Thoughts on Polygamy

Last night I had a hard time falling and staying asleep. After writing yesterday's post, I was too disturbed from going over in my head everything I've learned about polygamy in the early Church. I hadn't even mentioned everything I knew.


For example, John Taylor, the third president of the Church, received a revelation in 1886 stating that the principle would, essentially, be in force for good now that it had been returned to earth. Also that too many people were neglecting to practice it. He doesn't use the precise term polygamy or plural wives in the revelation, though, so LDS scholars debate the importance of this revelation as pertains to polygamy. LDS Fundamentalists see it, however, as a declaration that polygamy will never go out of style again, not so long as man wants to enter into the highest degree of glory in the Kingdom of God.


Remember how I said one of the few things I had learned previously about the history of polygamy was that Joseph Smith was reluctant to practice the principle until an angel came with a sword and threatened to ruin him and the church if he didn't get going on it? Well, that's actually what he told several women when he introduced them to polygamy, that unless they married him his soul and the restored gospel was at stake. (I don't know if the angel said you have to marry 30 women or it's not enough, otherwise I would think telling one girl and getting one extra wife would be satisfactory. Seriously, how many wives do you need?) Anyhow, quite the pickup line. So apparently the angel visited him and told him the same thing before he approached each future wife.


At one point, Heber C. Kimball reprimanded missionaries for going away, converting, and choosing wives before they ever made the trip to Utah. Apparently this was an unfair advantage, as they could choose the prettiest for themselves before introducing the new converts to the church as a whole. I would pray for ugliness.


What's really haunting, though, are the stories. These aren't the pioneer stories we hear at church, and, in fact, I've read very few of them. The ones I have read, though, break my heart. Women disgusted with a system where close relatives marry, or young girls marry old men. Women who hated their husbands for what they'd turned their lives into, but had no way out.


Wives whose husbands died weren't given a choice what to do afterwards if Brigham Young decided they were to marry him, as in the case of Zina D. H. J. S. Young, who was married to a husband when Joseph Smith married her, then told she was to be married to Brigham Young after Joseph Smith died. Not only did she not get a say (though she was very devout and maybe willing to go along with it all), but her original husband loved her and mourned for her all his life.  This is what she said of polygamy:


Polygamist women "expect too much attention from the husband and . . . become sullen and morose. . . ." She explained that "a successful polygamous wife must regard her husband with indifference, and with no other feeling than that of reverence, for love we regard as a false sentiment; a feeling which should have no existence in polygamy."


I know. Sign me up. Who wouldn't want eternity with a perfect situation like that? I also found this story (page 147 if the link doesn't take you there). Clearly things weren't peaches and cream, and I should never have assumed they were. 


Somewhere in the back of my brain all these years I'd had this notion that sister wives shared work and children and learned to get along, since that was the way things were, and loved their husbands as well. And that their husbands were generally their same age. These stones I'd turned over told a different story, a very sad story that kept me up at night. Faithful, devout women willingly followed their leaders down unchangeable paths to lonely lives.


We're supposed to remember our legacy of faith in the Church. We're taught our history from Joseph Smith's birth until the saints reached Utah, and then more about other converts making the journey. We're taught about when Joseph Fielding Smith told us to have family home evening and Lorenzo Snow told us to pay our tithing. Heber J. Grant told us to work hard and keep the Word of Wisdom. And then we talk about today. But we always skip over those ugly polygamy years. We never hear those stories. I never did, anyhow. It's all so sad to me.


One last thing. Everything in the Gospel that has made me a better person has always inspired feelings of the Spirit within me. This was what I called my testimony. My belief now is that anything that brings you closer to God, within or without the Church, will inspire those feelings. But I never, never felt anything remotely sweet about polygamy. I didn't grow up hating it or thinking it was the worst thing on earth, but if it was such an important part of the eternal Gospel, I should have felt something good about it. The question is: who has?