(Main image: from hulu.com and “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives”, and some of Brigham Young’s wives and daughters from churchofjesuschrist.org.)
Top Mormon male priesthood leaders in the 1800s led very sexually promiscuous lives. We’ve always called it polygamy and said it was commanded by a loving Heavenly Father, but I don’t believe that. Men who were already married with children continued to take more and more women and girls as additional sexual partners under the claim that God had told them (or their prophet) that they were free to do so. Women were rewards given to men for their obedience and loyalty to the church.
The new Hulu show, The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives has raised opposition from modern church members who are uncomfortable with how Mormons are being portrayed because of what they perceive as immoral sexual behavior that doesn’t align with their values. But are these women really that bad? They are adults after all, engaging in sexual activities with other consenting adults, and no one is underage or coerced into doing something they are uncomfortable with. Sure, marriages ended and I don’t think swinging is a good idea for most people. However, on the grand scale of things, twerking in Tiktok videos and having consensual sexual relationships is not illegal or predatory.
These are the women acting immorally that everyone is upset about. (From the Hulu.com website.)
I, on the other hand, am a member of the LDS church and I would like to condemn what our male church leaders did in the days of polygamy. Married men, with or without the permission, approval, or even knowledge of their first wives (thanks to the “Law of Sarah”), took additional girls and women as sexual partners under the premise that it was commanded of them by God. The higher up in the priesthood line of authority they were, the more women they were rewarded with for their obedience and loyalty. Men who reached the highest ranks in Mormon church leadership (prophets and apostles) were married to dozens of wives and fully intended to be sealed to many more in the eternities. Joseph Smith began the practice of polygamy by taking around 40 women as secret plural wives, including about 14 who already had living husbands.
Plenty of men have claimed to be prophets throughout history. Occasionally these men have successfully convinced large groups of people to believe and follow them. I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that many of these prophets have also told their followers that God commanded them to have many wives. Accumulating women seems to be a standard practice for men who find themselves in positions of power. As a whole we brush off the prophetic claims of 99.9 percent of these men and conclude they were acting out of a selfish interest for power and sex, but if it was our own leaders who did it – we believe them when they say God commanded them to do it.
This doesn’t mean the modern-day church can’t have a good influence in the world. It doesn’t mean someone can’t stay an active member and find value in that. It also doesn’t mean individuals can’t use the LDS church as a beautiful way to connect to God. A person’s church experience does not have to be tainted or ruined by the bad behavior of men who are long gone and dead.
What I hate is that we continue to hold up truly grotesque male behavior towards women and girls as something to be respected or emulated. These men coerced women into marriage and had sex with teenage girls far too young to give consent, yet we create entire lesson manuals based on their teachings and quote them in General Conference. We build universities in their honor and put statues of them up for public recognition.
I’ve heard men in my conservative Utah community joke about wanting to clean a gun in the front room when a teenage boy comes to take their teenage daughter out for a date. There are many reasons this is not funny at all, but those aside – would these same protective fathers be okay with adult male missionaries from a religious sect recruiting their teen daughters to be baptized into a church, then quickly married off to a 55-year-old bishop? Based on their desire to protect their daughters with threat of violence from any male who might make a sexual advance, these men in my ward today should also theoretically have been the ones leading the charge to tar and feather Mormon prophets and apostles in the 1800s.
There are (unfortunately) many stories of underage girls marrying older men with high leadership positions, and I will share one example that especially pulled on my heartstrings.
This is Martha Ann Hughes, who was 14 years old when she was given to 68-year-old Zera Pulsipher as a plural wife. In researching her life, it was hard not to think of the parallels to Brian David Mitchell, the kidnapper of Elizabeth Smart.
Both of these men took a 14-year-old girl as a spiritual wife while being significantly older and already married men. (Zera was 68, Brian was 48.) Elizabeth Smart was freed from her relationship after nine months, but Martha Ann Hughes bore Zera five children before he died of old age. They both claim that God commanded them to do what they did.
I hear people say, “Things were different back then and girls just got married younger.” The thing is, Martha (the 14-year-old plural wife) didn’t live thousands of years ago in a completely different culture, place and religion. She and I were born 138 years apart and her youngest son was still alive when President Russell M. Nelson was in high school. She died in Utah 74 years before I was born here, and only 37 years before my dad was born. She worshiped the same God, read the same scriptures, studied the words of the same prophets, and lived in the same state that I did. We are not that different.
