So before I delve more into these issues related to our polygamy problems, I thought first I’d lay out the context of claims I’m making relative to my argument that Smith was thinking of the idea of “shared marriage,” or men and women being able to have multiple spouses prior to a shift in 1843 highlighted by DC 132.
So for that, let me summarize and refer to arguments I’ve made on the blog over the last few years
1) I argue that JS (and that Joseph Sr. played a big role also) was seeking a much bigger restoration than biblical practice. The Bible was important, but the “Josephs” (Sr and Jr.) felt that it was missing a lot. The Book of Mormon says plain and precious truth had been removed from the Bible (1 Nephi 11:26), and Smith declared in the introduction to DC 76 in his 1838 history that “From sundry revelations which had been received, it was apparent that many important points touching the salvation of man had been taken from the Bible, or lost before it was compiled.” Not only had truth been removed, but a lot of important truth never made it in the Bible: “lost before it was compiled.”
A jail mate of Joseph Sr. when Sr. in jail for debt in 1830, wrote in his journal Sr. saying that “our Bible is much abridged and deficient.” Early Mormon Documents, vol. 3, p. 4.
While the Bible was important, the overarching purpose of the restoration was to bring back what was missing, more than implementing what wasn’t.
I think the Josephs were onto something with modern scholarship calling a lot of the Bible’s historicity, especially the Old Testament, into question.
The Book of Mormon also stated a much larger truth when it rejected sola scriptura in 2 Nephi 29 and declares, “I shall also speak unto all nations of the earth and they shall write it.” (12)
2) I argue that the Josephs became convinced that there was much truth in a contemporary concept most often referred to as “the ancient theology” (also called names like “the universal religion,” “the ancient religion,” or just “ancient philosophy.”) The idea was that Greek philosophy drew on ancient wisdom going back to sages like Zoroaster and Hermes Trimegistus, and Christians often argued that the ancient theology drew on biblical patriarchs as well. And many Christian Platonists claimed those patriarchs had a fuller truth also, not all of which was in Bible.
Again, the Book of Mormon said there was a fuller truth beyond the Bible.
Protestant scholar of the time argued that the ancient theology had corrupted early Christianity, a very popular idea in Smith’s day taught in books that he owned. JS strongly rejected the claim of Platonic corruption, but instead asserted that it was the removal of the ancient theology that had corrupted early Christianity and that he was called to restore that fuller truth.
3) I argue that the central group of doctrines that Smith sought to restore to Christianity are best framed around our concept of the plan of salvation. Here I note the major themes of that plan along with the Platonic dialogues that discuss those themes.
A) We lived before we were born and the high God presented a plan to us that we needed to be sent to earth to be tested, and if we past that text we could become like the gods (Timaeus)
B) The test was to see if we would act “justly,” by controlling out passions (Timaeus) but Plato’s Phaedrus gave more details of things we needed to do. We needed to live according the right ethics and morals like a philosopher, receive the proper ordinances, and engage in holy love. If we did so, not only would we be able to become like the Gods, but will would be able to be with our love in the next life.
C) The next life would have different states depending on what kind of life we lived here (Phaedo).
So pretty Mormon-looking to me, and the Republic added the claim that living in the most holy city would allow its citizens to live the most pious lives and have the best afterlife. In the Republic, there was no private property in order to have oneness and equality among the citizens, and among the most enlightened, all families were in common as well. The enlighten guardians of the city, male and female, were all married to each other.
Naturally such claims bring up the question of how Smith encountered them and I go over that in my book. But I also talk A LITTLE about that in this presentation.
4) Such shared marriage ideas got mentioned among the most radical utopians, but were viewed as a major scandal. Such a practice is difficult to accomplish with Oneida (coming a little after Mormonism) as the most successful.
As I’ve said a lot, I argue that’s what JS originally had in mind. He attempted to proceed cautiously, with a few individual marriages, which allowed for women have multiple spouses also (DC 132:41). Smith changed the policy to polygyny in c. 1843 and DC 132 was about that policy change.
Comments
17 responses to “The Framework of My Historical Argument about Polygamy”
“As I’ve said a lot, I argue that’s what JS originally had in mind. He attempted to proceed cautiously, with a few individual marriages, which allowed for women have multiple spouses also (DC 132:41). Smith changed the policy to polygyny in c. 1843 and DC 132 was about that policy change.”
