There once was a gifted and powerful king who inspired awe and adoration. Yet the king grew weary of the same old praise and began to feel empty inside. He wanted something new.

While wandering one night, he stumbled upon a strange place. The customs were difficult to make sense of. He didn’t understand them, but found them alluring. He hoped they would satisfy his desire for something more. He made it his personal mission to bring these conventions to his own kingdom.

He returned home and commanded his people to enact his vision. Some tried to share his enthusiasm. They trusted the King’s judgment over their own. Yet what he demanded felt unnatural and wrong.

The king’s actions pained his queen. She warned his path would lead to ruin, but he wouldn’t listen. He continued altering his kingdom’s culture and trampling on the desires of his subjects. Unrest led some to seek his life, and he was shot down.

So goes the plot of The Nightmare Before Christmas. This folktale-like narrative also works as a retelling of Joseph Smith’s polygamy. Jack Skellington’s story drives home an important point: leaders can make big, harmful mistakes, even when they are strong in many areas. Whether Jack really is “the Pumpkin King” is never the problem. The crisis is that his gifts and legitimacy do not make him immune to hubris. Jack develops an obsession and makes self-deceptive choices. Joseph’s prophetic gifts likewise did not eliminate character flaws or mistakes. We can reject Joseph Smith’s claims to a divine sanction for plural marriage without this being irreconcilable with a genuine prophetic role.

While Jack’s story grapples with his errors openly, in official Church narratives, Joseph Smith is protected from scrutiny. Our stagnant narrative leads to confusion, bifurcation and loss of faith across the Latter-day Saint spectrum. Some members deny Joseph practiced polygamy at all, others defend it, some are weighed down by it, and others quietly condemn it. Meanwhile, many who disaffiliate have come to assume Joseph Smith was a sexual predator and fraud. Loss of trust in him and perceptions that the Church has not dealt with his plural marriage teachings and practices in a thoughtful or accountable way has harmed many individuals.

Wouldn’t we all like to be at least a bit more unified about the kind of person Joseph was, what he actually did, where he contributed genuine goodness and where he overstepped? Could we, as we find in Jack’s narrative, come to treat our founder’s scheme as an exception to otherwise reasonable and honorable leadership rather than something that would require discarding all his contributions if invalid?

The truth about Joseph Smith’s character and motivations is likely complicated and lies somewhere in the middle of our polarized and unsettled views. To address the bifurcation, the Church needs to cease clinging to the stale, dogmatic narrative and open up to contemporary reinterpretations. This turn toward greater humility and adaptation is desperately needed in official Church spaces. 

Religious communities’ stories need to be retold over time to stay relevant, and this is nothing new. The ancient Greeks understood this in their ongoing redevelopments of their mythology. The long legacy of reinterpretations in Jewish faith also demonstrates that re-thinking stories is key to keeping traditions burning bright. We need retellings of Joseph Smith’s polygamy that are more historically, psychologically, and theologically sound than those of the past. I offer this essay as one pop culture-influenced version that is perfect for Halloween time. My main source is the 1994 edition of Mormon Enigma, the definitive biography of Emma Smith. It offers a unique, carefully researched, and distinctly feminine perspective of Joseph’s plural marriage teachings and practices and his interactions with others. The illustrations for these posts were created using Canva’s image generator. As the essay unfolds, I will draw several comparisons between Jacks’ and Joseph’s stories.

To being with, Jack and Joseph are both venerated leaders who develop unchecked desires stoked by their personal struggles. Jack acknowledges that his talents as the King of Halloween are “renowned far and wide,” but he’s “tired of the same old thing,” projects for which the objective is to send shivers down peoples’ spines. The “fame and praise” continue as strong as ever, but no longer help him feel fulfilled. He has grown lonely, purposeless, and depressed. At the end of a sleepless night wandering in the woods, Jack stumbles upon a circle of trees with entrances to other holiday worlds. He enters a colorful Christmas tree-shaped portal. After a brief taste of Christmas Town, he becomes obsessed and later comes to believe taking it over as his own domain is the perfect solution for his ennui.

Joseph Smith had impressive capabilities and theocratic power over his followers. Did he start feeling empty, bored, or disconnected like Jack? Did he crave power and devotion beyond what anyone should have as he tried to cope with a high-stress life or feelings of inadequacy? Joseph, like Jack, appears to have grasped for happiness, comfort, and satisfaction in the wrong places.

