Christian attitudes toward polygamy are more controversial today than they have been for many years. As Euro-American churches debate the issue of same-sex unions, African Christians attack Westerners for their moral laxity and for caving in to secular hedonism. In response, some Western liberals retort that Africans themselves need to put their own house in order. Do African churches define marriage as a sacrosanct union between one man and one woman? If so, then why do their leaders tolerate polygamous unions?

Such an argument seems to convict the most visible Christian conservatives of hypocrisy, of failing to pluck the beam from their own collective eye. Yet far from convincing Africans, such an argument illustrates a continuing global gulf on issues of sexual morality.

For many societies across Africa, polygamy is far more than a historic vestige. South Africa's president Jacob Zuma has at least four wives, raising etiquette concerns over which one should formally take the role of first lady. So entrenched is plural marriage that Christian churches have long had to make compromises. The ancient Ethiopian church tolerated polygamy in some circumstances, despite periodic reform campaigns. After long encounters with Zulu peoples in southern Africa, the 19th-century Anglican bishop J. W. Colenso concluded that polygamy could not be eliminated in the short term. He decided that polygamy reduced promiscuity and that an official clampdown would only drive plural wives and their children from stable home settings.

Few leaders in Africa's European-dominated churches were as sensitive as Colenso was. Most demanded that Christians end their plural marriages. This policy initially limited the impact of the so-called mission churches, while pushing believers toward the new independent congregations, the African-Initiated Churches or AICs.