Pastor who wrote book on biblical marriage arrested for alleged bigamy
Leslie Williams built a ministry promoting his marital advice. Looks like he never read his own book.
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There’s Christian hypocrisy. And then there’s writing a book about the importance of biblical marriage only to get arrested because you’re secretly married to multiple people.
In 2017, Leslie Williams self-published a book called Love Her Like This: Loving Her Has Never Been Deeper (affiliate link) all about the “type of love a man should have for his wife.” It was also an advice book that dealt with common issues that come up in marriage, the sort that “have the potential to destroy the sacred relationship between a husband and wife.”
All of that was an extension of his work at the Leslie Williams Ministries, a group whose goal was to empower people “to strengthen their relationship with God, each other and with new disciple recruits.”
Last week, however, the 62-year-old Florida man was arrested after an officer found that he was wanted in Georgia for alleged bigamy.
Authorities transported Williams to the Sumter County Detention Center, where he remains held pending extradition to Georgia authorities to face prosecution on the bigamy charge…
The Florida document does not include details about the underlying allegations in Georgia beyond the bigamy charge…
It’s not clear how people realized he actually had more than one wife, but it probably didn’t help that he recently posted about getting married on Facebook, only to have someone chime in with “Wow I thought you were already married. Congratulations!!”
That same week, he changed his Facebook cover photo to one of his new (latest?) wife… but it was taken down just weeks later and replace with an image of his dog, then his car, then his dog and car together. His page now says he’s “single.”
If you go back in time, there’s even more. In May of 2024, Williams posted about his “ex wife,” saying she had accused him of “domestic violence 4 different times.” He denied everything. Was she actually his ex-wife, though? Did the paperwork not go through or something? Did they just walk away without telling the courts? Who knows.
The reporting on all this doesn’t actually get into the details of Williams’ personal life, only the salacious charge against him. Fox News Digital noted that he lives in The Villages in Florida, a famously conservative retirement community, calling it a place for “swingers” and “unusually high rates of sexually transmitted diseases.” But there’s nothing to back up those claims much less any evidence that’s what he was doing.
Whatever the case, in Georgia, a bigamy conviction could lead to between one and ten years in prison.
Until that time, it’s possible his book will get a publicity boost given that he appears to be an expert in marriage given all this practice. One recent reviewer even alluded to that on his book’s Amazon page:
I was skeptical at first but, after finding out you had multiple wives, you must know what you’re talking about sir. You just got yourself another customer.
Brilliant trolling.
It’s very easy to crack jokes about this whole situation, but there is something serious at the heart of it. Because Williams didn’t just quietly fail at living up to his own ideals; he built a platform around those ideals. In that way, he’s not that different from young white evangelical women who pretend to be experts on intimacy despite having relatively no experience in the bedroom.
Plenty of people have marital problems. That’s not unusual. But when you write a book about how to be a great partner, when it’s not something you’re putting into practice, you’re setting yourself up for mockery. So much for Christian values.
Even if this is a extreme situation, it’s also not that weird. We’re so used to seeing Christians who obsess over other people’s marriages—by policing same-sex couples, calling for the end of no-fault divorces, etc.—who have little to say when their own leaders break those rules.
It’s not that Williams is uniquely corrupt. It’s that he’s part of a culture where hypocrisy is expected and the only question is what kind.
I will classify this under humor. Not funny for the people he hurt, but in the context of Christian hypocrisy. At least he wasn't arrested for molesting children.
"In May of 2024, Williams posted about his “ex wife,” saying she had accused him of “domestic violence 4 different times.” He denied everything."
Women, never forget, his ex wasn't crazy.