Mormon Founder Joseph Smith Lied about Polygamy

You Are listening to Shameless Popery with Joe Heschmeyer, a production of Catholic Answers.

Welcome Back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. So I want to explore an area where Catholics and non-Mormons more broadly disagree with Mormon theology and it’s the historic role of plural marriage. And this is something where I think it’s a complicated issue, and I think many of the arguments made against the Mormon view are a lot weaker than they could be. So I want to actually call out a lot of the non-Mormon Christian arguments. Before I get there, for those who are just tuning in, you don’t need to have seen any other videos for this to make sense. But for those who have been regular viewers or listeners, this is actually the fifth in a five-week series on Mormonism. And I started this basically by accident. So four weeks ago I did a video about how to answer Mormon missionaries. But the real reason was I think we do apologetics badly so often because I think we often are uncharitable in how we approach things.

And I gave the example of Mormonism that I think the way many times the culture answers Mormonism and the way many times other Christians answer Mormonism is one that’s lacking in charity and therefore not effective as apologetics and not really worthy of the name of Christian apologetics. But since I was calling non-Mormons out for doing this badly, I wanted to take a stab at how I think we ought to approach Mormon theology. So if you’re wondering why did you give five episodes to Mormonism? Because the first one I thought they were being treated unfairly, and the last four, I’ve been trying to unpack major theological differences and major doctrinal differences, and you can’t do that adequately in a single episode. There’s too much to explore, especially since many people don’t really know anything about Mormonism. And so I’m having to do a little more of the background work.

So thanks for indulging me on that. Three weeks ago we looked at the great apostasy, the idea that the church fell into apostasy completely shortly after the time of the apostles. Mormons really need that to be true for the restoration to be necessary and for their belief system to be true. And I’ve looked at reasons why I think that’s not true. And then the last two weeks, looked at the Mormon view of the Godhead. Because this is an area in which we often are using the same words, but as you unpack it turns out we actually don’t mean the same things by them frequently. And so when we talk about the Father, Son, Holy Spirit, we often have very different understandings of what those words mean. That is really good and important to know to have a meaningful and productive conversation grounded in the truth.

Now, as I said, the point of all of this isn’t just to correct this or that point of doctrine. It’s not just to even answer Mormonism. Although hopefully it’s done all of that. It’s really to propose to Catholics, but really to everybody, Catholics, Protestant, Orthodox, Mormons, whoever, that if we’re going to take Christian apologetics seriously, we have to do it in a Christian spirit. And so the text that launched this was one Peter three, chapter 15 in which St. Paul, excuse me, St. Peter, it’s First Peter, it’s First Peter, not First Paul. It talks about the need to always be prepared to make a defense and that defense, apologia, in Greek is where the word apologetics comes from. But we often stop the verse right there, and we don’t look at the fact he’s saying, make a defense for the hope that is in you, and that he tells us how to do it, to do it with gentleness and reverence and keeping our conscience clear so that our good behavior in Christ, if it’s reviled, the people reviling it will be put to shame.

In other words, it’s not enough to have the truth, you have to be presenting the truth in a loving, humble, gentle, reverent kind of way. And so a good companion text for this is Ephesians four and verse 14 to 16. In verse 14, I’m taking a sentence fragment here, but St. Paul is warning us not to be tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine by the cunning of men, by their craftiness and deceitful wiles. Now that’s important because implicit in that is that we should take doctrine seriously. I’ve gotten a lot of really good feedback from LDS listeners and even non LDS listeners who just know a lot about Mormonism, and a couple areas for instance. So for instance, I was screwing up Joseph F. Smith versus Joseph Fielding Smith. They have the same name, but they’re two different people, kind of a John Adams, John Quincy Adams situation, but if they both had the middle name Quincy. So that was a helpful corrective because I was just getting a detail wrong.

