New Religions and the Mediation of Non-Monogamy

what role does spirituality and religion play in polyamorists’ and Mormon fundamentalist polygamists’ practice of consensual nonmonogamy? How do recent reality television representations of these populations portray polyamory and polygamy, and how do practitioners interpret and understand these representations? These are some of the questions Michelle Mueller addresses in her book, New Religions and the Mediation of Non-Monogamy.As Mueller outlines in her introductory chapter, it is not uncommon for polyamorists to draw contrasts between polyamory and polygyny to establish polyamory as secular and gender egalitarian and therefore superior to and more enlightened than polygyny. Mueller's goal is to challenge these assertions by empirically documenting the experiences of polyamorists and polygamists. Mueller explicitly states that her goal is not to compare polyamory and polygyny, but to instead describe the practices and perspectives of these groups and identify intersections. Her analysis relies upon several sources of data including interviews with polyamorists, polygamists, and reality television stars; participant and ethnographic observations at polyamorous events and in polygamous families; and content analyses of reality television shows that feature polyamorists or polygamists.This book covers a lot of ground. For the most part, Mueller accomplishes her goal of describing the connections between spirituality and the practice of consensual nonmonogamy for her sampled populations and she successfully challenges the liberal, secular assumption that polyamory is always good and polygyny is always bad.In the introductory chapter, “Researching ‘Swingers’ and ‘Saints’ on Exhibit,” Mueller begins by describing what I assume were her experiences watching reality television representations of polyamory and polygamy with groups of polyamorists and polygamists respectively. This demonstrates both her access to these populations and her focus on reality television representations later in the book. Using her chosen label for both polyamorists and polygamists, Mueller then describes the different “poly(g)s” she will discuss in the book.In this chapter she outlines her goal for the overall project: to show that her interviews and experiences with polygamists and polyamorists, as well as representations of polyamorous and polygynous families in reality television, challenge the “dichotomous frame” that situates polyamory as gender egalitarian and secular, on the one hand, and polygyny as a practice justified with religious doctrine and oppressive to women, on the other. Mueller concludes the chapter by situating her own subjective position in relationship to the project and states that she is “a Pagan scholar-practitioner” and “non-polyamorous.” I commend Mueller for situating her own subject position in relationship to her study, but as I discuss below, these self-descriptions are significant because Mueller relied heavily on snowball sampling within the Pagan community in San Francisco and, as she states herself, she is rather critical of polyamory and polyamorists.The next four chapters focus exclusively on Mormon fundamentalism and its relationship to polygamy. These chapters provide a good primer for an uninitiated audience on government suppression of polygamous sects since the 1953 Short Creek raid, representations of polygamy on reality television, and the role of spirituality and religious doctrine in the accounts her interviewees gave for practicing polygamy as Mormon fundamentalists. Of these four chapters, I found chapter 3, “Mormon Polygamist Spirituality in the Twenty-First Century,” particularly interesting, compelling, and informative. Mueller does an excellent job describing the ways in which participants in her study marry their Mormon fundamentalist beliefs and contemporary politics of gender and sexuality to explain their practice of polygyny. She convincingly demonstrates how scripture and religious beliefs both reify and challenge patriarchal notions of men's supremacy over women within polygyny.However, many of her interviewees, especially younger polygamists, also relied on contemporary feminist politics to explain why they are polygynous. Mueller acknowledges that her sample “is biased toward socially progressive Mormon fundamentalists,” which would partially explain her findings (32). Nevertheless, the way in which she approaches the data is nuanced and informative. Mueller makes an important contribution to understanding the complex intersection of religious doctrine and contemporary feminist ideology in the lives of polygynous women and men.In sum, the discussion of more progressive fundamentalist Mormon polygamists is balanced and informative, and students of Mormon studies have much to glean from this chapter. After reading it, I felt that Mueller had successfully diminished the hard line drawn between religious polygamists and secular polyamorists.The following two chapters on polyamory, however, were less convincing. In chapter 5, Mueller concludes that what she calls “the polyamory movement” is deeply embedded within Pagan and Neo Tantra spiritual beliefs and practices. Her main goals in this chapter are to 1) show that polyamory is not secular because polyamorists are heavily involved with Paganism and Neo Tantra, and 2) argue that this religious affiliation is rife with cultural appropriation resulting from race and class privilege. While this section might not appear to be of interest to students and scholars of Mormon studies, it is in these chapters that Mueller most pointedly interrogates the claimed differences between polygamy and polyamory. Despite focusing on polyamory, Mueller has much to say about polygyny. She concludes that “the polyamory movement” is grounded in spirituality and religion, yet because of polyamorists’ class and race privilege, they, unlike Mormon fundamentalist polygamists, can form what she