Stephen, when you say “originally,” I hope you’ll clarify in a future post what months or years you believe fit into that “original” timeframe. Louisa Beaman, generally recognized as the first woman sealed to Joseph, was single when she they were sealed in April 1841 (the first of “a few individual marriages), and she did not marry anyone else during Joseph’s lifetime. Maybe that was simply a first step toward shared marriage (i.e., perhaps it was intended that Louisa also marry someone else and it just never happened for unknown reasons), but, if so, it would seem to be an errant first step if shared marriage was the plan all along.
Also, while you haven’t had time to flesh out your theory yet, your argument would seem to ignore Joseph’s earlier relationship with Fanny Alger circa 1835-1836 as well as his 1831 statement later recalled by W.W. Phelps in an 1861 letter about eventually marrying “Lamanite” women (presumably as plural wives given that the men present on the mission were already married).
Maybe shared marriage really was Joseph’s intended plan at some point, but, if so, the lifespan of that plan only seemed to last about a year from 1842 to 1843. Moreover, Joseph was sealed to single women during that time too which would seem to undercut the shared marriage argument
Regardless, I’m looking forward to your future posts!
My argument is that shared marriage was the plan from the beginning, or c. 1829. Yes, Smith married some single women, but he was reported telling Nancy Rigdon that his proposed marriage “would not prevent her from marrying any other person.”
That is, the wives didn’t HAVE to be married when Smith married them, and the report to Nancy is interesting.
One such case is Hannah Dubois who Smith was reported marrying early in Nauvoo, who then LATER married Philo Dibble and Smith performed the wedding. Lots of Mormon scholars simply leave Hannah out of Smith’s list of wives under the belief that such an action didn’t fit Mormon theology. I argue it did. (See Compton’s In Sacred Loneliness, 631).
So I argue the time frame of shared marriage being the plan was 1829 to 1843. That is, shared marriage was the concept even if Smith didn’t marry his first married wife until later. Women could be single and allowed to marry another husband under shared marriage, like the instruction to Nancy.
Stephen, thank you. If the span of time is 1829-1843, then I hope you’ll take plenty of time to address Fanny Alger as that relationship appears to complicate the argument. I will point out that John C. Bennett’s defense of his serial adultery (what he called spiritual wifery) as being learned from Joseph (albeit a very corrupted version of it and practiced for rather different reasons) would seem to support your theory.
Again, I do not see JS marrying single women as deviation from shared marriage, and note the claim to Nancy Rigdon.
What I do see as deviating from shared marriage is women NOT being able to have additional spouses like DC 132 insists on with all its “she shall be destroyed” talk.
I argue that was not the policy before 1843 as suggested by the many married wives and the Nancy Rigdon statement.
The details we have on Alger are pretty foggy, but Benjamin Johnson presents Alger marrying another guy soon after JS as not a rejection of JS. “She did not turn from the Church nor from her friendship for the Prophet while she lived.” But who knows? That was a short lived relationship that we don’t know a lot about, and Johnson’s statement comes much later.
So I look for clues about what I see as JS’s larger purposes in sources both before and after Alger.
The Sidney Hay Jacob pamphlet, The Peace Maker, published in Nauvoo in 1842, would seem to argue against your thesis. If it was a trial balloon to test how church members would react to polygamy and was published with Joseph Smiths’s blessing, the argument found in the pamphlet probably reflect JS’s views to some degree. Among other things, the pamphlet argued that polygamy would counteract women’s control (through sex) of men, and that would be a good thing! Beyond this, even though JS marries already-married women and encouraged them to still live with their husbands, his thought processes about building kingdoms in the hereafter through having many wives and children don’t really lend themselves to this interpretation.
I’ll take a look at the pamphlet, but I disagree with your interpretation of Smith’s afterlife theology. I’ll admit that such ideas do fit Brigham Young’s view, but I see Smith as having somewhat different ideals. I see Smith and seeking to bind loved ones together in life to form utopian connections. Sharing wives was a way for men to bind themselves to each other (as the ideal. This didn’t work, of course).
I see Benjamin Johnson’s later quote as illustrative of Smith’s purpose. “The Prophet taught us that Dominion & powr in the great future, would be Comensurate with the no [number] of ‘Wives Childin & Friends’ that we inheret here and that our great mission to earth was to Organize a Neculi [nucleus] of Heaven to take with us.”
The later institution of adoption of other men by church leaders (BY’s adoption of John D. Lee for example) allowed men to be connected without sharing wives. I don’t remember when this started, but it fits with JS’s notions.
I don’t think the Johnson quote supports you, though it certainly explains JS’s thinking. Having women with multiple husbands would devolve to chaos. Whose is this or that child? No one knows. Only the mother could be known (in those days). Somehow this does not seem to me like the kind of orderly kingdoms JS imagined. And he did live in a day that prized male headship, as the Jacob’s pamphlet supports.
