I was reading the Wikipedia article on monogamy, and came across this:
Similarly—according to Betzig—the Christian Church enforced monogamy because wealth passed to the closest living, legitimate male relative, often resulting in the wealthy oldest brother being without a male heir. Thus, the wealth and power of the family would pass to the “celibate” younger brother of the church.
I don't fully understand what it was attempting to say, but it sounds like the Church was attempting to encourage monogamy for financial reasons. Specifically, by limited who could inherit wealth, it was more likely to become inherited by a man incorporated into the church, resulting in the Church itself gaining the wealth. Is this correct?
No. There was no general or universal "medieval" rules of inheritance either temporally or spatially, and the Church encouraged monogamy for a great variety of reasons which varied over the two millennia of its history, not the least of which were historical/cultural precedence and theological injunction. And there are plenty of cases of adoption or the recognition of illegitimate children.
You can actually find the article in question here. On the whole, it's not bad work for a non-historian, but the wiki editor seems to have latched on to some of the less sound bits, which is one of the major problems with wikipedia.
Some general notes on source reliability:
If a source makes a claim about an institution as broad as the "Christian Church" (East or West? Nestorians?) and extends that claim for an absurd period of time ('medieval' means ca. 500 to ca. 1500, or 1,000 years) across all of Eurasia, it is almost certainly nonsense.
The Journal of Family History a journal that tends toward anthropology, and is not a place most Church scholars would turn, particularly not those interested in the period in question.
The author is an anthropologist, and this seems to be her only venture into the medieval period. A look at her CV shows she does not focus on any chronological period. The article does much the same, jumping from the 9th century to the 14th and back again