![\"Incredulous](\"http:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/joseph-smiths-polygamy.png\")
<\/p>\n
I had heard the story about Emma pushing Eliza down the stairs, causing a miscarriage in her jealous rage. But it was all fabricated nonsense created by anti-Mormons trying to defame the prophet. Like everything else that looked or sounded unsavory.<\/p>\n
Everyone knew about the public polygamy in Utah. Every year our elementary class toured the Beehive House<\/a>, complete with all the wives’ bedrooms and \u00a0fairly open discussion about managing the logistics.\u00a0Polygamous ancestors were a dime a dozen (or two).<\/p>\n Whenever the topic of plural marriage came up it was usually swept away with a Gordon-B-Hinkley-like flick of the wrist. “It’s behind us.<\/a>” We don’t practice it. Move on. Nothing to see here.\u00a0<\/p>\n When specifics were brought up\u2014I asked questions because the whole thing bothered me so much and I wanted reassurance\u2014the answers I always heard (from seminary teachers, religion teachers, ecclesiastical leaders) was along the lines of, “Joseph Smith restored it, but didn’t practice it.” Joseph’s\u00a0and Emma’s repeated denials were cited as proof and their “love<\/a> story<\/a>” was held up as an example of fidelity and support.<\/p>\n In this context, the explanations made sense and I believed them. I had no reason not to.<\/p>\n What are the post-correlation, pre-internet sources that a typical, non-CES employee, non-historian\u00a0member would come across? I’m sure there are some, but specifically what sources do we expect members to have learned this information?<\/p>\n In my experience, polygamy was addressed on occasion, mostly as circumstance demanded. The references were usually vague. From\u00a0one of my BYU religion manuals,\u00a0Church History and the Fullness of Times: Religion 341\u201343<\/em>, p.424:<\/p>\n The law of plural marriage was revealed to the Prophet as early as 1831, but he mentioned it only to a few trusted friends. Under strict commandment from\u00a0God to obey they law, the Prophet began in 1841 to instruct leading priesthood brethren of the Church concerning plural\u00a0marriage and their responsibility to live the law.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n It was revealed to Joseph, he told those closest to him,\u00a0he instructed<\/strong> some priesthood leaders. As long as one of them isn’t my husband\u2014and as long as it’s just instruction\u2014I can quietly put it back on my proverbial “shelf.”<\/p>\n Skip forward to current Gospel Doctrine<\/a> lessons. Yes, D&C 132 is included in the curriculum. (I’ve been called to teach\u00a0GD four times, I actually do know this.) But in the context of the discussion of Joseph Smith’s polygamy<\/strong>, the portions of this section that actually address\u00a0plural marriage are generally glossed over or skipped entirely and certainly do\u00a0not include much elucidation\u00a0of his\u00a0still unexplained practice.<\/p>\n The material covered in the most recent\u00a0lesson includes\u00a0Doctrine and Covenants 131:1\u20134; <\/a>132:4\u201333<\/a>.\u00a0The first reference discusses the need for marriage in order to obtain celestial glory.\u00a0The second talks about eternal\u00a0marriage while skipping<\/strong>\u00a0the items listed below\u00a0(among others) in the reading\u00a0assignment and main lesson outline:<\/p>\n So what is left\u00a0in\u00a0the actual\u00a0lessons and study of Gospel Doctrine?<\/p>\n The last of the “additional<\/strong> teaching ideas” is “Plural marriage.” It\u00a0is described thusly (emphasis mine):<\/p>\n The following information is provided to help you if class members have questions about the practice of plural marriage<\/strong>. It should not be the focus of the lesson.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n This is followed by:<\/p>\n In this Gospel Doctrine discussion, if<\/strong> you go outside the actual reading assignment, if<\/strong> you get to the “additional ideas,” and if<\/strong> someone in the class asks about it, you might correctly parse this sentence (if<\/strong>, in fact, it is given accurately by the teacher):<\/p>\n The Prophet Joseph Smith<\/strong> and those closest to him, including Brigham Young and Heber C. Kimball, were challenged by this command, but they obeyed it.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n And there you have the official Gospel Doctrine teaching on and explanation of Joseph’s brand of polygamy.<\/p>\n I understand the duck and cover from the teachers and leaders I interacted with. Who wants to talk about something so uncomfortable? I sure don’t. I don’t want a class (particularly a youth<\/strong> class!) to ask me what the heck was going on with the polyandry and young women and secret marriages other wives didn’t know about. I have no answers and the church<\/a> essays<\/a> don’t either<\/a>.