Back in November, I started a series entitled Monogamy is the Rule, outlining why we should expect monogamy to be the standard for marriage, both in this life and in the life to come. In the first of the series, I discussed how commandments and expectations from the Lord can change at different times, and that today, monogamous marriage is the commandment that must be kept to receive exaltation rather than plural marriage. In the second of the series, I discussed how there are multiple ways to interpret the revelations that have been used to undergird the practice (D&C 131–132). Since we are no longer engaged in a life-or-death struggle to uphold the principle, we have more breathing room to accept interpretations that do not require plural marriage for exaltation. Continuing this series, I will now turn to two specific issues regarding plural marriage and John Taylor, focusing on his 1886 revelation in this post and the next, then focusing on his authorization of individuals to perform polygamous marriages without his direct approval in a fifth post in the series.
On September 27, 1886, while living in hiding during the U.S. federal government’s intensifying efforts to end the practice of polygamy, John Taylor recorded a revelation. Given the intensity of efforts to punish polygamy, the question of whether the Church should end the practice weighed heavily on the minds of leaders of the Church. The revelation was recorded as a response to that possibility:
My son John, you have asked me concerning the New and Everlasting Covenant how far it is binding upon my people.
Thus saith the Lord: All commandments that I give must be obeyed by those calling themselves by my name unless they are revoked by me or by my authority, and how can I revoke an everlasting covenant, for I the Lord am everlasting and my everlasting covenants cannot be abrogated nor done away with, but they stand forever.
Have I not given my word in great plainness on this subject? Yet have not great numbers of my people been negligent in the observance of my law and the keeping of my commandments, and yet have I borne with them these many years; and this because of their weakness—because of the perilous times, and furthermore, it is more pleasing to me that men should use their free agency in regard to these matters. Nevertheless, I the Lord do not change and my word and my covenants and my law do not, and as I have heretofore said by my servant Joseph: All those who would enter into my glory must and shall obey my law. And have I not commanded men that if they were Abraham’s seed and would enter into my glory, they must do the works of Abraham. I have not revoked this law, nor will I, for it is everlasting, and those who will enter into my glory must obey the conditions thereof; even so, Amen.[1]
The message seems to be that polygamy was an eternal practice that would not change. And even while other leaders of the Church would back away from the principle, John Taylor’s namesake son and apostle John W. Taylor continued to perform more plural marriages, using this revelation to justify his actions.[2]
Later on, the revelation came to be associated with an elaborate vision in the accounts of Joseph W. Musser, John W. Woolley, Lorin C. Woolley, and others. They claimed that there was a meeting in September 1886. Prior to the meeting, John Taylor is said to have met with Jesus Christ and Joseph Smith, and to have received the revelation and been commanded that plural marriage should be kept alive by a group separate from the Church hierarchy. In these accounts as they evolved in the 1910s and 1920s, the following day, the Woolleys, George Q. Cannon and others were said to have been set apart to keep “the principle” alive, including sufficient priesthood authority to perform marriage sealings and pass on that authority. These claims became the foundation of many of the fundamentalist groups that descend from this Council of Friends (also known as the Woolley Group or the Priesthood Council), including the FLDS church, Apostolic United Brethren, Righteous Branch of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Davis County Cooperative Society, etc.[3] I’ll deal more with the claims of the sealing authority being given to a separate group in a later post in this series, maintaining a focus on the revelation itself here.
Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have sometimes attempted to sidestep the issues raised by the text by dismissing it as a forgery. For example, in the 1933 “Third Manifesto” that J. Reuben Clark prepared, he wrote that “From the personal knowledge of some of us, from the uniform and common recollection of the presiding quorums of the Church, from the absence in the Church archives of any evidence whatsoever justifying any belief that such a revelation was given, we are justified in affirming that no such revelation exists.”[4] More subtly, and while acknowledging that copies of the document do exist in the Church archives, Richard Neitzel Holzapfel and Christopher C. Jones observed, “The issue of corroborative documentation for the revelation … remains the most significant obstacle in connecting it with President Taylor.” They noted those who were with John Taylor in hiding—George Q. Cannon, L. John Nuttall, and Samuel Bateman—left no record of the revelation or meeting in their journals. “The silence is deafening, raising serious questions about the purported revelation’s authenticity.”[5] This would be a convenient way to dismiss the document and its implications, but I do not think it is enough.
