The LDS church is becoming more forthright with its history of polygamy. Going away are the hand wavy stories about it being primarily for widows who lost their husbands crossing the plains (because somehow God couldn’t think up a church welfare program to feed and clothe the single moms that didn’t require them to also have sex with their priesthood leaders). This past week the church released a new section on their website called “Plural Marriage: Faith to obey a law from the Lord, even when it’s hard” for kids, a rather whitewashed version of history complete with cartoon images, as if this was all a fun children’s story instead of systematic and institutionalized sexual abuse of women and girls.
To anyone who has previously gone down the rabbit hole of polygamy, this particular retelling will sound a bit absurd. If you don’t have the energy to read the whole cartoon story right now, I’ll summarize it for you.
It (basically) says: “Joseph Smith was reading the Bible and didn’t understand why some prophets had multiple wives, so unlike the many other barbaric biblical practices of rape, incest, genocide and slavery, he decided to ask God if he was supposed to do it, too.
It was really hard for Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. They didn’t want to collect women into their eternal harems via a loophole in the law of chastity that commanded them to sleep with dozens of women and girls other than their legally and lawfully wedded wife, but they reluctantly obeyed.
Joseph was sometimes commanded by God to command other men to give him their own wives, but the prophet’s heart was moved with compassion for his brethren when he saw the pain polygamy caused these men. Concerned for them, he would permit them to give him one of their teenage daughters instead.”
Actually, I quit. You get the idea! If you want to read it go to the church website for the official version – it’s very short. The main gist is that early church leaders didn’t come up with the idea, they were super reluctant to do it, and also…let’s not talk about any details.
Below are some clips from the story. It’s genuinely wild how much is left out.
This type of explanation for predatory behavior works literally nowhere else, and when you hear it in a slightly different context it is absolutely horrifying. For example:
Serial killer Ted Bundy was reading his scriptures one day when he noticed how many men of God were called to murder people. Nephi reluctantly killed Laban, Ammon had to violently cut off the arms of men and watch them bleed to death in complete agony, and Noah watched all of his friends drown in terrifying watery deaths. Why did God want his prophets to be so comfortable with gruesome death?
Ted decided to pray and ask God about this question.
God told him it was right and necessary that those prophets killed people, and asked Ted if he would be willing to do the same. Ted didn’t want to kill anyone, but he trusted in God and killed dozens of women anyway.
People didn’t always understand that it was God who had called him to be a killer, and they persecuted him. When he was arrested, faithful members of his branch wrote him comforting letters as he suffered in jail.
(Psst – did you know that Ted was baptized into the LDS church during his killing years, and people in his branch turned out to support him when he was arrested? This is an actual card his branch members sent to him to encourage him when he was taken into custody. Just because faithful members support a person in jail doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be in that jail! (From the Netflix documentary “Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes”.) Anyway, continuing on…)
Ted was martyred by those who didn’t understand his calling and hated him.
Ted didn’t want to hurt all of those women, but he was obedient and did what God told him to do – even though it was hard for him.” (Notice how uncomfortable this type of explanation sounds when used for literally anything else.)
Worst of all, guess who takes advantage of the church’s unwillingness to call out the sex abuse of women and girls by its early prophets? Modern day sexual predators in the church!
I unfortunately once associated closely with a convicted sex predator as a student at BYU almost 25 years ago. He was a recent convert in my freshman ward who’d joined the church after his Mormon high school teacher taught him about obscure early church history – including polygamy. My ward (full of inexperienced teenagers) mostly saw him as kind of quirky and embraced him as a new convert with a non-supportive family. I felt bad for him and his difficult childhood, and even accompanied him as his moral support when he paid a surprise visit to his father who had abandoned him as a child. He was already an expert at grooming and manipulation by the time he left to serve his mission. I eventually cut him out of my life but still feel the scars of my own association with him almost 25 years later.
Around the age of 28 he was married, graduated from BYU, living in another state and about to finish law school when he was arrested in Utah County (where I lived). One day a free newspaper arrived in my mailbox and as I tossed it onto my kitchen table his mugshot stared up at me from the front page, taking me by surprise. He’d been arrested after flying to Springville to meet a 15 year old girl for sex. He’d begun communication with her when she was 14 and had been out to Utah to visit her before, but this was the time he was caught.
