A bad start

Despite the pristine appearance that I and my loved ones tried to convey with all our might for many years, my marriage was anything but harmonious. During the first years I regularly wept twice a day: In the morning, when I rode my scooter to work, and in the evening, when I came home. Basically, the problem was very simple. We were not made for each other, neither on a relational, nor on an emotional, nor on a sexual level. Not worlds, universes separated us!

My parents were well aware of this situation, as illustrates the simple fact that almost from the beginning I received from my mother not only vitamins and tonics almost monthly until her death, but also sporadically all kinds of medication such as Zeller relaxation tablets, Stilnox (a sleeping pill), Lexotanil (a sedative) or even antidepressants of my father's beside table. Let's be clear: My mom was not a doctor, nor a pharmacist. She herself must have been on prescription medication. To have me put on sick leave or to accept psychiatric help. Certainly, there was no shortage of practical support – for childcare or family vacations, for example – or well-meaning advice not less than floods of Bible verses. There was only one thing that was out of the question: Divorce. ​Death would have been the only way out of an unhappy marriage. 

In my distress, I once wrote to my mother, ‘I have horror of my wife, I have horror of my wife, I have horror of my wife.’ Any reasonable parent would, at this point, suggest that their child seriously consider divorce. However, as a result, my parents wanted to put me in a psychiatric ward. Hadn't I already shown signs of instability in my youth? The psychologists who were recommended and, in two cases, arranged for me to see, were also members of the evangelical movement, because they had to have the Holy Spirit. 

Looking back, I am grateful to God today that our marriage did not end in a bloodbath. 

'Three souls are more important than one' was my mother’s saying, the 'three souls' referring to my children. I only learnt this from someone close to my mother after she died. Divorce, a matter of life and death, more so, a question of a soul's salvation even! 'Until the children are grown up,' was my father's wise advice, 'you have to grit your teeth!' My father remained insensitive to my suffering all those years. In my absence, my mother's sister (the Italian's wife) often tried to defend me. ‘What would you do,’ she once asked her brother-in-law, ‘if you had married a woman like your daughter-in-law?’ ‘Well,’ he replied coolly, ‘I didn't marry such a woman!’ That ended the discussion. Such remarks irritated my father, even though he usually remained silent. What could such a worldly woman, who clearly knew little about the fear of God, divine guidance, and heavenly trials, possibly understand? My mother was more sensitive and, like her sister, secretly suffered greatly from my situation, but she was strongly influenced theologically by her husband's hard line. Her cancer did not come out of nowhere. As for me, I have often begged God on my knees to put an end to my life. The fact that I would have liked to die is also expressed in a song that I wrote and recorded in 2014: It's called Not Without You (more on this under 'Black Heart'). ​

The worst years of my life

In the early years of our marriage, I searched for the causes of my discomfort in the invisible world. I suspected impurities in my heart and perhaps also in that of my partner, or attacks from the devil who wanted to prevent us from serving the Lord, or a combination of all these elements. The result was that I sank more and more into religious fanaticism:

In the summer of 2008, I broke off contact with a family that now reminds me of the one that committed mass suicide in Montreux in March 2022 (see the press article here), insofar as they had isolated themselves not only from the world, but also from the evangelical world. As far as I remember we were the only ones to support them spiritually and financially to the extent of our modest possibilities. We had met two of their sons at the Emmaüs Bible Institute in St. Légier, an evangelical training centre that brings together believers from the most diverse movements. The family was on the run from demonic forces, represented by magicians, satanists and a fallen, black world. I remember, for example, that these two brothers were members of the Salvation Army in Vevey, because Emmaüs students are always encouraged to visit a local parish. They had spotted a strange man in this community, ‘a Satanist’, they explained to me, with proof to back it up: in a very short space of time, three marriages had been dissolved. Clearly, agents of the devil had infiltrated the community. Naive as I was, I believed them wholeheartedly. What a gift they had for discerning spirits! Their father had even managed to rescue a partially paralysed daughter from her mother, who they claimed was a witch. Through the power of prayer, the girl was even able to take a few steps again! The family in question were wanted by the police for kidnapping a minor, as the girl was only 17. In the night and fog, they had taken the girl with her consent to leave Germany and were now in the Netherlands, waiting for her to come of age. Or had they taken refuge in Belgium? I can't remember exactly, so many places had changed in the course of their career as apostles. Roughly 3 years earlier we had met our two friends, conspiracy theorists with links back to Erlo Stegen and the Kwasizabuntu movement. Incidentally, the Kwasizabuntu sect has also taken root in Switzerland (see here). I also learnt from these two brothers that there is a small group of fanatics who are toying with the idea of blowing up the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem so that the third Jewish temple can be built according to the prophet Ezekiel. They thought it was an excellent idea. The spiritual struggle alongside them was total madness. For hours we would read imprecatory psalms such as Psalm 109 with prayers and fasts in a frantic struggle against these satanically ruthless forces, represented by this witch and other magicians. The fear of demons almost destroyed me. The slightest noise – a door creaking – and already I suspected the hand of a demon. My wife had talked me out of breaking up with them more than once. In 2008 we finally cut off all contact and links with them and I deleted everything about them (phone numbers, letters etc.). It was the darkest period of my life, and as a protective mechanism, I repressed these events. It's thanks to the therapy with a psychologist that I started in 2023 that some memories are coming back to me, even if most of them remain vague (in psychology this is called ‘dissociative amnesia’). For example, I can't remember most of the first names of the people involved. ​

