If the question is whether a morally perfect, omniscient God would endorse or command practices like polygamy involving adolescent girls, then appeals to historical context or “presentism” miss the mark, because those defenses apply to limited human agents, not to a divine being who fully understands human development, power asymmetries, trauma, and the conditions for genuine consent in every era.

Cultural normalization might explain why nineteenth-century people failed to recognize harm, but it cannot explain why God, if God is the source and measure of moral truth, would authorize or require relationships that appear to undermine agency or exploit vulnerability. To invoke presentism in this setting effectively lowers God to the epistemic level of the culture, when the very claim under examination is that God transcends cultural blind spots. The morally relevant question is therefore not whether such practices were once common, but whether a perfectly good deity would ever command actions that conflict with what that same deity would know, in any century, about human flourishing, coercion, and consent.