{"id":46790,"date":"2024-03-20T04:00:37","date_gmt":"2024-03-20T10:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=46790"},"modified":"2025-05-28T20:15:34","modified_gmt":"2025-05-29T02:15:34","slug":"how-big-is-joseph-smith-polygamy-denialism-in-the-church-insights-from-the-b-h-roberts-foundations-current-and-former-latter-day-saint-survey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2024\/03\/how-big-is-joseph-smith-polygamy-denialism-in-the-church-insights-from-the-b-h-roberts-foundations-current-and-former-latter-day-saint-survey\/","title":{"rendered":"How Big is Joseph Smith Polygamy Denialism in the Church? Insights from the B.H. Roberts Foundation\u2019s Current and Former Latter-day Saint Survey"},"content":{"rendered":"

Stephen Cranney and Josh Coates<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

This is one of a series of posts discussing results from a recent survey of current and former Latter-day Saints conducted by the BH Roberts Foundation. The technical details are in the full methodology report <\/span><\/i>here<\/span><\/i><\/a>.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

The people who do believe that Joseph Smith did not practice polygamy fall into two camps. The first is those who simply do not know. Presumably because the practice wasn\u2019t public until Brigham Young\u2019s day, and because the Nauvoo practice is much more sparsely documented, Brigham Young, and not Joseph Smith, became the icon of polygamy. Although <\/span>people more familiar with official Church history<\/span><\/a> (or even a careful reading of D&C 132) would have also known about Joseph Smith\u2019s plural wives, anecdotally there are cases of people simply not being aware because the emphasis was always on the better documented Utah-era polygamy. (And although the 20th century Church did not emphasize Joseph\u2019s plural marriages, <\/span>the Church did not hide it<\/span><\/a>; and in the late 19th century it went out of its way to gather invaluable primary source, first-hand evidence of his plural marriages and publicize them in order to stick it to the RLDS during the Temple Lot trial.)<\/span><\/p>\n

And so while the Church is publishing more content on Joseph Smith\u2019s plural marriages (and there\u2019s just more content available now overall, with perhaps the summum of this being Brian Hales\u2019 and Don Bradley\u2019s excellent multi-volume work and website on primary source documents about Joseph Smith\u2019s polygamy), in principle there might be somebody somewhere to whom this information has not percolated to yet.<\/span><\/p>\n

The other group are people who know about the historical consensus, but simply reject it. This is an eclectic, interesting group, including members and former members who believe <\/span>that Brigham Young started<\/span><\/a> polygamy <\/span>contrary to Gods\u2019 wishes<\/span><\/a>, and believe <\/span>that D&C<\/span><\/a> 132 wasn\u2019t <\/span>written by Joseph Smith<\/span><\/a>. Our understanding (please correct us if we\u2019re wrong) that the folks that put together <\/span>the movie that argued that Willard Richards and John Taylor killed Joseph and Hyrum<\/span><\/a> fall into this camp, as well as at least some of the \u201cSnufferites\u201d, and <\/span>very traditional-looking, active LDS wives and mothers<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

But just how big is \u201cJoseph Smith polygamy denialism\u201d\u2122 among the rank and file?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Our results from the survey show that it\u2019s negligible: in the year 2023 nearly all members know that Joseph Smith practiced polygamy. We asked for a response to the statement \u201cJoseph Smith practiced plural marriage\u201d with response options from strongly disagree to strongly agree.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The denialists are certainly an interesting group, but we do not find any evidence that they have a lot of sway. People who overtly disagree with the idea that Joseph Smith practiced polygamy are in the single digits.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Similarly, we also do not find any evidence that there is widespread ignorance of Joseph Smith\u2019s polygamy in 2023. If there was in the past because of the emphasis on Brigham Young\u2019s polygamy, that problem has now been more or less corrected (with a few holdouts).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

However, the \u201cneither agree nor disagree\u201d group may evince some ambiguity or lack of clarity on the part of some. We\u2019re not quite sure what the difference in this context is between agreeing or strongly agreeing. Is agreeing simply from people being predisposed towards a middle option? Or do they harbor some doubts? Whatever the case, variation on this variable was not correlated with any other belief or practice variable, so it does not appear that conservatives or liberals are more likely to choose the \u201cstrongly disagree\u201d option, and it\u2019s probably some artifact of how one answers a question like that in a survey (maybe we should have just made it a dichotomous yes\/no).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Stephen Cranney and Josh Coates This is one of a series of posts discussing results from a recent survey of current and former Latter-day Saints conducted by the BH Roberts Foundation. The technical details are in the full methodology report here.\u00a0 The people who do believe that Joseph Smith did not practice polygamy fall into two camps. The first is those who simply do not know. Presumably because the practice wasn\u2019t public until Brigham Young\u2019s day, and because the Nauvoo practice is much more sparsely documented, Brigham Young, and not Joseph Smith, became the icon of polygamy. Although people more familiar with official Church history (or even a careful reading of D&C 132) would have also known about Joseph Smith\u2019s plural wives, anecdotally there are cases of people simply not being aware because the emphasis was always on the better documented Utah-era polygamy. (And although the 20th century Church did not emphasize Joseph\u2019s plural marriages, the Church did not hide it; and in the late 19th century it went out of its way to gather invaluable primary source, first-hand evidence of his plural marriages and publicize them in order to stick it to the RLDS during the Temple Lot trial.) […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10403,"featured_media":46806,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2976,2910],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-46790","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-b-h-roberts-foundation","category-joseph-smith"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/Picture3-scaled.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46790","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\/10403"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46790"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46790\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50237,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46790\/revisions\/50237"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/46806"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}