calls a “charmed circle” around themselves to avoid religious persecution (108–13, 123–26).I found the theoretical framework for this chapter muddled and Mueller's sweeping claims about the “polyamorous community” in chapters 5 and 6 unconvincing for two reasons. First, while I have no doubt that many of the polyamorists Mueller interviewed and spent time with were involved with Paganism, I am suspicious of her conclusions that Paganism is the religion of the “the polyamory community.” Mueller states that she initially used her own social networks to find interviewees and events to attend and grew her sample through snowball sampling (141n4). Because Mueller is involved in the Pagan community, as stated in the introduction, I must assume that she over-sampled Pagan polyamorists making her generalizations to polyamorists, polyamory, or the “polyamory movement” dubious at best. Unlike in the chapters on “socially progressive” polygamists, where she states unequivocally that her finding cannot be generalized to all polygamists, Mueller makes no such cautions against generalization in the chapters on polyamory. In fact, she explicitly generalizes her findings to polyamorists as a group.Second, whether she intends to or not, Mueller comes across as negatively biased against polyamory. She states in her introduction that some might think she is too hard on polyamorists and too easy on polygamists to challenge the narrative of polyamory's superiority (35). I have no objection to this, and as stated above, Mueller does much to challenge assumptions about practitioners of polygyny. However, there are several places in these chapters where she makes empirically unfounded assumptions about polyamorists and adopts pejorative language when describing polyamorists. One example (of many) is when Mueller discusses the links between Paganism and polyamory and writes, “Within Paganism, polyamory as an orientation can spread almost infectiously” (130). In my reading, this statement characterizes polyamory as akin to infectious disease. What is at best a correlation between polyamory and Paganism within her sample is framed as a contaminating infection within Paganism and, within the context of the entire chapter, generalizable to polyamory and polyamorists as an entire population. In another section of the book, she describes interactions with polyamorous men as “sexually motivated proselytization.” It is one thing to challenge claims of polyamory's superiority to polygyny, but quite another to perpetuate stereotypes of polyamorists who are still a sexual minority without legal protections.When discussing gender relations in polyamory, Mueller relies on secondary data from one study, representations in reality television, and her own anecdotal experiences to argue that polyamory is not as “feminist” as scholars of polyamory typically claim. Here, Mueller conflates the claims of some polyamorists who have published nonscholarly books advocating polyamory, on the one hand, with scholars of polyamory who have published peer-reviewed, scholarly articles and books, on the other hand. Not only is this an inaccurate description of the scholarly theoretical literature on polyamory, but it also mischaracterizes the very real and only difference between polyamory and polygyny. Specifically, unlike in polygyny where only men can have multiple wives, it is expected in polyamory that all genders can have multiple partners. In other words, access to multiple partners in polyamory is gender egalitarian. Mueller interchangeably uses “gender egalitarian,” “feminist,” and “gender equality” to claim that most theorists and researchers of polyamory state that polyamory is inherently feminist. I am not aware of any scholarly publications that make this claim.Finally, Mueller interviewed many individuals who starred in reality television shows that featured polygynous or polyamorist relationships and provides ample examples to justify her content analysis of reality television. She convincingly shows that representations of polygyny and polyamory in television lack class and race diversity and sometimes reinforce stereotypes of both populations and other times challenge them. The interview data in these sections of the book are interesting and Mueller's analysis is compelling. However, there are sections of her analysis where she uses representations of these practices in highly edited reality television as empirical data to support her claims about the practice of polygyny and polyamory in real life. Her conclusions would have been more convincing, and perhaps more accurate, if she had separated the analysis of representations of polygyny and polyamory in reality television from her analysis of the interview and observation data.In summary, this book does a good job of demonstrating how the claims made by polyamorists about Mormon fundamentalist polygyny are inaccurate, especially for the progressive polygynous families and individuals Mueller interviewed. Mueller also does a good job of demonstrating how some polyamorists culturally appropriate religious beliefs and practices and do so from a place of race and class privilege. However, the sweeping and general conclusions Mueller draws about polyamorists seem less grounded in empirical data and more reflective of a biased opinion and theoretical agenda. My goal in this review is not to question how some polyamorists appropriate others’ religions or to deny the race and class privilege of the polyamorists in Mueller's sample and in reality television. Her data and conclusions are quite convincing on those fronts. However, as a scholar and practitioner of polyamory, I would be remiss if I did not challenge a “non-polyamorous” person making sweeping claims about polyamorists, “the polyamorous community,” or the supposed “polyamory movement” based on data derived from representations on reality television and a non-representative sample

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