While I believe that the elaborate vision story is a later invention, I do actually believe that the text itself is an authentic document from President John Taylor. Copies do exist in the Church archives and the originals seem to be in the handwriting of John Taylor. Further, the revelation is not all that different from the rhetoric and statements of Church leaders at that time. Wilford Woodruff, for example, recorded a revelation in his journal on November 24, 1889 that stated:
I the Lord hold the destiny of the Courts in your midst, and the destiny of this nation, and all other nations of the earth in Mine own hands; all that I have revealed, and promised and decreed concerning the generation in which you live, shall come to pass, and no power shall stay My hand. … Place not yourselves in jeopardy to your enemies by promise; your enemies seek your destruction and the destruction of My people. If the Saints will hearken unto My voice, and the counsel of My servants, the wicked shall not prevail.[6]
Wilford Woodruff displayed a similar mindset to John Taylor in feeling that plural marriage should not be ended, even in the year leading up to the 1890 Manifesto. In that context, it is not only possible, but likely, that John Taylor would write a document like the 1886 revelation.
How do we make sense of John Taylor’s 1886 revelation, in the light of the Church’s stance that monogamy is the rule and polygamy is an exception? Well, in the interest of space, I’ll follow up on that thought in my next post.
Footnotes:
[1] “Revelation given to John Taylor, September 27, 1886, copied from the original manuscript by Joseph F. Smith, Jr., August 3,1909,” John Taylor Papers, Church History Library.
[2] Minutes of Council of Twelve Meeting concerning fellowship of John W. Taylor, son of John Taylor, and Apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ, held in the Salt Lake Temple, February 22, 1911, at 10 am, at which were present: President Francis M. Lyman, Heber J. Grant, Hyrum M. Smith, Charles W. Penrose, George F. Richards, Orson F. Whitney, David O. Mckay, Anthony W. Ivins, and Joseph F. Smith, Jr. Original in LDS Archives. Cited in Stephen C. Taysom, “A Uniform and Common Recollection: Joseph Smith’s Legacy, Polygamy, and the Creation of Mormon Public Memory, 1852-2002”, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Vol. 35, No. 3 (2002): 113–144.
[3] See Anne Wilde, “Fundamentalist Mormonism: Its History, Diversity and Stereotypes, 1886–Present,” in Scattering of the Saints: Schism within Mormonism,ed. Newell G. Bringhurst and John C. Hamer (Independence, MO: John Whitmer Books, 2007), 258–289. See also Craig L. Foster, “The Persistence of Plural Marriage within Mainstream Mormonism: The Example of the Barr and Mary Lance Musser Family,” Scattering of the Saints, 290–314.
[4] Published in the Deseret News, Church Section,17 June 1933. See also Messages of the First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, ed. James R. Clark (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft Inc., 1971),5:315-330, https://prophetsseersandrevelators.wordpress.com/2022/09/01/third-manifesto/.
[5] Richard Neitzel Holzapfel and Christopher C. Jones, “‘John the Revelator’: The Written Revelations of John Taylor”, in Champion of Liberty: John Taylor, edited by Mary Jane Woodger (Provo: BYU, 2009), https://rsc.byu.edu/champion-liberty-john-taylor/john-revelator-written-revelations-john-taylor.
[6] Wilford Woodruff Journal, November 24, 1889. “Journal (January 1886 – December 1892),” November 24, 1889, The Wilford Woodruff Papers, accessed November 14, 2023, https://wilfordwoodruffpapers.org/p/79EG.
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