‘Till death do you part!’

‘Didn't God deliver Abigail from her foolish husband Nabal through sudden death thanks to her fear of God and perseverance?’ Bible-thumping hobby preachers, filled with the love of God, would chisel into my soft, sensitive and docile heart with unrelenting harshness once again when King David was mentioned in the church service. Only in my case, unlike with Nabal, my wife was not wicked. Nevertheless, my marital situation presented me with great challenges. ‘Till death do you part!’ the pastor had said at our wedding ceremony. In fact, only death could end my dilemma, either my own or that of my wife.

​Weeds grew around our house, one weed in particular, the bramble, which was to become the outlet for my marital despair. To limit the length of this page, I am dedicating another to it (see ‘Weedy Dock’). ​

Divorce in the New Testament

​​The Church's traditionally hostile attitude towards divorce goes back mainly to a statement by Jesus regarding Jewish divorce law in the Torah (i.e. in the first 5 books of the Bible). 

‘Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her.’ 
Mark 10 verse 11

‘Whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery;
​and whoever marries her who is divorced commits adultery.’
Matthew 19 verse 9

Adultery was then punishable by death. These statements of Jesus, if one detaches them from their Jewish context and looks at them from a monogamous point of view, would mean that a man may only divorce and remarry if his wife has committed some sexual immorality. This idea is so absurd that in the 21st century many theologians even from Free Church circles shy away from applying it literally to our time. But traditionally, these statements have been interpreted by the Church in this way (according to the Catholic Church, marriage is 'indissoluble' and divorce is illegal in the strongly Catholic Philippines to this day). The fact that adultery meant something quite different in the Bible than it does for us today, for example, is hardly ever considered (cf. 'adultery'). The ecclesiastical conviction that Jesus must have been a supporter of monogamy and an opponent of polygamy prohibits Christians from understanding the problem Christ was confronted with.

I start my theological research

I had started a Bible school in the evangelical world shortly before I met my ex-wife and had finished the third year shortly after our marriage. However, the gap between my initial theological convictions and my personal experience grew steadily wider, until in 2016 I decided to stop attending the evangelical world for Sunday service and to take a really serious look this time at the question of the veracity of my theological foundations. In February this year I had for the first time begun to realise that monogamy and our legal system – including divorce – did not come from the New Testament, but from the Romans. Biblically speaking, was there any other solution to my desperate situation than my death or that of my wife? For the very first time in my life I dared to open books by historians and theologians who think differently, I who had not dared to read books without the approval of my former 'friend', the professor of theology, master of fidelity to the Word of God. And I also began to study the languages of the sacred scriptures. As I was aware that divorce would have dramatic consequences, I spent several years searching the Bible for answers to issues related to marriage, divorce and sexuality. To my astonishment, I discovered that the New Testament teaching of divorce was due to a question of interpretation of the Hebrew constitution, i.e. the Torah. However, the legal basis for divorce was related to the legal basis for marriage, i.e. polygamy.

The trade-off

In my desperation not to have to divorce my wife, I have consistently drawn the logical conclusion and made exactly the suggestion that Jesus' teaching on divorce implies as a legal and accepted alternative:​

Polygamy!

The film “Sully”, starring Tom Hanks, recounts the heroic feat that took place on 15 January 2009, when a US Airways Airbus A320 struck a flock of birds shortly after taking off from New York. With both engines failing at very low altitude, the pilot successfully carried out an emergency landing on the River Hudson, thereby saving the lives of all 155 passengers and crew members. The investigation into Captain Chesley ‘Sully’ Sullenberger sought to determine whether his decision to land his Airbus A320 on the River Hudson was justified. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) sought to prove that the pilot would technically have had time to return to LaGuardia Airport or divert to Teterboro Airport. The final report completely exonerated Captain Sullenberger. Returning to one of the nearest airports would only have been possible if the pilot had bypassed the entire emergency protocol (such as attempting to restart the engines) in order to head straight back to an airport. By the time the outcome of the emergency procedure was known (just 35 seconds!), landing on the Hudson remained the only option to save the lives of the passengers and crew.