She was a Mormon girl in Utah, and he was an older married man in Illinois. How did he convince her it was okay? By telling her that Joseph Smith also married 14 and 15 year old girls! He’d convinced her he loved her and promised to marry her in the temple someday. My heart shattered for that girl (who is a woman in her late twenties now). She was a child dealing with an adult psychopath who used her youth, religious beliefs, and the abhorrent history of Mormon church leaders to manipulate her into fulfilling his predatory sexual desires.
This man was convicted of sex abuse and went to prison for years. I looked him up on the internet and found him with a big smile in his current sex offender registry photo, as if it was a dating profile image. I resisted the urge to chuck my phone across the room when I saw his face. He does not seem to be ashamed of what he did at all. And why should he? He was just following the prophet, after all.
This man is not the only one to be drawn to the church because of its teachings about polygamy or who has used it to victimize women and girls. There are countless news stories of seminary teachers abusing girls in their classrooms, bishops and young women in their ward, and even a mission president who convinced several sister missionaries they were called to be his plural wives. My friend Kristy Money is a psychologist who worked in the prison system rehabilitating sex offenders. She’s written op-eds in the Salt Lake Tribune on the topic of polygamy and sex abuse, such as “LDS history of polygamy still used to victimize women” and “LDS Church should make clear Smith was wrong to take 14-year-old wife” because of what she experienced professionally.
Why are modern church leaders so reluctant to disavow something as obviously wrong as adult married men secretly courting underage girls? Why is the safety of young girls a sacrifice they’re willing to make to protect the reputations of men who have been dead for 150 years? Unfortunately, the only answer I can come up with is the obvious: if they admit their predecessors were wrong about polygamy, they’ll finally have to admit that they can be wrong about things, too.
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A friend sent this quote by James Hollis to me today: “It is of paramount importance that our spirituality be validated or confirmed by fidelity to our personal experience. A spiritual tradition that is only received from history or from family makes no real difference in a person’s life, for he or she is living by conditioned reflexive response. Only what is experientially true is worth a mature spirituality.” The claims of this Church’s official Joseph Smith/plural marriage revelation narrative are incongruent with the lived experiences of LDS women, whether they have faced conjugal abuse or betrayal, are married to men with unwanted sexual behaviors, support family members who struggle with these issues, or just know deep down this is something abusive and wrong.
I feel cautious about implying we should treat Joseph like an sexual predator. I think he was emotionally sick like a lot of people with disordered intimacy and didn’t intend get caught up in such awful behavior. But he should be held accountable for his actions regardless, sick and deceived or not. I just don’t want to hurt testimonies or the community. People who struggle with this kind of disordered behavior are complicated, and he seemed to sincerely believe it was okay with God on his conscious level. I highly recommend reading the book “Addictive Thinking” by Abram Twerski, it explains how people deceive themselves into justifying and enabling their unhealthy and self-destructive behaviors. It helps me have compassion for these kinds of problems. One thing I learned in the book is that when lots of reasons are given for a questionable behavior, this is one sign of addictive/unhealthy thinking. Its rationalization. In the church we have 180+ years of contradictory and absurd rationalizations for what happened, we’re all kind of co-dependent on Joseph’s behavioral illness. When people do things, there is usually only one central real reason. I think the real reason is Joseph was wounded and sick in this area of his life.
All I can say to the Church in these ridiculous efforts is a sarcastic “good luck” passing on this stale and sketchy narrative in the next generations. My teen daughter watched Keep Sweet, Pray and Obey twice in recent years of her own accord. Hell with freeze over before she’ll believe polygamy came from God. My son is equally disinterested and disconnected from it. For those they will convince, I feel anger. Everything about the polygamy doctrines led to unintentional spiritual abuse in my life starting around age 9. I’m still mad about it, and to think this abuse continues against our children despite how many women raise a voice against it is so very frustrating.
