My last year of college I wrote a rather lengthy thesis, where after many interviews and  much reading,  I came to believe  a rather simple idea:  many women who practice patriarchal forms of a variety of religions, understand their practice in terms of particularity within  universality. The women see their practice as incumbent only upon them, either as a personal preference, or a manifestation of God’s calling the them – and not universally applicable to either women in general, or even to other women of faith, who may be called to practice differently.  This is significant because it undermines a widely held understanding of fundamentalist practice, as by its very definition,  encroaching upon us either in fact ( anti-gay marriage crusade) or in spirit (unsaved/unfaithful/unpracticing are going to hell).  In other words, why tolerate people who either want to change the law to match their religious texts or just deep down inside believe that we are damned?

What if, at least for some of the believers, these assumptions do not apply?

The new TLC show “Sister Wives” is a fabulous conformation of the radical power of particularity within university.  Sister Wives is about a polygamous step-family with four wives, one husband and sixteen children in total. The wives are able to embrace polygamy as a “faith” practice as they explain on the NBC interview, while maintaining openness to alternatives for their children, and thus for us all. On the show, the language embraced by the sister wives is “lifestyle.”

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