The Past and Present of First-Cousin Marriage Bans in the West
A member of Delaware’s state assembly, Madinah Wilson-Anton, a Muslim progressive, has proposed a bill recognizing first-cousin marriage. “It’s an issue for my community,” Wilson-Anton told an interviewer, “and I was elected to be the voice for my community.” A quarter of her district was born overseas. She relies on the love-is-love language from the same-sex marriage debate (“I don’t feel like the government should be in the business of telling people who they should marry.”) to justify first-cousin marriage.
American law is more ambivalent about consanguinity, or first-cousin marriage, than American practice. Americans during the colonial and founding periods allowed first-cousin marriage. Today, 25 states ban it. More than 20 states banned it between 1858, when Kansas became the first to adopt a ban, and the mid-1920s. Texas banned it in 2005, and Tennessee in 2024. Nineteen states currently allow it; the rest recognize some first cousin marriages either among the sterile or among marriages contracted out of state. Though permissible in states where over half of the American population lives, few marry first cousins—only .2% of American marriages are between first cousins, according to a 2015 study.
America’s legal tolerance for first-cousin marriage has not come at much of a cost. Third World immigration over the past two decades has brought a whole new species of first-cousin marriage to America.
“Cousin marriage is on the rise in regions with a large influx of immigrants from areas where the practice is more common,” reads a book announcement for Alan H. Bittles, a prolific author on cousin marriage and genetics. Trends have accelerated since. In Great Britain, 2021 estimates suggest that half of British Pakistanis marry first cousins—and about 3% of marriages in Britain are between first cousins.
The region from Morocco to Pakistan is a cousin marriage belt. Consanguinity has long been more common in Muslim and Arab countries than in Christian and Western countries. Muslims engage in first cousin marriage more than Christians. Arab countries have higher first cousin marriage rates than non-Arab countries. More than 50% of marriages in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Burkina Faso involve first cousins.
As the immigrant population from these countries has increased, first-cousin marriage has rapidly become a political issue in Britain. Sweden, which legalized first-cousin marriage in 1686, is considering a ban, as is the Netherlands.
First-cousin marriage poses challenges political and theological. I have discussed the political problems of excessive tribalism and nepotism at the Institute for Family Studies. Protestants generally recognize first-cousin marriage as lawful and not sinful per the teachings of Leviticus, while Catholics have long opposed the practice. First-cousin marriage is banned in Poland, France, Italy, and Spain—countries with Catholic history. Protestants consider bans more theologically problematic because they do not consider first-cousin marriage a sin. Renewed skepticism about first-cousin marriage, arising from mass Third World immigration, is forcing Protestants to think more politically as new challenges present themselves.
The Reformers Against the Catholic Church
The Catholic Church long combined prohibitions on consanguinity with dispensations. Prohibitions relating to consanguinity prevent a man from marrying the “flesh of his flesh” (Leviticus 18: 7-13, 20: 17-19). Incest was also forbidden. Marriage between first cousins was inconsistently forbidden among Romans: Theodosius forbade it, the Code of Justinian permitted it; Constantine married four children to first cousins. Initially, the Catholic Church followed the strand of Roman laws banning first-cousin marriages and then, over time, extended discouragement to second cousins and beyond.
The Catholic positions sow political concerns about first-cousin marriage into a holistic teaching. St. Augustine writes in City of God that “marriage between cousins…the customary morality has prevented from being frequent, though the law allows it. It is not prohibited by divine law, nor as yet had human law prohibited it; nevertheless, though legitimate, people shrank from it, because it lay so close to what was illegitimate (i.e., incest).” Augustine calls bans on first cousin marriage a “seemly regulation.” Thomas Aquinas agreed.
Pope Gregory the Great fixed the Catholic teaching against first-cousin marriage in the 590s A.D. Bans on first-cousin marriage served important interests, lessening insular tribalism by forcing people outside the family for marriage. Public institutions and the church were even allowed to grow with less of a threat from nepotism and family clannishness. The church discouraged families from corrupting young children of either sex by grooming them for marriage with close cousins; those living in close intimacy often confuse respect for love, thus corrupting each (see esp. City of God, 15.10). Nature also seems to abhor marriages between too close of kin, bringing with it genetic diseases or barren relations.
Many things that would be very bad at scale can be tolerated on a small scale. The Catholic Church gave dispensations, or waivers, for marriages deemed too close under some circumstances—for example, when pagan first cousins married and then converted. As the levels of consanguinity expanded to second cousins or aunts and second nephews, couples could get dispensations. No record of a first cousin dispensation exists until 1361, according to one study. As far as I’ve found, there has never been a dispensation for an incestuous marriage.
Martin Luther considered dispensations to be the scandal. For Luther, dispensations for consanguinity beyond incest “were only invented in order to be a net for gold and a noose for the soul.” Marrying a second cousin was forbidden “unless money comes to [your] rescue!” On this view, dispensations, like indulgences, were invented to transfer wealth from the laity to the church, and were seen as the privilege of the wealthy.
Luther and the Catholics agreed that first-cousin marriages were not of themselves sinful. The Catholic teaching brought political concerns to bear on the question of cousin marriage. Luther worried about the church adding to the Word of God. The Old Testament hardly supports blanket bans on first-cousin marriage, and neither Jesus nor the Epistles unambiguously come out against first-cousin marriage. Based on this and other Scriptural evidence, Luther writes in “The Estate of Marriage” that “first cousins may contract a godly and Christian marriage.” What happens when the first cousin marriage happens at scale? Might it corrupt family itself? Might it lead to defects or barrenness? The downstream political effects of excessively close marriages are not Luther’s concern. Worries about those things invite the church to begin implementing the Catholic Church’s scandalous system of dispensations and waivers.