Adoption did not start under Smith, but came after him.
Yes, shared marriage is tricky, but is laid out in Plato’s Republic. The abundant allusions to Plato’s Republic in Smith’s utopian statements suggests that was Smith’s ideal. (and I argue that the creation of Mormonism was a helped by more than just Smith, especially his father, but a few others too).
I’m extremely dubious about The Republic as a source for Joseph Smith’s polygamy. You’re the Plato expert and I understand some of the details are disputed, but it seems like the main objectives are clear:
1) Selective breeding of the guardian class. The state controls who sleeps with whom in festivals, though the guardians are told it’s random so they blame bad luck when they’re left out. The best men are bred with the best women, and often. Lesser individuals breed rarely, if at all, when needed to keep the population up.
2) Destruction of family ties so the guardians are loyal only to the state. Children are taken from their parents immediately after birth. Children do not know who their parents are and vice versa.
This seems more like the setting for a dystopian novel than the Celestial Kingdom.
Granted, our polygamy apologetics occasionally approach goal #1, though usually framed in terms of improving how children are nurtured rather than improving their nature. But goal #2 is antithetical to Joseph Smith’s entire project.
I can see The Republic maybe shifting the Overton window a bit for Joseph Smith. But the Old Testament seems like his obvious primary source, where polygamy is tied to founding a lasting “house” or extended family, not destroying families.
Yes, I do disagree. The principle is much simpler, as Plato states not only in the Republic but the Laws and Timaeus that highest goal is to have goods and wives in common. Smith never sought to create that full system of selective breading in the Republic, but instead the system of shared marriage among the enlightened guardians. The ones who had been (figuratively) out of the cave and have beheld the Good. Having reached such enlightenment, they could engage in that highest order of marriage and complete unity. There’s a long heritage of such ideas among radical Christian groups (some of which Joseph Sr. had contact with).
Furthermore, Smith’s utopianism shows lots of similarities to Plato’s Laws which Plato says people can try if the highest form (the Republic) isn’t possible. The Laws is about assigning stewardship which became central to a lot of Smith’s utopian planning.
The Republic’s goal was to create oneness and and uses wording quite similar to the city of Enoch and some DC sections on that theme.
So, yes, I think that you and the Josephs read Plato differently.
I don’t know about Plato, but all this seems way over the top. I’m thinking that this would legitimatize wife (husband) swapping parties. With the WoW ill defined, a little alcohol would certainly liven the party. All this is sort of a spiritual rationalization for free love. All you need is a temple marriage and the world is your oyster. And as already mentioned, what about the kids?
For the record:
“It follows from our former admissions [about breeding the best animals],” I said, “that the best men must cohabit with the best women in as many cases as possible and the worst with the worst in the fewest, and that the offspring of the one must be reared and that of the other not, if the flock is to be as perfect as possible. And the way in which all this is brought to pass must be unknown to any but the rulers, if, again, the herd of guardians is to be as free as possible from dissension.” “Most true,” he said. “We shall, then, have to ordain certain festivals and sacrifices, in which we shall bring together the brides and the bridegrooms, and our poets must compose hymns suitable to the marriages that then take place. But the number of the marriages we will leave to the discretion of the rulers, that they may keep the number of the citizens as nearly as may be the same, taking into account wars and diseases and all such considerations, and that, so far as possible, our city may not grow too great or too small.” “Right,” he said. “Certain ingenious lots, then, I suppose, must be devised so that the inferior man at each conjugation may blame chance and not the rulers.”
….
“And the children thus born will be taken over by the officials appointed for this, men or women or both, since, I take it, the official posts too are common to women and men. The offspring of the good, I suppose, they will take to the pen or créche, to certain nurses who live apart in a quarter of the city, but the offspring of the inferior, and any of those of the other sort who are born defective, they will properly dispose of in secret, so that no one will know what has become of them.” “That is the condition,” he said, “of preserving the purity of the guardians’ breed.” “They will also supervise the nursing of the children, conducting the mothers to the pen when their breasts are full, but employing every device to prevent anyone from recognizing her own infant.”
….
“All that sounds reasonable,” he said; “but how are they to distinguish one another’s fathers and daughters, and the other degrees of kin that you have just mentioned?” “They won’t,” said I, “except that a man will call all male offspring born in the tenth and in the seventh month after he became a bridegroom his sons, and all female, daughters, and they will call him father.”