What does this story have to do with my situation? On the one hand, I was close to losing my own life. On the other hand, it is often only with hindsight that things become clearer. My religious fanaticism, the dreams I had at night that my wife was going to die and that I was going to marry someone else, my desperate struggles to remain faithful to my partner and to avoid divorce at all costs – I was only able to identify the causes of these and articulate them clearly once I had left the evangelical movements. It didn’t take 35 seconds, but more than 35 years, before I realised that both the foundations and the emergency protocols I’d inherited were flawed. Back in 2021, I was far from being able to formulate all this so clearly. At that time, I still considered myself to be partly inside the evangelical movement. But I was at a dead end. I didn't know who to turn to. So I started writing what would become the book of which this website is a small summary. And I also started publishing the precursor to this website on the Internet. Needless to say, this website (now 1plus2.info) has evolved a lot since then. But back then, when I first published it, it was a cry for help. When it was discovered in March 2021, people thought I was crazy. My proposal to take on a second wife went down like a bomb, especially with my parents. I then depublished the website. 

So I filed for divorce.

The consequences

In the summer of 2018, my mother received a summons from her doctor for a preventive examination, as she had been diagnosed with risk factors for breast cancer. ‘My time is in God's hands‘ was my parents’ confident motto. So the invitation was thrown into the waste paper basket without them paying any attention. When she rushed to the gynaecologist's in December of that year, she already had a first metastasis. When I later wanted to know why my parents had ignored the doctor's letter, my father got angry. When there's a difference of opinion or conflict, my father's reaction is either silence (he just knows better) or anger. But he has not given an answer to my question until this day. In December 2022, my mum died in agony after four long years of suffering from breast cancer. She couldn't tolerate morphine and at the end didn't want to be put into an induced coma. When she found out in spring 2021 that I was planning to divorce – she had already been suffering from her cancer for almost two and a half years and was very well acquainted with chemotherapies, radiotherapies and operations with all their side effects – she said:

'My cancer is like sugar water compared to my son's divorce!'

My mother: Her hair begins to grow again (autumn 2020, 2 years before her death

My mother, October 2022, six weeks before her death

​I was told this by two people to whom she told it independently of each other. ​My mum even cut off contact with her cousin, one of her best friends, when she learned that the latter had not only shown understanding towards me, but had even invited me to a meal at her house. As I was to learn later, this cousin's nonagenarian husband was shocked and said he had never in his whole life seen a man weep as bitterly as I did. After a while, my mum got back in touch with her, but this rupture speaks volumes. Another incident was difficult to digest: when my mother was dying and wanted to see her grandchildren one last time, she called my ex-wife – not me – to bring my children to her. So her grandchildren were not my children, but my ex-wife's. Consequently, when it came to legal questions related to our divorce, they supported their daughter-in-law, not their son. 

Two days before her death, however, my mum admitted to her sister (the wife of the Italian) in agony: ‘For a long time I didn't get it into my head, but today I know that divorce was the right thing for Chris.'

​I learned several things about myself during my mother's illness, including the following: Even when she was in great pain, when a visit or a doctor came in, she tried very hard to put on a smile: ‘No, no, I'm fine’, she tried to make even the medical profession believe. This sometimes irritated me. But in fact, that's exactly how I'd reacted during all my years of marriage: Above all, don't show how I'm doing. I subconsciously copied the role of my parents in that, unlike my father, I never got angry but, like my mother, tried to mend broken glasses as best I could. What I really wished for was a woman capable of reading my soul, just as my mother had done all her life. For one thing, my wife would probably have needed a man to bang his fist on the table from time to time to say: ‘That's enough’. Secondly, I had never been equipped with the necessary tools to communicate my plight to my wife. From her point of view, my dreams and fanaticism were probably a confused jumble that had neither head nor feet. When I filed for divorce, a world must have collapsed for her because she hadn't seen the blow coming. 

Shortly after the separation, I met an older person from a similar evangelical background as me who had also eventually divorced. Unlike me, she was able to wait until her children came of age. ​She testified to me that her own parents would rather have seen her in the ground than divorced, even though they knew exactly how much she was suffering in her marriage.​

I discover Poledance

It was a broken man, on the verge of suicide, who signed up in May 2021 at a fitness centre in Lausanne – I was in the process of separation. I was so broken that I couldn't even ask the pretty lady on reception for a glass of water without stuttering. Her name was Cindy. And it was as a broken man, shaking inside, that I set foot in a pole-studio for the first time. It was 12 July 2021. I wrote a song with the title of that very date. Pole dancing is in many ways the antithesis of my previous life. You can find out more on the page I've dedicated to it, but I suggest you read the whole website first, because of the many references to different subjects covered here:
12 July 2021​

When my ex-wife found out that I was doing pole, she said to me: ‘Oh yes, you're having a teenage crisis! Imagine your partner thinking you’re just a clown going through a teenage identity crisis, when in reality you’re simply trying to avoid taking your own life. The saddest thing is that this isn’t even an expression of malice, but rather an inability to understand you properly. After 17 years of marriage, my ex-wife still doesn’t know who I am. A decade earlier, I once wrote to my aunt: ‘After six years of marriage, my wife still doesn’t know me!’ Nothing has changed since then!

