Everything is Polygamy

Polygamy, the eternal disease of Mormonism still infecting us today

I recently read John Green’s fabulous new book, Everything is Tuberculosis, and yeah, everything is tuberculosis. His book made me realize how much one disease touches so much of human life, creativity, and institutional structure even today when most of us believe it to be a thing of the past. I especially appreciated how John Green took his personal niche interest and turned it into a project that brings awareness to the world.

I’m no John Green. Not by any stretch of the imagination. But I do have my own hobby cause and I think it should be talked about more in my community. Because in Mormonism, everything is polygamy. It’s the root cause of a lot of suffering, inequality, and abuse today, long after the practice formally ended in the mainstream LDS church.

Polygamy, plural marriage, celestial marriage, the Principle, the New and Everlasting Covenant. These are all names for a patriarchal power project begun by Joseph Smith in the 1840s and perpetuated by his successors until the early 20th century. It’s ingrained in LDS culture, doctrine, and tradition. It’s not a thing of the past, as so many Latter-day Saints claim. It’s alive, festering under the surface of our most sacred rituals and fused into our every day worship. Polygamy is everywhere, but like tuberculosis, we are often collectively blind to it.

There is absolutely no way I could break down every place polygamy lives in LDS culture in a single post. Instead, I will focus on a few examples from this weekend’s General Conference that stuck out to me.

My own polygamous ancestors, George Kirkham and his wives Mary and Sara Russon

This weekend several stories were shared about infidelity, specifically men cheating on their wives. While I like to hope that these instances are rare in any religion or culture, I think they are more prevalent than we want to admit because they are a fruit of patriarchal systems.

Doctrine & Covenants 132 is canonized scripture for the Brighamite tradition. This is the polygamy scripture, given to Emma Smith by her husband. It reduces women to their sexuality—virgins—and their personhood to objects. It makes a mockery of their consent, stating that they must consent to plural marriages or be destroyed. Polygamy as an earthly practice might be dead in the modern church, but it’s patriarchal roots are alive and well. When literal founding scripture states that women are nothing more than sexual objects to be collected at men’s whims, obtained when desired, and destroyed when disobedient, women do not actually matter in church doctrine or structure.

How can we be honestly surprised when men cheat on their wives, abuse young girls, or demand familial control when D&C 132 still seeps into our minds as words sanctioned from on high?

Image from PBS

Elder Anderson’s talk on abortion was gross on many levels that I won’t get into because you can read amazing responses here and here. But it’s hard to talk about the church’s stance on abortion without also talking about polygamy, where the foundation for the church’s belief in the importance of children was laid. Traditionally, Latter-day Saints claim that plural marriage happened because God needed to “raise up seed.” (Even though scholars have proved that plural marriage actually produced less children per woman than monogamy.) Children are essential because men can’t have eternal kingdoms without eternal increase. Mormon theology teaches that men and women sealed in eternal marriage will somehow reproduce spiritual offspring for eternity. Since women are the viewed as the roadblock to producing more children due to gestation time—possibly even in heaven—polygamy is inherently tied with children.

So elective abortion must be rejected by the church because it undermines the very concept of a polygamously-ordered heaven, one that has never been formally disavowed by modern church authorities. Women must have their wombs controlled by priesthood men who can declare when it’s righteous for them to have children and who can impregnate them. They also put the responsibility for carrying children both wanted and unwanted onto women exclusively. Just like in polygamy when men would often show up to impregnate a wife and then move on to the next, women are mostly on their own once they are pregnant to deal with the consequences.

Image from MormonWiki

Elder Rasband decried the “naysayers” as “mere footnotes” just like in Joseph Smith’s day. (I can’t recommend enough this response to being called a footnote.) Many of Joseph’s detractors were those opposed to his practice of plural marriage. Even his once righthand man, Oliver Cowdery, was excommunicated for his public disavowal of Joseph’s “filthy affair” with Fanny Alger. Joseph eventually ordered the destruction of the Nauvoo Expositor as a “public nuisance” for printing information about his polygamous marriages—an act that lead to his arrest and death in Carthage Jail in June 1844. The “footnotes” of Mormonism continued to decry the problems of polygamy for over a century. Modern day “footnotes” like D. Michael Quinn, a historian who exposed post-Manifesto polygamous marriages, were excommunicated for drawing attention to issues only for the church to openly admit they were right years later. Those Rasband calls footnotes are actually the witnesses of Joseph and the church’s misdeeds.