I feel confident to speak on behalf of all (current and former) middle school girls when I say that yes, 14-year-old girls are interested in sex. They are not, however, interested in losing their virginity to men who are pushing seventy. They have crushes on other 14- and 15-year-old boys, and unless someone is in a very famous boy band or a sexual predator who has worked hard to groom the girl, almost any man over the age of about 25 is considered old and gross. I don’t believe Utah Mormon teenage girl preferences evolved so much between Martha and myself that she wanted a boyfriend 50 years older than I did in 8th grade. I feel sick at the thought of her wedding night, and I want to reach back in time and save her from the horrors that were sold to her by old men as the will of God.
So now in 2024, a silly Hulu reality show intended to sensationalize Mormon women is being denounced by church members as misrepresentative of the values and sexual ethics of our religion.
Yet at the same time we have a university named after a 43 year old man who sealed a 13 year old girl to himself for time and all eternity, sing hymns in praise of a 38 year old man who took a 14 year old girl as a bride in secret from his first wife, and a lesson manual dedicated to a man who married 6 out of ten wives as teenagers with the biggest age gap between him and a wife being 46 years, and later sealed 267 dead females (including a 6 year old deceased girl who had never even been baptized) to himself as birthday gifts on his 70th, 71st, 72nd and 74th birthdays. The man famous for baptizing a prophet was 68 years old when he married a 14 year old girl and impregnated her five times. No amount of revelations from God written by the same men doing bad things to teenage girls will ever convince me it was okay.
So from here on out, instead of being horrified by adult women making consensual choices regarding their own sexuality while teaching primary songs about sexual predators, let’s swap the two. Be horrified by what famous men in our church have done instead.
(I’ve written on the topic of Polygamy and Sex before, by the way. Feel free to click and read about the worst sex dream I ever had!)
Read more great blog posts on Exponent II about this new Hulu show including a watch party!
***The blog is free to read, but not free to host! Check out our donation page to support our site.***
22 Responses
Amen. While the reality show seems stupid and swinging is ridiculous, I am so much more disturbed by church history. Like you, I have imagined the horrifying sexual experiences of these poor young women. It’s evil to that these old men robbed these girls of love and happiness in monogamous marriages to men their own age. If men experienced sex the way women did, by being penetrated, they would be horrified by polygamy too. Somehow men never seem to ponder much about the lives of these women. They just chuckle nervously or make jokes about the practice and never really contemplate its atrociousness. I have also thought the same thing about every male cult leader. Isn’t it convenient how God always wants them to have sex with young women? If it were the reverse where there was a Goddess commanding women to have multiple husbands, men would start riots and right away denounce those women as false prophets.
I endured so many jokes by high school seminary teachers about polygamy. (Like, “Yeah, way to go Grandpa!” when a male student asked a question about his polygamous great great great grandfather who had many wives.) It took me until recent years to finally realize how harmful and gross those jokes were, especially saying them in front of teenage girls the same age as the victims of these polygamous men.
As someone who is from a big Mormon family, but never a member, I find it perplexing that you criticize your church prophets and leaders, and still attend chapel and sacrament meetings. These guys were scum bags. Just leave like thousands of other good Mormons. That would make the greatest statement of all..
Abby, this post is bold and incredible. Thank you so much for putting this together. I love the ways you point out the absurdity and the hypocrisy of it all. Mohammed had 12 wives at the end of his life. This is disturbing, but at least he didn’t claim it was inspired/heavenly and at least he waited until his first wife died. Most of them were actually widows in need of support, unlike Joseph’s. It’s hypocritical that we’re harsh on the FLDS, but the truth is they are just still riding out the wave of crap and abuse our own founder threw at them. We should be empathetic and recognize the bad fruits for what they are.
It is time that we retire the hymn Praise to the Man. It is time to acknowledge that illegal and secretive behaviors, not sacred martyrdom, led to Joseph’s death. It’s time The Church lets go of the stale, dogmatic, abusive polygamy narrative it keeps stubbornly standing by. The narrative comes from self-justifying polygamous leaders and completely excludes female feedback. It largely stands on Joseph’s sloppy, self-justifying, abusive butchering of polygamy stories the Bible found in D&C 132.
We’re a young faith and you’re right past Mormons emotions and their mental health problems and blind spots weren’t as different from people today as we would like to believe. At Church and in the gospel topics essays, we emphasize Joseph Smith’s reluctance and ambivalence about plural marriage. We emphasize his assertions that it was a commandment on pain of death. But we turn a blind eye to all the obvious enthusiasm he also showed over years, and how polygamy was a gradually accumulation of ideas and justifications rather than an unwanted, sudden commandment. For example, in 1831, three year before the first visit from the fiery sword angel, and long before he started treating polygamy as a commandment, he groomed 12-year-old Mary Elizabeth Rollins to marry him later, telling her she belonged to him in the premortal life. He brought his own thinking and desires bigtime into polygamy. In the same year, he said he thought he was inspired by God that already married male saints should marry indigenous women so that their kids’ skin would be lighter skinned. He also hoped for land rights.
