Remember when Meatloaf famously teased us with the addictive lyric, “I would do anything for love, but I won’t do that”? For years, the common question of this earworm chorus remained, “But what won’t he do? Meatloaf won’t do what for love?!”
In a 1993 VH1 Storytellers, Meatloaf solved the riddle for fans. Apparently the answer was there all along, hiding in the syntax. The line before each repeating chorus lays out what the committed lover will never do. That is ultimately:
- Lie to you
- Forget the way you feel right now
- Forgive myself if we don’t go all the way tonight
- Do it better than I do it with you
- Stop dreaming of you every night of my life
- See that it’s time to move on
- Be screwing around
The song is ultimately one of commitment between one lover promising fidelity to another who’s clearly been scorned. The promise of the song declares that love won’t require cheating, lying, being unfaithful, or leaving (mentally, emotionally, or physically). That isn’t real love and he won’t require her to endure those things in the name of love.
It seems fitting, then, that I’ve lately heard the lyric, “I would do anything for God, but I won’t do that” repeating in my head. This began after seeing the new children’s D&C curriculum released by the LDS Church, which explains how the story of polygamy is a beautiful lesson of obedience. In this story, God commands through a modern-day prophet and his followers obey. You see, they would do anything for God.
These lessons, accompanied by child-friendly drawings, absolve Latter-day Saints of any issues, questions, or lingering ick they may feel regarding polygamy. Faithful members can continue to separate themselves from that unsavory practice and ignore its sordid history. They can even act offended when comedians rely on it for an easy laugh, calling it a low, cheap joke that is irrelevant to Mormonism (ahem – I mean The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) today. Except, the LDS Church isn’t that old. And they are using polygamous stories of a man considered a modern-day prophet to teach about blind obedience in 2025.
This raises an important question most mainstream Latter-day Saints would like to side-step: If God commanded his followers to practice polygamy through a prophet today, would you obey?
The common response: That part of the restoration is fulfilled. He would never do that. Yet, people place themselves in the shoes of scripture characters, asking:
- Would I decapitate Laban?
- Would I sacrifice Isaac?
- Would I have sex with my wife’s handmaiden to conceive a child?
The scriptures repeatedly require us to participate in moral bargaining sanctioned by a God who requires proof of our love and devotion. We are told of moral absolutes in one moment, then given morally ambiguous stories that require giving up those absolutes in favor of higher laws of faith and obedience. Perhaps this is why I’ve never found their stories particularly comforting or their lessons clear-cut.
Even at my most conservative and believing moments, I know this: I would do anything for God, but I won’t practice polygamy. And God should never ask me – or anyone else – to practice it.
Frankly, I don’t want to follow a God who places such high value on obedience over conscience, love, fidelity, and honesty. The polygamous stories are messy because the practice is not of God and it will never be of God. I sincerely hope my children never view polygamy as anything but an ugly blight on Mormonism. From my perspective, polygamy (practiced by my forbearers) is a strange obsession and desire for dominance over women that a few men presented as God’s command. You can’t clean it up. You can’t ignore how it negatively impacts the character of men such as Joseph Smith and Brigham Young.
As I’ve wrestled with real-life dilemmas without clear-cut answers from simple scripture stories or sanitized versions of LDS history, I feel as if I’ve had a call-out with God similar to the lovers in this song. We, of course, know that moral choices are not always as clear as they appear in this song. But I think it can still work.
While there is comfort and security in simple obedience and unwavering faith, doesn’t God want us to mature and grow in our faith? Shouldn’t faith help us truly move through the complexities of life, the moral ambiguity, and the conflicting choices by building a robust conscience, learning to think by the spirit, and by constantly developing compassion, empathy, and love?
How can we evolve in our faith if we swallow these lessons of obedience without question? Why won’t we wrestle with our history? Why won’t we disavow, even apologize for, some of it? If we allowed this, then the fear and resistance around substantial change and new questions might lesson. Perhaps, then, we’d be ready for new revelation.
I would do anything for God, but I won’t:
- Ignore my conscience
- Give up my integrity
- Sacrifice the mental, physical, or or emotional well-being of my children
- Accept inequality in God’s name
- Go along with practices that are racist, sexist, or homophobic in God’s name
- Make “The Church” synonymous with “God”
- Ignore Heavenly Mother
- Do whatever a prophet/priesthood leaders says God commands
- Lose the ability to hear my own conscience and moral compass because someone else says their word is God’s
- Stop asking questions
- Place any other commandment above “love”
I would do anything for God (but I won’t do that). And He shouldn’t ask me to.