And then I actually had a non-Mormon reach out to me to suggest McConkey might be a more controversial figure within LDS Mormonism than I was giving him credit for. So the mere fact he says, don’t worship Jesus. The amount of weight that might have for an ordinary LDS believer, maybe less than I would assume. Totally fair. This is very common, as a Catholic people say, “Oh look, this Catholic priest or this Catholic bishop said X, Y, Z.” But if you don’t know, well, is that bishop someone who’s well respected or are they someone who says crazy things sometimes? Who are they? What do we make of them? That can be a hard thing to assess from the outside. So I’m grateful. On the other hand, some people just think it’s hateful to even discuss, “Why are we beating up on the Mormons?”

It’s like, no, no, we’ve got to be able to call out bad doctrine. St. Paul is very clear. We have to have a remedy to being tossed to and fro on the waves, or excuse me, on the winds of doctrine. Otherwise, you’re not going to be theologically grounded. If you don’t know why do I believe X and not Y? You’re totally going to be susceptible to the cunning of men, the craftiness of deceitful wiles. So I reject the people who just say, don’t address Mormonism at all, or to do so is hateful or slander. No. Look, if there’s a substantive criticism, by all means engage. But don’t just treat any critical engagement with Mormonism as hate speech or as an attack. I’ve seen some comments like that and those are just not serious. If you shut down all reasonable discussion that’s critical, then all you’re going to be left with is the unreasonable discussion that’s critical, and that’s worse for everybody involved.

Now, on the other hand, it’s not enough for me or for any of us to just say, “Look, I’m confronting bad doctrine,” because St. Paul, in the very next verse, tells us how to do it. He tells us to do it by speaking the truth in love. That’s a good, what is that five word kind of test. Am I speaking the truth in love? Because one way to fail that is by speaking the truth unlovingly. That’s why I started this whole thing by critiquing, mocking, contemptuous, uncharitable approaches. The other way to fail is by not speaking the truth, because you’re afraid that speaking the truth is hate. So we have to be able to speak the truth in love. This is true in everything. If somebody’s lifestyle choices are wrong, but also their theology is wrong, we don’t just say, “Well, they’re a nice person.”

You have to be able to have those conversations sometimes. But you have to be able to do it in a way that is building the church in love. So with that all in mind, let’s dive into today’s actual topic, which is polygamy or plural marriage. I would suggest we often get this wrong as non-Mormons. And what I mean by that is that we make a lot of weak arguments on the subject, arguments against polygamy itself. And there’s several different ways that argument can go. Sometimes it’s like, “Oh, polygamy is gross, or it’s offensive to women, or it’s against mainstream Christianity. It’s unacceptable today, even it’s unnatural. It’s against a New Testament.” Now, some of those critiques I think are valid, but I think they’re weak arguments. It’s possible for an argument to be both true and not worth being the center point of your focus.

So let me explain why. Aquinas, in the Summa, in the supplement to the Summa, which was assembled after his death but based on his writings, argues that it is evident that the plurality of lives is, in a way, against the law of nature in a way, not against it. So he’s going to suggest the moral law case against polygamy is a little more nuanced, a little more complicated than it might seem at first. And he goes into the theological depth on that. St. Augustine actually even suggests that maybe it’s not against nature itself. And so he responds to the [inaudible 00:08:28] who brought charges against the fathers, like the patriarchs of old in the Old Testament for having many wives. And Augustine makes the point that, yeah, it was not something that was obviously against nature. So that’s important to know that it’s not just me saying, as a 21st century person like, “Oh, the polygamy stuff isn’t obviously against nature.”

It’s like, no, no, great Catholic theologians, Aquinas and Augustine are the two at the top of the list, are saying it’s complicated. It’s a nuanced kind of issue. Aquinas explains why, as I said, he dives into the theology, because he explains in marriage… Look, this is not necessary. I’m just nerding out because I think this is really cool. Within marriage, there’s three dimensions. One, you have the animal dimension of marriage, that men and women come together to have kids and for the bearing and rearing or raising of children. That’s the animalistic sense. Animals do the same thing, right? Swans mate for life. The second dimension is a human dimension that animals don’t have, which is a shared common life so that we can help one another. And he gives the example in household matters. So if the first one is offspring, the second one he calls fidelity.