I agree with you, all of this was deeply wrong, yet this also doesn’t mean we have to throw the baby out with the bathwater. He had inspiring experiences with God and recorded scripture. It’s most likely he was a deeply flawed human who didn’t deal with his personal weaknesses and insecurities in a humble, mature or caring way. He was both creative, bold prophet and also turned away from God. People can be both deeply gifted and even spiritual and also deeply flawed, immature and hurtful in other ways.
The FLDS are so spot on to early church leaders. How can we condemn them while holding so tightly to the belief that Joseph Smith and Brigham Young were inspired when they did the exact same things?
Also, I hate when we talk about some of them feeling hesitant at first to embrace polygamy. The same men who took a pause before the first plural wife were lecturing missionaries only a few years later to bring all the new convert girls to Utah before marrying any themselves so they could have a pick of the prettiest ones first. Like… They got over their polygamy hesitation just fine.
Thank you for laying this out so plainly. It bothers me when our church’s history with polygamy is dismissed simply as “messy”. I hear that phrase a lot, especially from active, apologetic members.
No, it was more that. Polygamy was an evil, violating practice. It commodified, manipulated, and oppressed too many women.
I feel strongly that this needs to be called out by the church and accepted for what it is. And it NEEDS to be disavowed if we are ever going to heal.
Can members hold the tension of what was true then, and what could be possible now? Can we take the good, and the bad?
Anyway, thank you for this awesome post. You put into words what I have felt for a long time, as a wounded, frustrated (but hopeful) member.
“it NEEDS to be disavowed if we are ever going to heal.” I love how you say this. Amen 100 times. I’m finding that so many members feel this way. How can every member of the Q15 have received a copy of the Ghost of Eternal Polygamy from CLP and then do nothing in response to the incredible voices in that book? A lot of older men in the church, including the Q15 see polygamy as a problem that’s all taken care of and not bothering anyone anymore. They are absolutely wrong. It’s not all over. It taints many of our church experiences and causes spiritual suffering every day. Even though I have received personal revelation for myself that polygamy was not at all from God, I still have to deal with how it has affected leader-member power dynamics (very parent child and controlling), rigid and anxious approaches to all things sex, marriage, and gender, and numb responses to sensitive topics from powerful leaders.
How about I rob a bank, have an affair, murder someone and just call it following God’s commandments to me, but in a “messy” way – because God is just complicated and I’m only human?
Because these men were raping teenage girls and apologetic members are just calling it “messy”, like you pointed out. 🤷♀️
I don’t think the men in charge will do anything until the low rumble turns into a deafening roar and they finally HAVE to say something against polygamy.
I think black people would still be banned from the temple and priesthood if the outrage hadn’t got loud enough. The same thing needs to happen with this topic, I guess. 🙁
Every time there’s a polygamy conversation I’m tired of a General Conference talk some number of years ago in which he shared that a woman, who was sealed to a man who was also sealed to his first wife, expressed discomfort and concern about what eternity would look like for her. AND HE LAUGHED AT HER. And led the congregation to laugh at her. Silly woman, to be concerned about something like that. It made me angry then, and it makes me angry every time I think about it. They just do not get it, and they seem fine with that. There is zero effort made to understand why polygamy bothers women. And it bothers me for a host of reasons–it bothers me that we still practice it spiritually today and that women who die first are entering an eternal polygamous relationship against their will, that women can’t be sealed to more than one man and are sometimes left with just heartwrenching decisions when they are widowed young, that men just don’t understand why women hate it. But it also bothers me that in the 100+ years since we “stopped” polygamy, there has been zero recognition from the church of the harm it did women. The church really has this idea that if something is stopped, then no one is hurt by it anymore. You’re not even allowed to feel hurt. It’s not like the effects of abuse stop the moment the abuse stops. And, it’s not like if I were committing a serious sin and then stopped, the church would just that let go. I would still need to acknowledge and atone for that. Why doesn’t our church feel the need to acknowledge and atone for anything in its past?
Anytime that I think RMN is the worst, I remember this talk from Oaks and he gets the honor of most tonedeaf and arrogant. But in the same conference, different session, one of them gave another polygamy story about the adult children of a widower who was going to marry/be sealed to another woman. The wanted to know what about their mother who’d never have agreed to such an arrangement? He dismissed their concerns with a “just make sure you’re there.” These are NOT leaders that any woman should follow.
How about I rob a bank, have an affair, murder someone and just call it following God’s commandments to me, but in a “messy” way – because God is just complicated and I’m only human?