Not unlike how Jack stumbles on Christmas and tries to use it to solve private problems, Joseph stumbled on polygamy and perceived it as a fix for a personal issue. In 1835, he was struggling with extramarital desire for a woman living in his home as a servant, and also retranslating the Bible. He came to believe the precedent of men taking multiple wives in the text provided him with a justification to marry another woman illegally. Joseph’s proposal to Fanny Alger mentioned desire rather than revelation (The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy 67). The D&C 132 text also identifies desires for additional partners as the context of Joseph’s plural marriages, stating: “[I]f any man espouse a virgin, and desire to espouse another… then is he justified (v. 61, emphasis mine). Emma perceived the desires Joseph expressed as “indulgent” (Mormon Enigma 153). 

The Church narrative focuses on the idea that plural marriage was an unexpected mandate from God about which Joseph felt reluctance. Times of ambivalence did happen. The problem is, the Church turns a blind eye to the evidence that it was more psychologically complex than this. We assume that if any reluctance was present, this is a kind of proof it never could have been Joseph’s idea or a false revelation in the first place. However, alongside ambivalence and doubts, there was even more enthusiasm, desire, and curiosity on Joseph’s part. When we look at the historical details, we find that Joseph’s plural marriage-related thinking and behaviors were the result of an accumulation of ideas that enticed him over the course of several years rather than revelations that he did not want or expect.

Joseph had actually started to express interest in the idea of taking additional partners a few years before Fanny Alger. In 1831, he said he felt inspired that he and other already-married male saints should marry indigenous women, “that their posterity may become white delightsome and just” (Mormon Enigma 65, In Sacred Loneliness 47). In the same year, he told 12-year-old Mary Elizabeth Rollins that someday she should be his; this grooming resulted in her marrying him years later (Mormon Enigma 65). Thus some of his earliest instances of “inspiration” to instigate plural marriages were rooted in racist sentiments and impulses to give attention to underage girls.

Joseph’s three angelic visitation accounts, still treated as bulwarks of the Church’s defense of the divinity of plural marriage teachings, are not as credible or compelling as traditionally held to be. There are no contemporaneous or first-hand records of the experiences, and it is problematic that the accounts we have suggest that Joseph used the experiences to manipulate others and defer responsibility for his behaviors to God. In some cases, he appears to have shared these visitation accounts specifically to pressure women who had already rejected his proposals of marriage (The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy 92-3; Mormon Enigma 110-1, 146-7).

Considering that the commandment from the angel required breaking the law and the ten commandments as well as harming Joseph’s and others’ family relationships on pain of death, what Joseph experienced was not congruent with the loving and benevolent God he encountered in other instances. These “angel” experiences could have easily been caused by a deceitful spirit or a self-justifying delusion. They are strange outliers to his visionary experiences in that they are they the only instances of “forceful admonishment.” It’s hard to think of anything evil would find more useful than for betrayal, adultery, and sexist, unhappy, non-consensual marital structures to be codified as sacred aspects of the restoration of priesthood ordinances.

There are many other pieces of evidence–beyond what I can share in these posts–that Joseph’s personal thinking, desires, and emotional struggles rather than God’s will were at the roots of polygamy. Joseph brought his personal romantic thoughts and feelings into the practice. For example, he used the concept of “kindred spirits,” which theorized that some people belonged to each other in the premortal life, to justify forming polyandrous unions (In Sacred Loneliness 37-8). His interest in plural marriage escalated into a fixation such that he didn’t speak of much else in private during the last year of his life. It had become central to him both religiously and emotionally (23). Surely it should be concerning to us and our current general leaders that polygamy became a kind of idol that eclipsed Jesus Christ and his gospel for Joseph during his final years.

Why did plural marriage become such an obsession for him? Valerie Hamaker suggests that Joseph suffered from avoidance of his “shadow” or the unconscious parts of him that didn’t match how he wanted to perceive himself as an upright prophet of God. She explains, “[Joseph] didn’t make sense of his own underdeveloped shadow struggles with women, with power, with patriarchy, [or] with sex.” And “when we deny our shadow, it starts to take over, and then we do all sorts of very creative things to make that which is not okay, okay.” Polygamy was a consequence of Joseph deceiving and justifying his desires and actions in effort to avoid working through his personal weaknesses (see “The Shadow Side of Joseph Smith’s Polygamy”).

Perhaps Joseph, like Jack, became obsessed with things he should not have precisely because of nagging dissatisfaction. In Joseph’s case, this dissatisfaction seems not to have been with his leadership role as it is for Jack, but rather with himself. Disordered intimacy is comorbid with self-contempt and shame. Certain early life experiences, such as feeling unwanted in one’s family, and situations that combine humiliation, futility, lust, and anger can lead individuals to struggle with impulses to seek out excessive intimate partners and experiences. 