When my dad discovered I'd started a new sport, his face fell. An icy, long pause followed. In the end, the only sentence he managed to get out was: ‘Well, you should know that’. That was the end of the discussion. As I later learned, he was devastated: 

‘Now my son lives in sin!

And living in sin, in Free Church language, means to gamble one's salvation. ​

​Is pole-sport striptease? You bet! In January 2025 the Swiss Pole- & Aerial Sports Federation (SPSF) became a member of Swiss Olympic (spsf.ch). And in the meantime I'm on the SPSF committee. I have also completed a professional training course (senpeza.ch) and taught pole in 2025 at Freespirit in Vevey (vevey.acropolestudio.ch/) and in 2026 as a competitive coach at the Swiss Pole- & Aerial Championships in Geneva. 

We didn't talk about it much anymore, but since my dad could see that I haven't become a libertine, a delinquent or a bum, that I am still working honestly and living normally, his dark view of the pole must have diminished. But I feel there are still reservations.

In September 2023, nine months after the death of his wife, my dad remarried a friend who had been divorced many years earlier, something that happened – as my dad likes to point out – at a time when she was not yet a Christian. While there is nothing unusual about this kind of thinking, and it seems harmless enough, the underlying idea is this: 'A true Christian does not divorce!' 

At both my mother's funeral and my father's remarriage, pretty much all of my parents' acquaintances, who I hadn't seen for a long time, found out that I had been separated for two or three years and was going through divorce proceedings. One German friend's mouth fell open and she almost sank to the floor. My parents hadn't told anyone outside their closest circle of friends that I had filed for divorce. The shame I had brought upon my family was too great! 

Look, any other man would have simply cheated and got off much better. What my history has taught me is that the far-right wing of the evangelical movement may well claim to be ‘faithful to the Word of God’ (i.e. the Bible, which they hold as truth), but in the end it is only interested in the truth insofar as it seems to affirm its own vision of the world. ​On Sundays at church, these spiritual people marvel at the piety of the great King David, a polygamist and author of marvellous texts such as Psalm 23, Psalm 119 and many others, but if I show up and defend polyamory, all hell breaks loose. Of course, proposing polyamory to my ex-wife is ridiculous, if not shocking, because she would have considered a second wife as competition. But my proposal to a heterosexual person reflects both, my desperation as well as the absurdity of my entourage, for whom divorce is inconceivable, to the point of excluding anyone from the community who dares to do so. Even though officially I was never excluded from any circle, the reactions of my relatives and ‘friends’ of the past came back to that. If one wants to take Jesus literally, one must also consider the context. My proposal was biblically correct. ​Basically, what I had done was simply to push the system of thought of those around me ('the Bible, and only the Bible') to the logical end. ​

There’s one thing I know for certain today: those Christians who feel the need to constantly blare out over loudspeakers on every street corner that they are faithful to the Bible do so precisely because they are not.

Getting married was the biggest mistake I ever made, and filing for divorce was the best decision of my life. Yet, the evangelical world I grew up in is insular. People there live in a bubble, in a parallel universe that ignores any facts that don’t fit with their worldview. For instance, my dad’s new wife is convinced that I was head over heels for my ex-wife on one occasion when she saw us together. And at some point, my father set up a group on Signal for the two of us called ‘ChriMxx’, a reference to the email address we’d used until we split up, made up of the first letters of our first names. And he began the conversation with a Bible verse, namely Psalm 42:5: “Hope in God, for I shall yet praise Him for the help of His countenance.” I was completely taken aback. My therapist couldn’t believe it either. “You’re clearly not on the same wavelength,” she exclaimed! After all the hardships my father has seen me go through, does he still think it is God’s will that we get back together? I mean, just ask my ex-wive if she wants to to come back, she will tell you! "I wanted to organise a birthday party for my wive" my father later explained. But when someone organises an event and sets up a WhatsApp group for it, they’ll give it a name that’s related to the event (for example: ‘birthday’) rather than using the guests’ initials, won’t they? There had been no mention whatsoever of organising a birthday party – that was the explanation my father gave later on – because I immediately left the group and temporarily blocked my dad. 

Before we look more closely at Christ's teaching on divorce (see 'Polygamy and Divorce in the Bible') and monogamy (see 'Monogamy') we need to talk about the second big problem of mine: 

Sex

By Chris Zürcher. Page updated on 23 May 2026