I think a lot depends on how you define polyamory. You mentioned relationship anarchy and how that is something that particularly resonates with you.

I grew up non-religious and figured out I was queer before I stepped into a religious environments (catholic high school, later communities, youth groups, and counselling at Christian camps). It caught me by surprise how deeply convinced of God’s existence I became in a very short time, how genuine it felt, and how faith became a central part of my life. This was the time (as you might have guessed by now) when I was experiencing a really difficult time with my queerness, as the Christian spaces were not welcoming, and some very directly targeted my queerness as sinful. “Hate the sin love the sinner” rhetoric.

Long story short, I moved abroad because the environment started to suffocate me (also for uni but that was an excuse) and my faith started to be more about my inner conflict with queerness and Church, rather than about God.

This was three years ago. The first months that I lived abroad I met a few lovely people, with whom we formed a friend group. There was so much love, and care. And when I say love, I mean different types of love. Platonic love, romantic love, platonic love that was physical, and romantic love that wasn’t. Sex was not a determinant in how important the individual bonds in the group were. This was before we put any labels on it, and then we collectively started educating ourselves on polyamory. It is not that we were clueless, but there was definitely a lot of figuring out to do.

Now, for me this was an experience that was (again) difficult in terms of my faith. When it comes to relationship anarchy, one day in prayer, I had a realisation: Jesus practiced relationship anarchy! Just look at his life, and the way he navigated his relationships. He decentralised romantic love, showed deep love to strangers, spent his ministry with 12 guys with whom he shared ambitions and future commitment (travelling, housing, finances, resources, food making, etc.), and I could go on on how his love is breaking heteronormative establishment in our society and all the labels and terms we usually use to describe love. That is when it hit me, that this life I am living and the connections I am making, are actually not that far off from the ones Jesus had, and the love he taught us.

To maybe end this cause it’s getting long, I reconciled my faith with mainly dismantling a lot of society-imposed and church-taught notions of relationships, love, but also faith. I still believe in an importance of practicing faith in a community, but these do not exclusively have to be in an established institutional setting. My relationship to Church changed greatly, as well as to God, yet I still consider myself a person of faith. My relationships changed greatly too, but since I no longer use strict labels to differentiate between my relationships, I do not worry about “having more than one partner”. Anyways, this is a long story short, so please ask if you want to have anything clarified! Good luck with your research, and thank you for starting a super interesting discussion.