Acting on such impulses only reinforces self-contempt and serves as an unconscious way of staying connected with deep-set feelings of inadequacy, creating vicious cycles. For a full explanation of the psychology behind this, I highly recommend Unwanted by Jay Stringer. Joseph certainly did not lead a life free of shaming experiences, frustration or anger. Relational and emotional struggles could have easily been at the root of his behaviors and ideas when it came to plural marriage. If Joseph had impulses to seek out excess intimate connections in times of personal strain, this could help explain why he justified spending so much time pursuing intimate relationships in a life chock full of stressful projects, financial instability and transience, strained relationships, disease, loss and grief, arrests and imprisonments, and mob persecution and violence.

Jack’s and Joseph’s approaches to experimentation are ill-suited and do not yield knowledge. After returning to Halloween Town, Jack locks himself away in his study for days, neglecting friends and responsibilities to devote all his time to the study of Christmas. He attempts to decipher its mysteries and meanings by experiments such as dissecting teddy bears, smashing ornaments and boiling them, and observing smashed holly berries under a microscope. Yet the understanding he seeks simply cannot come through such methods. At the end of his experiments, even he acknowledges he still doesn’t get it– the spirit of Christmas has slipped through his “bony fingers” and there is much he cannot grasp.

Joseph’s experiments in studying polygamy were just as poorly designed and violent. His object of study was the Bible, and Joseph’s interpretation was sloppy. Contrary to D&C 132, where we find his thinking about polygamy, Isaac never had plural wives and the biblical text never recounts prophets being commanded to practice plural marriage. Polygamy was just one of the non-religious, worldly aspects of ancient cultures. A harem was a ubiquitous symbol of royalty, power, and wealth. The Old Testament makes clear that the law for Israel’s Kings was monogamy, as laid out in Deut. 17:14-17, which states: “Neither shall [your king] multiply wives to himself, that his heart turn not away.”

Joseph’s reading ignores the Bible stories in which polygamous relationships create schisms, unhappiness, and jealousy. He didn’t notice the accounts of men repenting from taking excessive partners as part of their journeys toward God. Instead of basing his insights on the text, it is as if he created his own mini mythology in D&C 132 about polygamy being a commandment and priesthood rite among ancient prophets. Joseph’s reinvention of biblical polygamy requires a great leap of faith; his ideas are only really supported in the passage he produced himself in section 132. Despite all this, the Church continues to affirm his stance that Biblical prophets and people were commanded by God to practice polygamy as an exception to God’s standard law for marriage in a Gospel Topics Essay. The supposed divinity of biblical polygamy is a second major bulwark of Latter-Day Saint polygamy that proves flimsy.

Joseph failed to grasp the true spirit of love and marriage just as Jack failed to capture the spirit of Christmas. In section 132, women are treated as objects to possess. If women decline to consent to their husbands marrying other women, they are, most absurdly, to be destroyed by unidentified means. Women’s consent or non-consent amounts to nothing. Joseph couldn’t uncover spiritual light while writing the polygamy verses of section 132 because he had a predetermined agenda to control Emma, cover his personal sins, and gratify his pride (D&C 121:37-41).

Like the angel with the sword account, there are specific reasons to treat section 132 as a rejection-worthy outlier to Joseph’s other revelatory experiences. For one thing, Joseph usually used the Urim and Thummim to aid his process of receiving revelation, but in this case, he chose not to. He explained to his brother Hyrum that the content was already in his mind (Mormon Enigma 151-2), almost as if he had already decided he didn’t really need God’s input. Joseph usually intended revelations to be shared to benefit others in his community, but he intended D&C 132 to be only for Emma’s eyes. It was actually an indiscretion on the part of later Latter-day Saint leaders to publish and canonize it. Usually, Joseph recorded revelations contemporaneously, but he recorded section 132 over ten years after he started having impressions about plural wives and several years after he started experimenting with the practice. 

Joseph’s experiments with writing scripture about polygamy seem intended from the outset to justify and enable his personal desires and behaviors, however unconscious this probably was. This was selfish and immature. Joseph was a caring, compassionate, gifted, and inspiring leader in many other instances and areas that I can’t cover in these posts, but not when it came to plural marriage.

We will continue the comparison between Jack’s and Joseph’s tragic schemes tomorrow. Will the stories continue to work in parallel, or will they diverge in the end?