<\/p>\n But why did so many I encountered give false responses? I don’t know. I trusted them and didn’t question them. These people were, in my estimation, decent and sincere (or I wouldn’t have asked them). Given that multiple “authorities” gave similar responses, the answers\u00a0seemed credible. Happy to have an answer I could (mostly) deal with, I moved on.<\/p>\n Thinking back, today, here are a few guesses as to why I was mislead so often:<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t until I moved to Florida in 1991 and my (faithful-till-death) parents sent me\u00a0Mormon Enigma<\/a>\u00a0<\/i>that I learned that Joseph Smith practiced polygamy himself. I was horrified at what I read. I stopped reading for a few months and later forced myself to finish.\u00a0I didn’t want to believe it because it made no sense and the implications were awful, but the citations were solid.<\/p>\n I tried to have the most generous response I could muster, \u201cWow. I must have been absent (or asleep or daydreaming or staring at boys\u2026) every single day this was discussed! What a coincidence!\u201d Everyone knows this stuff and they are fine<\/strong> with it, so I just need\u00a0to get some context.<\/p>\n Soon after, while introducing a hymn written by Eliza R. Snow\u00a0in Relief Society (in the Boca Raton Ward in South Florida), I mentioned the obviously well-known fact that Eliza R. Snow\u00a0was one of the few people on earth to be married to two different prophets. Cool!<\/p>\n I was met with confusion. So I said, \u201cWell, she was married to both Joseph Smith\u00a0and<\/b>\u00a0Brigham Young.\u201d\u00a0You know, obviously.<\/p>\n Not only did my statement\u00a0garner surprise, but also anger. Vocal anger. Not one single person in our very large Relief Society acknowledged any<\/b>\u00a0notion that Joseph Smith married multiple women. The claims were\u00a0horrific and offensive to them. The suggestion was heretical.<\/p>\n Myriad\u00a0experiences since then<\/a> have\u00a0convinced me that, at least until the essays were published, enormous numbers of\u00a0believing Mormons didn\u2019t believe stories about\u00a0Joseph\u2019s polygamy and many who did\u00a0didn’t know the details. As Julie Smith said:<\/p>\n I think the root of the problem is that virtually nothing was said by the church (i.e., through official channels) for decades, which means that the one or two times a teacher went rogue and said something about polygamy, that something\u2014whatever it was\u2014loomed large for the hearer. This is how you get people stunned that others hadn’t heard anything and others stunned that people had heard anything.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n After the sometimes\u00a0contentious discussion following Julie Smith’s post “New Polygamy Essays<\/a>,” Kaimi Wenger ventured forth on social media to create a completely non-scientific poll, just to get a feel for the climate. Here are the choices given and the votes cast:<\/p>\n As of this writing,\u00a0approximately 40% of those participating in that poll did not<\/strong> know. That’s a chunk of change for a topic that supposedly obvious and universal and the result is likely skewed by the makeup the group in which it was posted. As one person noted:<\/p>\n I found out about this stuff about eight years ago. At that time there was a lot of news about Warren Jeffs going on and I pretty much considered him to be a scumbag, when I found out that JS was doing the same things and I was disgusted! It rocked my world! I went to my Brother in Law to ask him about it, he has worked for the Church Historical Department for probably 32+.years now, he said he had never heard of it. I think that he was probably told to say that if anyone asked. I went to my Brother and he outright dismissed it as anti-Mormon stuff. That discovery lead to many many other disturbing and testimony destroying info that I continue to research. It has been quite a ride with lots of sleepless nights and conflict. It’s kind of nice to see that the Church is sort of trying to be “honest with your fellow man”. Of course this is just the tip of the iceberg.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Have the essays changed the lack of knowledge among the typical, non-historian, church-going member?<\/p>\n I saw the garment video pop up in my Facebook feed about a thousand times, posted by devout members and not-so-devout. I was seriously pretty sick of seeing that thumbnail of male garments (do they know they can pick a different one?) all spread out on display.