We desperately need new versions of the story. Here’s mine, which I worked on off and on for a year. It brings some of the nuance that we need to preserve faith, redeem Joseph’s wrongs, and move on from polygamy’s abuses. Joseph should have listened to Emma and noticed the red flags:
https://exponentii.org/blog/comparing-the-nightmare-before-christmas-and-the-nightmare-of-polygamy/
https://exponentii.org/blog/comparing-the-nightmare-before-christmas-and-the-nightmare-of-joseph-smiths-polygamy-part-2/
Great points, Candace–thank you! Your comment about reluctance as supposed proof of innocence helped me recognize something similar in these quasi-apologetic lines from Hamilton:
“That’s when I began to pray
Lord, show me how to say no to this
I don’t know how to say no to this
But my God, she looks so helpless
And her body’s saying, ‘hell, yes’.”
I love this connection to Hamilton! Who hasn’t been ambivalent and half reluctant when caught up in sinful behaviors. I’ve learned from other people and study that ambivalence and reluctance play a big role in patterns of self-destructive habits.
Here’s a relevant piece from my Nightmare Before Christmas post about why the Church’s narrative is distorted, deceptive, and harmful: “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.” (Visit the original post for links, and more relevant points about why the Church narrative gets it wrong) https://exponentii.org/blog/comparing-the-nightmare-before-christmas-and-the-nightmare-of-polygamy/
Wow I hate this little “cartoon” so so so much. Why is the church still trying to defend polygamy? Studying its history shows the obvious abuse.
One of the topics I explore a lot in my book is the concept of men creating families as kingdoms. This is what polygamy existed for, men getting to play god. I hope Mormon readers will be willing to acknowledge this when they read it.
Linda, I think this is one of the best arguments against polygamy: this its only real purpose was to glorify an elite group of men rather than God or bless anyone else. Many people have disproven this idea that it helped produce more births (it was actually less of course), and that it was about helping widows, or compensating for a shortage of men. It was really about specific men having more dominion, more wives, more children (at the cost of other men and through the creation of hierarchies). It was a self-glorifying narcissistic thing.
RMN and DHO are polygamists who’ve shown no concern for women, ever. Their wives seem to be considered to be sidekicks and cheerleaders for them. They’ve both ridiculed people who question what eternal polygamy will mean for women. Oaks said, “Just make sure that you’re there.” And “No one knows.” These were used as laugh lines in conference about four-five years ago. Grotesque.
It would be incredibly hard to get a retraction on the sanctity of polygamy when the two top men in charge would be saying that their sealings to their four combined wives aren’t actually valid.
Yep.. It is imperative that we STOP supporting and sustaining them.. Evil is as evil does.
When I saw the cartoon yesterday on Reddit I very nearly vomited. Truly! Polygamy is what was the catalyst for my departure from the church. Both of my parents had parents or grandparents who were the children of polygamy. My paternal grandma’s father was born to a second wife who didn’t know about wife #1 and vice versa. If her midwife hadn’t been the BFF of wife #1 she would never have known about her husband’s deceit (which we later learned was sanctioned by “The Brethren” at the top) nor would she and her days old baby have been kicked out of her home (while the husband was out of town on church business) and forced to find a job as a cook at a very rough, tough silver mining camp up Big Cottonwood Canyon just east of the Salt Lake Valley. She and her baby lived in poverty until he quit school at age 12 to support them both. My grandma, her sisters plus my dad and his sibs all said that Great-Grandpa would often hold forth in a very outspoken manner on the evils of polygamy, and he grilled all of his prospective sons in law on their views of polygamy. For all that my grandfather was patriarchal he loathed polygamy.
My maternal grandmother and her entire family’s life were upended when her father decided in 1900 to suddenly move to Mexico. It wasn’t until the family arrived after him that they discovered that their husband and father had been grooming a young girl in their ward in Salt Lake City for the past five years that he’d been her Sunday School teacher and had married her and then moved to Mexico because this was 10 years post Manifesto 1. If my great-grandmother decided to divorce her husband then and there she was told that she wouldn’t receive any financial support from her husband or the church. My grandmother and her older sister were regularly sexually abused by their father because both mothers were usually pregnant. The abuse only stopped when they both began their periods in their late teens. The physical and psychological damage to not only these girls but also to their three brothers was horrific. (The sisters born in Mexico were too young to remember the horror the older kids lived through.)