Because these men were raping teenage girls and apologetic members are just calling it “messy”, like you pointed out. 🤷♀️
THANK YOU for writing this, for saying this out loud. Exactly every word you said. Nailed it.
I’ve been trying for weeks to pinpoint what bothers me so much about the general LDS response to “the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” (besides the obvious air of slut-shamey-ness) and I think it’s this: I’m really disappointed to see so many women of the church banding together to once again quantify what Correct Latter-day Womanhood looks like.
This post hits the nail on the head—who are WE, of all people, to judge, qualify, discount, or disavow a sister’s claim to our religion, ESPECIALLY because of controversial sexual practices?
How can our church have such an incredibly uncomfortable history of non-traditional marriages (polygamy, where exactly one relationship (the first wife) was actually a legal marriage and the rest weren’t) and yet still try to stop other relationships we don’t approve of (gay marriage, swinging, premarital sex)? We have no leg to stand on!
If only these details were a part of the history of the prophets lessons we had to sit through in RS….. There is a reason we are not taught women’s stories/ histories at church. Loved this article you’ve written. Well put.
Melissa, I couldn’t agree more. Women’s perspectives of polygamy have been intentionally hidden from us. When I read Mormon Enigma recently, I was amazed to realized that Emma Smith ultimately and definitely decided polygamy was an indulgent, sinful, and a destructive false revelation. She said it came straight from hell. She held all this while also affirming Joseph had a real calling from God to the end of her life (If Emma could hold this kind of nuance, so can I!) Brigham Young antagonized Emma for her criticisms of polygamy. The story passed down to us is exactly what powerful male polygamist leaders like Brigham wanted us to believe, not based at all on the experiences or moral feelings of women. The gospel topics essay give some nods to Emma’s pain, but that is not sufficient. I tried reading In Sacred Loneliness recently about the personal lives of Joseph’s wives, but it was so disturbing to me I had to stop reading it!
For years I wondered how the Church of England could thrive and continue on for so long when everybody knows that it was founded by a tyrant who started his own religion so he could take extra wives. Watching my own church continue to expand, I pretty much have my answer. Now I must decide: do I want to enable institutions founded on such values? What message does that send to my children? LDS polygamy is quite the line in the sand, and I struggle with it often, as do all the women in my family. Thank you for this article. These are important topics for LDS women to discuss.
Emily, I love your comment. I just love the comparison the Henry VIII. I have raised the same question and my answer is absolutely no, this is absolutely the opposite of what I want or what I stand for, and I’ve been aware of this for a few years. But here I am, I still feel deeply Mormon, still involved with the Church. I stay in the Church partly to say and write subversive things about polygamy from the inside!
I often bring up the abusive, sexist practices of early church leaders (let’s face it, Nauvoo was a hot mess), and sometimes people push back or try to soft peddle it as if it doesn’t matter now. Then, in a triumph of smugness, I bring up my Methodist upbringing and how that church is part of C of E, Episcopal, etc, and was started by Henry the VIII. That pesky Anne Boleyn wouldn’t bear a male child and the Pope said No to a divorce, so Hank to the 8th did his “off with her head” thing and married five other women, killing all but one. If C of E can survive that for five hundred years and counting, then we who are LDS can accept with grace, honestly, and a touch of SMH, the history of abuse in our church. Pro Tip: Only then can we stop pretending that it was God’s will, we can heal, correct course, and move on in more healthy and inclusive ways.
With changes to the wording of the Endowment a few years ago, where women no longer covenant to obey their husband, but instead covenant in “the new and everlasting covenant”, which is polygamy, I am alarmed that we aren’t teaching this to our young people. Do young women know that they are agreeing to be a plural wife at some point? Of course they aren’t! Because if they knew, they wouldn’t go to the temple. Uninformed consent isn’t consent and invalidates the covenant. At best, it’s a joke made in poor taste. At worst, it’s a cruel, manipulative practice.
Beth, I really appreciate this info. and perspective. I did not notice this wording and what it really means. There is great hypocrisy and inconsistency. Recently added handbook wording tries to put a little band-aid on polygamy saying no one should worry about being forced to stay in sealings they don’t want. Meanwhile, polygamy without consent (and in D&C 132, destruction for women who don’t consent) is alive and well in sealing practices, our canonized scripture, and even the endowment as you point out! It appears like the assumption and/or hope is that women will end up staying in undesired situations and keeping unintentional covenants to live polygamous, because polygamy is supposed a high more godly and sanctified way to live, even if they have to slip it into our drinks to get us to swallow it. I also noticed how recent additions to sealing policies about common-law marriages continue to affirm men’s supposed right to have multiple wives, while denying multiple sealings to women.