What I mean by the title of this post is what I see as the most common church narrative for polygamy that I’ve heard over the years. Polygamy is something church leaders and members generally want to downplay, and yet it takes up a good chunk of our history and is hard to make go away.

So with the caveat that lots of people have their own take on this, I’d say our standard church narrative is something like this: “God commanded Joseph Smith and the early Mormons to do it. It’s connected to Old Testament practice. It was only meant to be practiced for a short time, and monogamy is the norm. Let’s move on!”

My point of this post is that I see this standard narrative as leaving quite a few historical and theological questions.

First, such statements tend not to address the fact that men can be sealed to other wives if previous wives die, but women can’t do that if a husband dies. That practice, of course, tends to make polygamy an ongoing issue for members.

Second, there’s the tricky issue of what we put in our scriptures of Wilford Woodruff’s explanation for ending polygamy:

The Lord has told me to ask the Latter-day Saints a question … Which is the wisest course for the Latter-day Saints to pursue—to continue to attempt to practice plural marriage, with the laws of the nation against it and the opposition of sixty millions of people, and at the cost of the confiscation and loss of all the Temples, and the stopping of all the ordinances therein, both for the living and the dead, and the imprisonment of the First Presidency and Twelve and the heads of families in the Church, and the confiscation of personal property of the people (all of which of themselves would stop the practice); or, after doing and suffering what we have through our adherence to this principle to cease the practice and submit to the law.

The strong implication of Woodruff’s explanation was that the Lord said we needed to stop because the United States government was forcing us to stop.

So did we stop because God only intended the church to practice polygamy for a relatively short time because monogamy is the norm, or did we stop because the United States government made us?

This reminds me of an exchange on my mission many years ago when polygamy came up in a chat we were having with a non-member. “You’d still be practicing it if the government hadn’t made you stop,” he asserted. My companion said emphatically, “I know we would not,” and I remember saying less emphatically “I don’t know.”

Then there are a whole host of other issues that I think DaveW addressed well on my first post on this topic:

For me, concerns about polygamy are really a manifestation of a deeper issue: the church is unable or unwilling to clarify past practices and statements. I assume many here are familiar with statements about polygamy from Brigham Young (“the only men who become gods . . . are those who enter into polygamy”) or John Taylor’s 1886 revelation (“I have not revoked this law, nor will I, for it is everlasting”) which the church denied the existence for 100 years.

There are two extreme paths here. One is to throw previous presidents of the church under the bus and repudiate past teachings as just plain wrong. The other is to embrace polygamy as an eternal principle, though perhaps one we have to forgo for the time being for practical reasons. The Church has instead opted for a middle path that, despite decades of trying, they don’t seem to be able to un-muddy. Polygamy was right then, but wrong now, and it wasn’t very common, or it was just to take care of widows, or to raise up a righteous seed, or for other reasons that history and data don’t support, and all those statements are best left alone, or were a product of their time. It’s a perpetual game of tap dancing around the issue trying to find any rational that will make the questioner stop asking the question right now.

A good summary, and like I said in my first post, I see a difference between polygamy issues and the priesthood ban for two reasons. 1) Racism was a common attitude in the US and we can thus at least partially blame the priesthood ban on church leaders improperly taking on problematic attitudes of the larger society. Polygamy was very much at odds with the norms of the society to the point that it caused all the problems that Woodruff noted. 2) With Young implementing the ban, we often work to distance Joseph Smith from it. With polygamy, Smith practiced it, and while a fallible leader may have a bank fail, if he implements a religious policy we consider really really bad (I know opinions differ) that had nothing to do with larger societal norms, at what point does that start to call the legitimacy of the religion he implemented into question?

So I see that as the bind we’re in. And I’ll close with the proposal from Kendall in my first post. Would allowing women to be sealed to other husbands if previous ones die help alleviate many of our ongoing polygamy problems?