13 Responses
In 1999 when I first joined the Church I was told I needed to be Obedient to Church authorities like my bishop and so on. I said people with authority OVER other people are just people that are more likely to abuse their power. And I intend to trust my conscious and the leading of the Holy Spirit.
I said no to garments immediately, and no to nosey people pretending to be holier than me because I’m a convert, like I was a child. The Church in general will continue to bleed losing people, especially young people as long as these authorities continue to treat us like dumb children that don’t have a world view exactly like THEM.
Even children have the right to make choices and ask questions that make sense to their innocence and integrity and intelligence that make senseTeresa to them.
Please have some trust and respect for people as they are and give us time to learn and grow in our own way.
Amen!
As I’ve evolved over my 80+ years, I’ve come to believe that most of the stories in the OT are just stories or fables. I’m tired of rules of obedience because they are usually about unrighteous dominion of men.
Excellent post, Mindy. I admit my memory might be faulty, but I feel like when I was younger, Church teachings talked a lot more about conscience and the importance of learning to decide things for yourself. It’s been sad to see, especially in the Nelson years, but before him too, as it’s moved to pretty much just saying obedience is all that matters. GAs will tell us what to do, and we’ll do it. I agree with you that that’s an awful setup, and I refuse to participate. Lots of people command lots of things in the name of God, so the fact that Joseph Smith claims “God said so” doesn’t make me think polygamy is any more righteous. It only makes me think Joseph Smith is more suspect.
YES!! Thank you for explaining this so clearly. This is truth. This is goodness.
Love this. This for sure needs to be taught instead of the blind obedience they are emphasizing now. It puts into words for me why we should obey our own conscience above any man claiming to be prophet. Our own conscience is our direct link to God. If we do something we know to be wrong, we violate that link in favor of some man’s claim to speak for God. Also, if we do something unloving to “the least of these” we have done it to God. That idea that we shouldn’t do anything hateful in the name of God is perfect, because anything hateful isn’t from God who put love as the first principle of heaven—-not obedience. So, by definition, a loving God will never ask us to harm someone else.
Thank You for saying it!
Thank you for your thoughtful, inspiring article. Several years ago, after a family member came out, I found myself in the car driving to work and singing the chorus from this song with tears streaming down my face.. I would do anything for the love of this person, but how could I do “that?!” The “that” I feared was leaving the church. It hasn’t come to that and we have a relationship that I cherish- but on my own, I’ve come to have one foot solidly out the door. You beautifully expressed what I believe about God.
This is an important article with some good points. I first realized that polygamy was not from God when I realized that the interpretation of Jacob 2:30 to mean that God sometimes commanded polygamy could not be a valid interpretation because of the chiastic structure of that chapter. Verses 29 and 30 are at the pinnacle of a chiastic structure, which means that verse 30 is a reiteration of verse 29, so it needs to be interpreted in that context, which doesn’t allow for an exception for polygamy. That means that the Book of Mormon condemns polygamy without exception.
There is one issue with this article that I think is important to call out. The article doesn’t explicitly say it, but it implies that Joseph Smith taught that polygamy was from God along with Brigham Young. However, Joseph Smith never taught polygamy and certainly didn’t practice it. Thanks to the work of people like Michelle Stone, Jeremy Hoop, and many others, it is becoming more and more clear that the historical evidence contradicts the official Church narrative that Joseph Smith practiced polygamy. Joseph Smith always denied having more than one wife.
It was a clear doctrine in the Church that polygamy was forbidden as laid out in the original section 101 of the 1835 Doctrine and Covenants that Joseph Smith ratified. Right before Joseph and Hyrum were killed in 1844, they were at the general conference of the Church. There, Hyrum gave a clear and scathing refutation of polygamy. Logically, this means that the official Church narrative implies that Joseph and Hyrum were liars and were actively deceiving regular members of the Church with scriptures and talks they knew to be false, but I testify that it is actually the official narrative that is false. To add to that, section 132 of the current Doctrine and Covenants that supports polygamy didn’t appear until years after Joseph and Hyrum were killed, and its authenticity is dubious.
To her dying day, Emma Smith testified that her husband, Joseph Smith, had no wife but her. I think we dishonor Emma Smith by not seriously considering that she was telling the truth. I testify that she was telling the truth.
Sorry Jake but there is a large piles of evidence that Joseph did in face marry many women.
Read the testimony of the women of polygamy in journals and Church History.