I knew from a young age that my mom’s family wasn’t normal, especially her mother who was so damaged that she hated almost everyone including us her grandchildren. (She especially hated sex and demanded that my mom, her baby born in her 40’s sleep with her every night while my grandfather was relegated to another bedroom. Mom remembered her father begging her mother to let him spend the night with her and her mother throwing a fit about such a suggestion.). We children and grandchildren hadn’t done anything wrong, so why did she despise us all so much? That plus all the other baggage as a result of polygamy seriously damaged four generations on that side of my family.
If my sister and I hadn’t decided to figure out what was wrong with our mom’s family we, our other sibs and cousins would’ve most likely have passed on the trauma to our children. Instead, we held a cousins meeting and shared what we learned about the family disfunction. As a group we pledged to each other to get the necessary help to overcome what we now refer to as the family garbage, and happily, the break with the past was made. That doesn’t mean that we’ve made peace with polygamy or our evil great-grandfather. I doubt that we ever will, but now we are free from the myriad evils of polygamy and many of us, especially the females, are outspoken foes of this wicked practice that should never have begun.
That is a harrowing story! Polygamy leads to secrecy, which all too often leads to abuse. The reality is we are all suffering from things that happened in our families long before we were born, and we’re finally gaining the wisdom to begin to heal old patterns and family trauma. I didn’t come from polygamy personally and even then, it’s affected me a lot! I can only imagine what it would be like if it was in your very DNA.
wow that’s a terrible history, but thank you for sharing it and i am inspired by your cousin meeting.
When I was a child, I was taught that the Holy Ghost would tell you if something was right or not, it would be your guide. Well, I can still remember the physical revulsion i felt when i learned about polygamy as a semi ary student. We need to teach our children to listen to that feeling, not push it aside in the name of obedience. Yes, God can help us do hard things, but we need to teach our children emphatically that does not and never should include WRONG, harmful things. Things our whole body and mind are screaming at is are bad. We need a better hermeneutic to approach not only polygamy in our past but violence and abuse in our scriptures, a hermaneutic that doesn’t include excusing abuse and violence.
Moss, I appreciate these thoughts and resonate. I grew up in a house where my father chronically betrayed my mom through porn use. I didn’t know this was going on at the time, but I felt the misery, the distrust, the darkness and depression, and the pain they both felt in my own body. As an adult, I’ve come to believe this context is part of why I’ve always had such a strong spiritual and visceral reaction to polygamy. The spirit always confirmed infidelity was wrong across the board. The spirit consistently affirmed that the Joseph’s remarkable encounters with God, on the other hand, were joyful and full of light. I still trust these feelings I’ve had since young childhood. I still can feel them today.
Like you; I was given a similar description of polygamy when I was about 10. I remember the revulsion I felt. I remember thinking it was a horrible thing. And I said so to my parents but then I was told I was the problem and I needed to learn to trust God or be destroyed.
Fast forward 30 years and I finally take polygamy off the shelf to study and I realize my 10 year old self was right the whole time!
Lessons like this story teach people to ignore their inner voice and give personal autonomy over to another. It is very harmful.
I don’t see the church ever saying anything about how it hurt women. I wish they would.
In the Church, we’re only encouraged to trust spiritual experiences that affirm what the institution upholds. Revelatory outside of that range are by default treated as fallen, deceived, of Satan, etc. This is really unhealthy! What a huge problem, and what a limitation to what personal revelation can offer members. Where is the acknowledgement that leaders are just as prone to get “revelations” outside the acceptable range of content?
I was always told that someday I’d spiritually evolve and be okay with sharing everything, even my marriage and sex in the afterlife, and that this would be a happy thing. This would be the way I’d be sanctified and become acceptable to God. I think this is exactly why I get so triggered today by polyamorous ideas that such relationship structures are on some kind of higher, more mature or advanced emotional plane where everything can be shared and jealousy is irrelevant. It comes across as condescending and deeply false to me after all the gaslighting I endured about polygamy making me more holy and unselfish as a Mormon girl, teen, and young adult.
The problematic grooming in these lessons definitely ranked me and here is a tangential aspect of the “Polygamy for kids” discussion that I wish more members would address:
Last week, the exmormon subreddit posted screenshots of these lessons for children. Within days of those pics racing to the top of the “hot” reads ranking, the church revised their original title and removed the phrase “for Primary children.” Ok, good for them, that was definitely problematic, but why do they only listen to exmormons when their own devout and vigilant temple worthy sisters have been raising voices of concern about lessons like this for decades?