Luther’s teaching on what was banned illustrates sola Scriptura in action. His definitions of incestual relations stay strictly within the limits of Levitical law (Leviticus 18), which prohibits 15 specific relations.
No German state ever exactly followed Luther’s prescription, according to Hayward Joyce. First-cousin marriage for Luther may not be a sin, but it could be a crime depending on the circumstances. Making first-cousin marriage a crime, however, would mean the loss of a godly Christian marriage. How could a Christian countenance state action to ban first-cousin marriage under this approach?
The other Reformation tradition on first-cousin marriage saw the English Church meld with the Calvinist approach to allow a wider range of relations than either Luther or Catholics, though it operated within Luther’s framework.
Henry VIII changed the marriage laws of England in 1540 to allow consanguineous marriages to marry his fifth wife, who was a cousin to his second wife (both were beheaded!). The Marriage Act of 1540 criticized the Catholic Church for bilking the laity and favoring the rich. It did not adopt Luther’s list of forbidden relations. Instead, the Marriage Act prohibited “Levitical degrees” but did not spell them out. This allowed for a more dynamic understanding of the Levite prohibitions than Luther offered—one that banned parallel relations to those textually found in Leviticus. (Whereas Leviticus bans marriages between aunts and nephews, for instance, it says nothing about uncles and nieces. John Calvin extrapolates to include uncles and nieces; Luther stuck to the text. As a result, Calvin’s vision of incest extended to more relations than Luther’s.)
This Marriage Act set the substance for most Protestant nations. Public law followed the Biblical teaching. No incest is allowed, and analogues to Levitical prohibitions were added to the conception of incest. Britain adopted this scheme by the middle of the 1550s. The Netherlands adopted the Reformed approach in 1555; Scandinavia followed suit. American colonies and states followed this practice during its first 200 years or so. James Wilson notes consanguinity bans in his Lectures on Law.
While it was blessed in law, first-cousin marriage remained a marginal practice. “Every available piece of data indicates that [Protestant countries] never reached the levels seen in Islamized societies,” writes blogger David Roman. First-cousin marriage probably never cracked 5% of all marriages in any country in Western Christendom. One observer, George Darwin, the son of Charles, poured over the available data in the late 1800s and concluded that perhaps one in twenty aristocratic marriages in Britain were between first cousins, and one in fifty for the commoners. There has thus been no need to evaluate the potential political problems that St. Augustine identified, except where imperial efforts from Britain or the United States run up against a Third World country where first cousin customs compromise nation-building efforts.
The First Cousin Marriage Challenge
Protestant countries have mostly not had to face adverse consequences for their tolerance of first-cousin marriage. First-cousin marriage rates in the West are very low despite the practice long being legal. Law may be a teacher, but law in this area has a poor track record as a teacher—that is, until the influx of mass Third World immigration into the Protestant West, and the West generally.
Catholics sowed political concerns about consanguinity into the church’s teaching, and those political concerns led to the church’s prohibition. The focus on ever greater degrees of consanguinity appears a bit excessive in retrospect, but that does not obscure the underlying issue about political corruption. The church, apparently, reformed the system of dispensations, moving toward a more blanket condemnation after the Council of Trent. The Catholic teaching is well adapted to meet challenges to Third World immigration from countries blessing first cousin marriage.
Western Protestants and Americans nevertheless act like there is a ban on first-cousin marriage. People shrink from first-cousin marriages. Perhaps in recognition of this, many American states also rolled back permissive first-cousin marriage laws during the mid-1800s and early 1900s. These facts show that it is legitimate to revive bans on first-cousin marriage where such marriages might otherwise become more prevalent. The almost universal non-practice of first-cousin marriage—in a world where lots of peoples practice first-cousin marriage—suggests that most Americans and Westerners generally regard first-cousin marriage as too close to incest. It is not some sophisticated argument about eugenics that persuades people to turn away from considering their cousins as mates—an immediate reasonable sense of disgust at marrying a first cousin keeps the thought off the table.
Protestants must think politically about the adverse consequences of first-cousin marriage. In fact, Protestant teachings hardly discourage putting the duties of citizenship in a self-governing republic front and center. During the Reformation, Protestant thinkers saw this issue within the context of ending the corruption of the Catholic Church. The result was, in this case, legalizing what was not inherently sinful. Further, cousin marriage seemed important to maintaining the aristocratic politics of Henry VIII. Marrying cousins was a way of preserving family fortunes or preventing family estates from breaking up, so aristocrats were much more likely to stay in their smaller circles when choosing a spouse. Jane Austen’s aristocrats embraced it.
The democratic regime shapes sentiments differently. We do not look at first cousins for tribal alliances or family dynastic purposes. First cousins can be more akin to siblings than strangers, especially when they are young. Brothers and sisters do not even think about arranging dates or marriages between their offspring. Such sentiments provide a guard to the clear Biblical prohibitions on incest while also safeguarding politics from tribal alliances and families from inviting sexual intrigue within its confines. These considerations should guide Protestants moving forward.
Augustine’s observations about the corrupt and corrupting practices that accompany prevalent first-cousin marriage are especially compelling when tribal family structures, nepotism, and declining measures of public trust challenge a republican political community. Protestants can act as good citizens without costing themselves too much. The loss of first cousin marriage is not, according to the numbers, a great loss. Bans will prevent an alien culture antithetical to republican self-government from growing within our midst.
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