From what I’ve found, the evidence that Joseph practiced polygamy largely comes from the testimonies of women that were written many years later in Utah when the Church was under pressure from the government to construct a narrative that polygamy had been part of the religion from early on. The Church at that time was also under pressure by RLDS missionaries who were teaching that Joseph didn’t practice polygamy. It is likely that those women were pressured into “lying for the Lord” by writing those testimonies to defend their religion when it was coming under attack in Utah. I have not seen any good evidence, however, that is contemporaneous with Joseph Smith. There are a few things like cryptic notes that might be initials but the meaning is not clear at all. Or, there are things like the Whitney letter that is only evidence for polygamy if you come at it with with the preconceived idea that it involves Joseph having a polygamous relationship and interpret it that way, but it can be interpreted differently in a way that doesn’t suggest polygamy and is more consistent with the context of the letter. Furthermore, there are issues where the later narrative doesn’t fit with the contemporaneous evidence that we do have.
It doesn’t matter how big the piles of evidence are if the evidence isn’t any good. It’s also important to consider the contradictory evidence as well. There are things in the later narrative from Utah that don’t make sense to me at all. The more I’ve looked into it the more insubstantial the case for Joseph being a polygamist looks. At this point, I really can’t take it seriously anymore. The historians defending the polygamy narrative have a whole lot of questions to answer and issues to resolve. It’s exciting because a lot of work on this history has come out in just the last few years, much of it made possible by things like the Joseph Smith Papers project that has made the documents available for more people to study.
Here’s an example of the evidence for polygamy from the later Utah period being problematic. This is from an article from Church historians.
https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/church-historians-press/the-first-fifty-years-of-relief-society/part-1/1-6?lang=eng
In the article, it includes an article from 1842 that the Relief Society presidency put out:
“We the undersigned members of the ladies’ relief society, and married females do certify and declare that we know of no system of marriage being practised in the church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints save the one contained in the Book of Doctrine and Covenants, and we give this certificate to the public to show that J. C. Bennett’s “secret wife system” is a disclosure of his own make.
Emma Smith, President,
Elizabeth Ann Whitney, Counsellor,
Sarah M. Cleveland, Counsellor,
Eliza R. Snow, Secretary,”
The article has a quote from Eliza R. Snow from a letter to Joseph F. Smith, which looks like it’s from the 1850s (I didn’t look up the exact date) about that article that the Relief Society presidency put out: “At the time the sisters of the Relief Society signed our article, I was married to the prophet— we made no allusion to any other system of marriage than Bennett’s— his was prostitution, and it was truly his, and he succeeded in pandering his course on the credulity of the unsuspecting by making them believe that he was thus authorized by the Prophet. In those articles there is no reference to divine plural marriage. We aimed to put down its opposite.”
Now, the problem with this is that Eliza Snow says that they made no allusion to any other system of marriage than Bennett’s and that there is no reference to divine plural marriage. However, the article from the Relief Society presidency clearly states that they knew of no system of marriage in the Church except what is in the Doctrine and Covenants. For readers who are not familiar with the topic, it might seem like they are talking about the system of plural marriage in section 132. However, the Doctrine and Covenants that they are referencing, and that is cited in the footnotes, is the Doctrine and Covenants from 1835, which doesn’t have section 132 and which in its section 101 lays out the system of marriage, saying: “Inasmuch as this church of Christ has been reproached with the crime of fornication, and polygamy: we declare that we believe, that one man should have one wife; and one woman, but one husband, except in case of death, when either is at liberty to marry again.”
So, when Eliza Snow signed her name to that article she was testifying that she knew of no system of marriage in the Church that had anything but where a man has only one living wife and a woman only one living husband. Yet, many years later she says that she was married to Joseph Smith at the time who was also married to Emma Smith, which would be more than one wife. Therefore, because her statements are contradictory, we know that she was lying, either in 1842 or in the 1850s. I think there is more reason to think that her second statement is the lie, but at any rate it puts the credibility of the second statement in doubt because it could be the lie.
I was tired when I wrote about Eliza Snow and after I got some rest I realized that an 1850s date for Eliza Snow’s letter to Joseph F. Smith made no sense whatsoever and I don’t know what I was thinking. So that I don’t look like a total idiot, I quickly looked it up and according to Perplexity.ai it looks like it was written around 1879, which means she would have been around 75 at the time. I’ll also note that a lot of the affidavits signed by women who claimed to be the wives of Joseph Smith were written around 1869, so much of the best evidence that Joseph Smith was a polygamist wasn’t written until around 25 years after Joseph and Hyrum were killed.