<\/p>\n To date, the\u00a0polygamy essays I’ve seen have been\u00a0shared almost exclusively by ex-members, disaffected members, agitating members, or at least members willing to rock the boat (heh).\u00a0The few times I have seen them promoted by what we might call “conservative members” it has been done so along with a raft\u00a0of rather nonsensical declarations.<\/p>\n Many claimed they have known the info for-freaking-ever, but then seem to have conflated general Utah\u00a0polygamous practice with Joseph Smith’s particular mix of polyandry\/polygyny behind Emma’s back.\u00a0Others said\u00a0it doesn’t matter because he was a prophet. End of discussion.\u00a0Many have tried\u00a0to rationalize the practices with mental contortions. For example,\u00a0an old friend of mine posted this:<\/p>\n Interesting that Joseph Smith never had any offspring from any of those marriages, except with Emma, his first wife. That makes not one grain of sense, since most women were very fertile in those days, as evidenced by the norm of family size during tha<\/span><\/span>t time period … unless those marriages were never consummated, which is completely consistent with the Gospel that Joseph was trying to restore. And a further evidence that he wasn’t in the marriages for sex. Very interesting.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n The message here (and elsewhere<\/a>) is that Joseph was faithful to Emma (and therefore his polygamy was fine and dandy) because (in their claims) he didn’t have sex with anyone else. But how does that notion play out with, say, Brigham Young (who, for the record, also had three or more\u00a0polyandrous marriages) and his 55 wives and 56 children? Polygamy was good for Joseph because he was (supposedly) sexually faithful and it was good for Brigham because he\u00a0wasn’t? (And how good it was for the wives is rarely discussed, but I digress\u2026)<\/p>\n Another common response was\u00a0denial\/blame. One\u00a0person chimed in with this:<\/p>\n I have a friend that’s been serving a mission with LDS tech. He’s told me that many articles he’s written were changed due to that insidious legal\u00a0division at church headquarters. Let’s look at the article on blacks and the priesthood, where it denies cursings. Not only it had distortions regarding the past, but it was completely anti-doctrinal. To say otherwise is to deny both the bible and\u00a0the Book of Mormon.<\/p>\n Groups like FAIR are some of the wicked that’s [sic] been trying to change church policies. God does not change according to man.<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n One of the distortions from this publication I have issue with, is saying that Joseph married other men’s wives. Which is simply not true. Then again it is the legal division of the church that publishes things online.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n If I don’t like it, it’s not true. Even if it’s on the church website it’s not true because the legal department is the public face of the church and they are a bunch of heathen liars.<\/p>\n Some members got angry:<\/p>\n I’m glad the church finally came clean about it. It seems like I always knew he practiced it but I could never figure out why the church actively hid it for so long. The thing that really got to me were all the<\/span><\/span> “carefully worded statements.” That really pissed me off. And then I read some wise words about how some people lessen Martin Luther King Jr. And Ghandi because they did things that were not morally upright. That doesn’t negate the good they did, it just shows that they were men, pure and simple. Joseph Smith was a man, pure and simple. I strongly believe he was a fallen prophet because of the polygamy and all the lies. He wasn’t martyred. He got his just reward.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Some created supposedly apologetic posts<\/a>, got\u00a0the facts wrong, rewrote, removed comments, and moved on like nothing ever happened.<\/p>\n Could<\/strong> I have found out that Joseph Smith practiced polygamy and learned at least some of the details about how he did it? Obviously. Even pre-internet (shock!) there were places to get a lot of the information. If I had thought I was given misinformation and\/or had a burning (or even moderate) interest in church history by my 20s, I might have. But neither applied.<\/p>\n Yesterday even Meridian published an anonymous (often convoluted, possibly\u00a0multi-authored) post<\/a>\u00a0admitting:<\/p>\n Strictly speaking, the Church has acknowledged many times that Joseph Smith had been sealed to more than one woman.\u00a0Church Historian Andrew Jenson collected affidavits from women near the end of the 19th<\/sup> century who attested to the fact that they had been married to Joseph Smith.