I remember in the 90s when a group of primary leaders within one stake compiled a list of primary lessons that teach primary children about sex and abstinence. The primary manuals had lessons about David and Bathsheba, Joseph of Egypt, and Alma the younger that warned kids not to have sex outside marriage. The sisters who compiled those lessons’ data felt that sexuality was not an appropriate topic for volunteers to discuss with ten year olds, so they politely and diplomatically took their concerns and list of church manual citations all the way to an area authority and got nowhere. They were gently chastened and encouraged to obey the brethren. Since when do the brethren write manuals for children? They dont,. So why are church manuals treated like holy canonized writ that cannot be questioned?
Also, the new Book of Mormon intro that was discussed here last week after being taken down, it had been posted for several months but the church only made efforts to remove it after exmormons started raising a ruckus.
Why are the brethren so willing to change their policies and publications based on feedback from exmormons but not for the faithful women laboring diligently for the church day in and day out??? Is apostasy the price we must pay to have our voices heard?
These are fascinating points. Maybe they feel more threatened by those who have claimed total independence, whom they have absolutely no jurisdiction over, and who feel more at liberty to criticize them than those who are still involved. It’s an interesting thing to think about. It does seem very hypocritically and ironic. I guess its good they are (sometimes) listening to some of the people who have been hurt by the Church’s actions.
I think they pay attention to what is on line because it is public and making the church look bad. When a group of active women raises a concern, they do it politely and in private, so they can be ignored. I learned from watching the church change things that they don’t care how much something hurts people. They only care about bad publicity. So, write letters to the editor, start on line things that can go viral. That kind of bad publicity gets the leaders attention. I mean, if they cared why people leave, they could ask instead of ignoring the problem. But get a blog post with thousands of comments and suddenly they care. Oh, they might excommunicate you if you are still a member, but they notice. Polite women don’t make history or changes in a male church. Unfortunately they care more about publicity than people.
Wow. Just wow. My great-grandmother was the daughter of polygamist and her mother before her. I only heard good stories growing up, but even as a child the idea of polygamy appalled me.
My cousin was in the single’s ward in Utah when Bundy was investigating the church. She told me the girls thought he was a catch as he was studying to go into law and good looking. She brought this up after I hitchhiked once, thinking it was safe as I was living in Provo. She told me that anyone could be a Bundy, hiding behind a temple recommend. Yup, I asked the guy who picked me up to show his temple recommend. Stupid, I know but that’s how naive I was.
Later,, I went to the sx offender’s unit at the Point of the mountain prison to interview inmates for my social work class. I’ll never forget the former stake counselor who rped numerous young women, including his daughter and how angry he was that his wife left him. None of those inmates had remorse. Some went into graphic detail what they looked for. It was a haunting experience.
I personally feel current leaders need to be not only open but apologize for past, but doubt that will happen as doing such would mean admitting they were human. Like the whole no priesthood for blacks.
I hate how this new (and most) polygamy explanations centers the men participating in what is at best highly questionable behavior and their feelings about it, in essence turning them into the victims of difficult commandment, not the perpetrators of so much harm against women and girls. A classic abuser tactic is to make the offender into a victim to excuse them of any wrongdoing, which I’m seeing majorly in this kind of justification. And who would these men be a victim of? God? We are supposed to believe in an abusive God too?
Way too many red flags here.
I like this. I’ve thought about how they projected their own issues and badness onto God. “Don’t blame me, it’s God’s fault!” “You’d better marry me, or God will kill me.” Projection onto other people, or in this case, God, is a classic move when you’re deceiving yourself and justifying a destructive behavior. Joseph also projected his crap onto other men by requiring them to live his way, he was super relieved when he wouldn’t be the only one doing his polygamous thing anymore.
Another red flag with this is how the story makes God look like the bad guy, a sadistic, abusive jerk who doesn’t keep his own rules or respect human agency while making human men look like the good guys, pious, reluctant heroes who do the thing no matter what. It’s incredibly fishy. It’s ridiculous. They’ve always repressed womens versions of the story, esp Emma’s
You can’t say you believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, As well as Moses, David and Solomon while maintaining your prejudiced views about celestial marriage ( hint: its polygyny)