Like real footnotes in a paper, these men and women who call out polygamy’s abuses are the ones who testify to the truth. Joseph Smith set the church’s precedent for dealing with those who dare to speak against plural marriage and his power. The church hierarchy continues to wield Joseph’s polygamy-created discipline and denial for its detractors.

Image from Unsplash

President Nelson announced 13 new temples at conference. The continuing explosion of temple growth not only obscures honest church retention numbers, it spreads subtle polygamous practices that remain enshrined in temple ceremonies. Though the language of the temple has evolved over the last decade, the new words remain a thinly-veiled reference to the practice by using the coded term “new and everlasting covenant.” In D&C 132, the new and everlasting covenant is laid out very clearly as plural marriage. When I went through the temple in 2010, I had to covenant to my husband instead of God—which was blatantly sexist. In 2019, the language changed so women no longer covenanted to their husbands but instead covenanted to the new and everlasting covenant of marriage—so basically still their husbands. Women are now also anointed in the ceremony under this covenant, again making polygamy a part of the covenant even if most members don’t realize that. It’s like leaving the back door open just in case plural marriage wants to slip in at some time, in this life or the next.

Sealing practices in the temple are where inequality and polygamy rage the hardest. Men are allowed to be sealed to a new wife after the death of a first without canceling their first sealing. Women, however, cannot. They must choose to either cancel their sealing to their first husband or never be sealed to their living husband. When children are involved it becomes even more complicated. The church handbook states that if children are born in the second marriage but the first sealing hasn’t been canceled, the children are sealed to the first husband, not their actual father (38.4.2.1). These practices lead to nothing but heartbreak, anguish, and confusion, none of which is necessary. This only continues because of polygamy, which allows men to have multiple wives but not women to have multiple husbands. It should be noted that the two highest ranking men in the church structure are both proud polygamists; they are married to both their living and their dead wife.

Everything the temple touches (which is just about every single thing these days in our temple-obsessed church) is touched by polygamy.

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As a bored millennial teen, we used to play a game where we’d go on wikipedia, start on a random article and see how many link clicks it took to get to Jesus. I think we could play that with Mormonism and it wouldn’t ever take more than a couple clicks to get to polygamy from any topic in the gospel library. Polygamy is at the heart and soul of Mormonism. It’s what made Joseph infamous and what killed him. It’s a large part of what drove the Saints west and what determined the politics of Utah territory for decades. It lives in every sexist and unequal doctrine or cultural practice.

Since the root of polygamy has never been fully dug out, women will always boil down to objects to be used, bred, and collected. Children and wives will be status symbols for men, not full people. Hierarchies will always be male and leadership will always consist of men. Institutional power will never allow women into every room where decisions are made because objects can’t vote or voice opinions.

Everything is polygamy. Which really means everything is patriarchy. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will remain an institution that restricts roles based solely on our genitalia in a modern world because it was built and sustained on a man’s lustful desire to have multiple wives. If women get full and complete equality in the church, then the church will have to admit that polygamy was fundamentally flawed. If polygamy was flawed, then Joseph was wrong. If Joseph was wrong, then God didn’t tell him to be a polygamist. And if God didn’t tell him to be a polygamist, what else didn’t God tell him to do? The entire thing unravels.

So women must stay oppressed, forever under the eternal thumb of polygamy because the church has built it’s entire foundation on truth claims that aren’t much more than a card house of patriarchy. Everything is polygamy because without it the house collapses. Women, their dignity, their lives, their rights, must be sacrificed so men like Joseph Smith and Brigham Young and Russell N. Nelson can stay propped up. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.