\u00a0Various Church periodicals and priesthood manuals have published references to Smith\u2019s plural marriages. Available resources do not mean, however, that every person would have found the information. Regardless of the information\u2019s availability, it is still a difficult topic for many Mormons who are only now hearing the information to digest.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Unmoved by such statements<\/a>, Daniel Peterson declares all this info readily available:<\/p>\n First of all, many of these things [Joseph Smith’s polygamy, Mountain Meadows Massacre, multiple First Vision accounts, Joseph Smith\u2019s using a stone in a hat\u00a0for translation]\u00a0have<\/em> been taught by the Church. The four\u00a0items above, for example, are, respectively, (1) obviously implicit in Doctrine and Covenants 132 (what on earth is it talking about in the early 1830s, if not plural marriage?), (2) discussed\u00a0in Seminary and Institute manuals, (3) published in Church magazines and in books printed and distributed by the Church\u2019s wholly-owned publishing company, and (4) mentioned in at least one General Conference talk that I can think of just off the top of my head.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In other words, Joseph’s marrying already married women under\u00a0threat of destruction should be obvious from section 132. (What else could it possibly<\/strong> mean?) All you “newly-minted apostates” are simply intolerable.<\/p>\n [Double spaces in Peterson’s quote were removed because they make my head explode.\u00a0I don\u2019t fault Peterson\u00a0for not being up-to-date on 30-year-old proportional typeface protocol. I\u2019ve publicly lamented the fact that\u00a0bloggers\u00a0by and large don\u2019t know their way around computers, and\u00a0I know and readily admit that many such bloggers of the Bloggernacle are far better writers and grammarians than I am. What I object to, though, is when certain people loudly demand that their own area of expertise should also be everyone else’s. This simply isn\u2019t true. Ahem.]<\/p>\n Then Peterson defers to M* as The Source so Geoff Biddulph (after “Heavenly Father [very Joseph Smith vision-like] hit him over the head with a two-by-four (wielded by the Holy Ghost)”) can resort to the aforementioned conflation, call anyone troubled by the revelations “naive,” patronize them\u00a0about for not reading scripture enough to suit him, and then spend a number of paragraphs to explain that it’s not taught because there just isn’t time.<\/p>\n Given the role of the Church, and indeed the history of Jehovah\u2019s prophets in every dispensation of time, it is not at all surprising or alarming to me that the Church has recent history that is difficult to understand. This is where faith comes in. If there is something about Church history you do not understand, you are being challenged to find a faithful way to respond. Many people try to find out more information (this is what I did), but others just file away the difficult information until another time and concentrate on the joy of the Gospel. I know it is hard to believe, but some people prefer to concentrate on the eternal joy of knowing that families can be linked together forever than, say, how many wives Joseph Smith had.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Biddulph doesn’t offer to share the “more information” that cleared up all the issues for him if, indeed, he had any. But I would love to know the specifics<\/strong> of the eternal family revelry we should be marinating in. Is it to be lucky enough to be included as one of the many wives of some esteemed man? Is it to be a queen\u00a0(among many queens) to one’s husband? Is it to be an invisible being who probably does something<\/a> or other, but certainly has no connection with her spirit children? It’s hard to indulge in\u00a0the “eternal joy” of having families sealed without acknowledging the actual practice of sealing and eternal doctrine about women.<\/p>\n Should<\/strong> I have found this information?\u00a0I spent my time in college studying accounting and business and musical theater (and men). After college I had six kids and taught myself to program. I have spent over 20 years doing web tech. Would it have been a better use of my time to distrust the answers I got and look for “further light and knowledge” about Joseph Smith’s polygamy? Which activities should I have given up to do so? I don’t know.<\/p>\n But the fact that many of us went through years of typical church education and activity and never heard anything about it is meaningful. And it shouldn’t be surprising that those who find out such things later without thorough explanation, are a bit taken aback.