I made a bold statement in 2014 that the next battleground in the moral revolution was going to be polyamory. Maybe it wasn’t all that bold, since Newsweek magazine said the same thing in 2009. Now it looks like both of us were right.
Moral revolutions rarely happen overnight. Instead, they tend to follow a predictable, step-by-step pattern. Certain things must shift before others can.
Think about the LGBTQ revolution. Not that long ago, much of what we now see would have been simply inconceivable. Feminism tunneled under the wall of distinction between male and female into the mixed-up world of gender confusion. Eventually the gates were flung open. An almost unlimited display of gender confusion resulted, manifested in the four waves of feminism.
Once the momentum built with L, G, B, and T, it wasn’t long before a plus sign had to be added to the end of the acronym — because moral rebellion never stops at any fixed point. So how does this process unfold? There’s a customary sequence.
Step one: A particular behavior or lifestyle is morally condemned. Society as a whole recognizes it as wrong.
Step two: The universal moral consensus begins to erode. It’s no longer condemned by everyone. What was once overwhelming agreement gives way to division — some people no longer see it as wrong. We saw this in technicolor in the Adventist Church as ordaining women inevitably morphed into affirming homosexuals. We don’t have to look very far to find it, do we?
Step three: Celebration begins. What was once condemned is now openly celebrated by growing numbers (Spectrum and Atoday are fully in this column).
Step four: Compelled celebration. Those who still refuse to celebrate it are the ones who find themselves in trouble. You can trace this exact pattern with adultery, feminism, no-fault divorce, sex outside of marriage, ordaining women, and then the full array of LGBTQ issues. And that plus sign at the end of the acronym? It signals that the revolution is ongoing — there is always more to come, and subsequent deviations are pre-approved.
The crucial question is this: How do we move from step one (moral condemnation) to step two (the erosion of consensus)? Two recent major articles — one in the New York Times, the other in the Wall Street Journal — illustrate exactly how this shift is engineered in real time.
Consider the New York Times article: “Love Without Limits: Brazil Flirts with Polyamory.” The subtitle says it all. “More people in a still largely conservative and religious nation are rejecting monogamy as they seek new definitions of romance and of family.”
The article opens with this scene: A sleepy toddler wobbles into the kitchen and plants a kiss on the woman helping make breakfast. Then the child’s parents follow and also kiss the same woman — one of their lovers — on the lips. Let that sentence sink in. Your parents couldn’t have understood it. Your grandparents couldn’t possibly have made sense of it. Now we’re expected to treat it as normal.
If the moral revolution succeeds on its own terms, our children won’t even blink at it. One of the women in this arrangement, a 28-year-old graduate student, says: “It’s a family. These are the people I chose and they are the people I love.”
Notice what’s happening here. The biblical understanding of family (man and wife and children) is grounded in creation order — not in personal choice. But neo-pagan culture reframes everything around autonomous choice. Look for it. Even some of the last words of Jesus are twisted into this pagan paradigm shift. “This is my Body” He said at the Last Supper. Encapsulated in this statement is divine self-sacrifice “I will die, so you may live.”
Planned Parenthood and the pro-choice death cult purposely take that statement and make it theirs “This is my body.” “You must die, so I can live” (and do as I please). Many people today won’t even notice how radical that shift is.
Back to the New York Times. The article includes this telling line: “This Brazilian household both is and is not just like any other.” That’s a classic technique in moral revolutions — claiming the new thing is simultaneously just like the old while also fundamentally different. Later, the logic is spelled out: “We don’t just have one friend to do everything with, right? So why would we expect one romantic partner to fill all our needs?”
The Times reports that this rejection of monogamy is part of a broader movement embracing “different forms of love, marriage, and parenthood.” Friend, if that statement sounds perfectly reasonable to you, it’s because you’ve been captured by the modern age. In biblical terms, it should not make sense, and it doesn’t. We have to remind ourselves — and teach our children — that it doesn’t.
The article notes that Brazil remains deeply conservative, home to the world’s largest Catholic population, with hard-line evangelical movements growing as well. Yet polyamory is facing pushback from religious leaders. Even Pope Leo XIV has warned against “the fragility of unions, the trivialization of adultery, and the promotion of polyamory.” That’s a helpful word — and one we wish more Christian and Adventist voices would echo clearly.
The NYT piece traces the issue back over a decade, when a notary in Brazil registered a common-law union involving one man and two women. Religious groups denounced it. Liberals defended it as a reflection of a changing society. Court challenges followed, and conservative legislators have tried to block notaries from recognizing unions of more than two people. Notice the shift. As long as the number is two, any two will apparently do.
But once you move beyond the created order of marriage as the union of one man and one woman, the number itself becomes meaningless. One advocate put it this way, It’s simply “a much wider understanding of love.” Another woman in the story, raised evangelical and previously married to a man from her church, said she began questioning the norms that kept her from dating others while still married. She started exploring bisexuality and described the process as learning to “deconstruct these concepts of sin, of spirituality.” There it is, friends.
To embrace this lifestyle, she had to deconstruct the biblical understanding of sin. That’s not accidental. If you hold to historic biblical Christianity, these issues are not confusing, and you cannot walk into this new ‘morality’ while remaining accountable to Scripture. Deconstruction is required. An activist in the movement insisted: “People think it’s just about sex… and it absolutely is not.” Right.
When someone feels the need to say it “absolutely is not” about sex in the context of multiple romantic and sexual partners, that claim contradicts reality.
The Times brings in scholars to define non-monogamy as “any emotional or sexual relationship not requiring partners to be exclusive.” You don’t actually need scholars for that — a dictionary would suffice.
But this is how cultural authority is deployed. ‘Experts’ are summoned to normalize what was once unthinkable. The goal, we’re told, is to move away from any model that makes one romantic partner more important than another. Yet history — and the Old Testament’s honest portrayal of polygamy — shows how difficult that is in practice.
Claims of perfect equality rarely hold. Defining something a certain way doesn’t make it so, especially when the definition is constructed on a lie.
This is how moral revolutions advance, one sympathetic feature story at a time, normalizing the abnormal, reframing choice as the highest good, and treating biblical conviction as the real problem.
As Adventists, we must see it clearly — and refuse to be swept along in the muddy current of moral rebellion.
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“Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24).