….
“But what of your guardians. Could any of them think or speak of his co-guardian as an outsider?” “By no means,” he said; “for no matter whom he meets, he will feel that he is meeting a brother, a sister, a father, a mother, a son, a daughter, or the offspring or forebears of these.”
Roger, the bottom line is that many women had more than one husband in Nauvoo. No, there were no wife-swapping parties. Many women had more than one spouse, just like many men had more than one spouse.
RLD, again, those arranged marriages were not part of the system that Smith was seeking to implement. The Republic is a very large book and no doubt it’s not hard find things that Smith DID NOT implement, just like it’s quite easy to go through the Old Testament to find things we do not practice.
Again, the principle was much simpler: the phrase repeated over and over that marriages were in common among the guardians.
In terms of children, yes, they were to be raised in common in the Republic. Smith’s shared marriage system never got that elaborate. Nor are we aware of Smith producing children with any of his wives. We don’t have evidence for JS having NO sex with his previously married wives, but it likely wasn’t frequent and there were ways to try to avoid pregnancy.
Then there’s the claim from Josephine Lyons that her mother Sylvia Sessions told Josephine that Josephine was JS’s daughter. My understanding is that DNA testing has shown this to be incorrect, but that fact that Sylvia THOUGHT JS was the father of Josephine but was not strongly suggests that Sylvia thought so because she had a consummated relationship with JS as well as her other husband.
Yes this could be problematic and, no, JS didn’t set up a system of raising children in common. This was all very secretive and preliminary. There were all different kinds of relationships between JS and the wives he shared with many (but not all) husbands being aware of the shared relationship.
I’d assume that for the husbands that were aware, they would have been aware of the possibility of their wives having JS’s children as part of the shared relationship. Again, sharing was the goal of the utopian community with the ideal not being to “destroy the family,” but to unite as a larger family, similar to the Benjamin Johnson quote I cited.
I think of Mormon’s statement in Moroni 8:17: “I am filled with charity, which is everlasting love; wherefore, all children are alike unto me; wherefore, I love little children with a perfect love; and they are all alike and partakers of salvation.” My guess is that the goal was to love “all the children” with that kind of love. Not a “mine” v. “not mine,” but a communal love.
One way or another, these shared marriages did happen and I do not see an OT explanation for them, but more of an adaptation of things Plato talked about. And as I note in the OP, Mormonism has a whole lot of Platonic stuff.
And, yes, there’s the question of JS’s shared marriages being reciprocated, or the question of Emma having other husbands. We do have claims of such arrangements being discussed (probably not consummated) and I argue that DC 132:51 revokes such arrangements. My argument is that’s why Emma found DC 132 so upsetting. Not because she was super eager for more husbands, but that shared marriage was a least much more fair than polygyny. William Clayton records JS telling him that Emma may seek revenge in a marital kind of way and to watch himself.
Anyway, I do think that was Emma’s attitude, and if so, she was clearly right that polygyny was unfair.
I think both Plato’s Republic view of women and polygamy are terribly misogynistic and wrong. Both are treating women one step away from goods. And the implementation of polygamy after Joseph’s death wasn’t shared marriage or polyamory but much more like fundamentalist polygamy that is still practiced by Mormon offshoots. Why try to justify and piece together some pseudo doctrines to explain something that is morally wrong? It isn’t good in the republic and it wasn’t good in Mormon history. I am happy that the church finally walked away from this practice.
Opposed, the point of my research is to try to understand what Smith was practicing. Seems like a responsible thing for a historian to do.
And yes, the policy changed to polygyny in 1843.
The Republic was one of the first documents to declare female equality. In the history of feminism, early modern feminists tended to be Platonists. I’m not here to advocate for implementing the Republic, but there’s clearly a big difference between shared marriage and polygyny.
You’re both right. Yes, Plato was remarkably feminist, insisting that women should hold all the same offices as men. The second paragraph I quoted refers to this, saying that the officials in charge of childcare will be both men and women.
It’s also not too much of an exaggeration to say that women in The Republic are one step away from goods, to be used, deceived, and carefully manipulated by the state. Men are too.
Granted, The Republic is not all of Plato’s thinking.
I understand that with our hundreds of years of utopian experimentation and awareness of things that can go very wrong, we’d read Plato through that lens. I’m just saying that the Josephs (father and son) wouldn’t have looked at such ideas through the legitimate baggage of 20th-century communism. I’m writing on this theme currently, and Zion in Missouri did have a number of restrictions. That bothered some people, like Oliver Cowdery.