<\/p>\n As Kaimi Wenger<\/a> said:<\/p>\n The often condescending response “you should have known” misses the\u00a0point that a lot of members don’t<\/strong> know. Members who have attended\u00a0church their whole lives, held callings, read scriptures, gone to\u00a0seminary and Institute.<\/p>\n I’m one of them. I lived in half a dozen wards growing up, in several\u00a0different states. I attended four years of seminary, earned scripture\u00a0mastery awards, read the scriptures and other church material\u00a0regularly, took several Institute classes, served a mission, served as\u00a0Elders Quorum President. And I didn’t realize that Joseph Smith was a\u00a0polygamist.<\/p>\n The idea that one should be able to discern this from the elliptical\u00a0and bizarre language of D&C 132 is silly. D&C 132 is taught, like most\u00a0scripture in the church, through use of a few cherry-picked verses as\u00a0prooftexts of current practice. That is, it’s taught as, “here, read a\u00a0few lines, that means families-are-forever, the end.”<\/p>\n Even people who read the whole thing don’t necessarily pick up the\u00a0details about Joseph Smith. It’s a weird section and not enlightening.<\/p>\n What adds insult to injury is the amount of what we label “education”\u00a0that we give to people. Church members think<\/strong> that they know the\u00a0important things. In fact, much of the time education is simply\u00a0catechism, where a teacher asks a question and the class recites\u00a0pre-approved answers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Amen, Brother Wenger.<\/p>\n [For the curious: On January 7 I scheduled this post to auto-publish on January 8, since there was already a new post on the 7th. In the hours between the scheduling and the publishing, Dave Evans published a fabulous guest post and this post bumped it off the top spot only a few hours later. I pulled this post to give Dave the top spot for a longer period before reposting. Sorry if it caused inconvenience. (And if you haven’t read Dave’s post, check out Laughing Through General Conference<\/a>. You’ll be glad you did.)]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Entrenched in Mormon Culture I am a 7th generation Mormon who grew up in Utah County. I attended church all my life, had regular family scripture study and FHE. My dad was a BYU math professor and my mom a devout scripture scholar. I graduated from seminary and graduated from BYU (with all its required religion courses) and married a 5th generation, returned missionary in the temple. And I didn’t learn that Joseph Smith personally practiced polygamy until I was in my 20s. I had heard the story about Emma pushing Eliza down the stairs, causing a miscarriage in her jealous rage. But it was all fabricated nonsense created by anti-Mormons trying to defame the prophet. Like everything else that looked or sounded unsavory. Everyone knew about the public polygamy in Utah. Every year our elementary class toured the Beehive House, complete with all the wives’ bedrooms and \u00a0fairly open discussion about managing the logistics.\u00a0Polygamous ancestors were a dime a dozen (or two). Whenever the topic of plural marriage came up it was usually swept away with a Gordon-B-Hinkley-like flick of the wrist. “It’s behind us.” We don’t practice it. Move on. Nothing to see here.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":116,"featured_media":32523,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31975","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-church-history","category-news-politics"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/joseph-smiths-polygamy.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31975","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/116"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31975"}],"version-history":[{"count":35,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31975\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32537,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31975\/revisions\/32537"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32523"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31975"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31975"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31975"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Fuzzy Presentations About Polygamy<\/h2>\n
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Main Points<\/h3>\n
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Additional Teaching Ideas<\/h3>\n
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Why the Misinformation?<\/h2>\n
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Not Just Me<\/h2>\n
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Fallout<\/h2>\n
You Could\u00a0Have Known<\/h2>\n
You Should\u00a0Have Known<\/h2>\n
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