But then there’s another sense which is unique to Christians, the sacramental dimension, that the role of marriage is to be a sign of Christ’s love of the church. And so we see that in the New Testament, and we’ll get into that a little bit, but he’s going to argue that polygamy is totally consistent with the animal nature of marriage. You’re begetting kids even better if you’ve got a lot of wives. It hinders the human dimension of having a common life because you can’t really have an effective common life with 10 different wives. But it doesn’t totally destroy it. You can have something of a common life. It destroys altogether the Christian sacramental dimension of marriage, because as Christ is one, so also as the church one. That if you look to what the scriptural evidence is, well, we’ll just talk about it. Jesus in Mark 10 gives the analogy that the two become one flesh and that what God has joined together, let man not put asunder.

He’s arguing against divorce and remarriage. And this is something almost every Christian today ignores, that if God has actually joined the parties together, and that’s an important question, but if that’s happened, we don’t have the power or the authority to just undo what God has done and therefore he says whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her. Now, notice, if that’s true, it would also be adultery to not divorce your wife and to marry another, right? If it’s wrong to leave wife number one for wife number two, it’s also wrong to just take up wife number two at the same time. So whether you have consecutive wives or concurrent wives, it’s still an offense against the fidelity in marriage. That’s what Jesus is saying.

But with that sacramental dimension of marriage, that Aquinas talks about, this is coming from Ephesians five in which St. Paul has a very beautiful passage talking about the relationship of husband and wife being like the relationship of Christ and the church. And so he compares the relationship of Jesus and the church to that of husband and wife and of head and body. And he quotes, Genesis, says, “For this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” Jesus quotes the same passage,. But Paul says, “This is a great mystery, and I mean in reference to Christ in the church.” I love this passage because everyone talks about Ephesians five because it has really controversial things to say about gender roles in men and women. But Paul is actually using all of this as an example of his view of the relationship of Christ and the church that is head and body, it’s man and woman, the two becoming in one flesh.

Now, notice implicit within all of this, for any of that to make sense as theology, there has to only be one head and one body, and there has to be only one man and one woman. Otherwise, the whole thing falls apart. If Christ had multiple churches, the Ephesians five analogy falls apart. Likewise, if a man had multiple wives, the Ephesians five analogy falls totally apart. So in other words, all that’s to say, I think there is a biblical case against polygamy. I think it’s all well and true, but I think people can actually miss it and deny it because there’s not just like a passage in the New Testament that says, “Thou shalt not have many wives.” You’d have to just understand the positive theology about what marriage is and what this means about the relationship of Christ and the church. Now I say all of that because not only did Augustine and Aquinas say it’s nuanced, it’s complicated using just natural reasoning, but you find the Protestant reformers, in many cases, arguing that maybe polygamy is consistent with the New Testament.

The most famous example of this is from Martin Luther himself. In a letter to Philip, the land [inaudible 00:13:17] of Hessi. Philip is a serial philanderer. He is cheating on his wife all the time, and he writes to Luther and wonders if he could just take a second wife because he doesn’t like his wife. And Luther points out that the patriarchs of old had several wives, but they were driven to it, he says, by necessity. And then he says, it’s not sufficient for a Christian to be satisfied with the fact that like Abraham did this. You have to actually have a divine word that makes it okay in your case. And he says, “Where there was no necessity or cause the ancient fathers did not have more than one wife.” And he gives the examples of Isaac, Joseph, and Moses. Now, Philip reads this and is like, “Okay, so you’re saying there’s a chance.” There’s in cases of necessity, you can be a bigamist, but nevertheless, Luther is…

I want to be fair to Luther here. He says, I can’t advise it, I strongly advise against it, especially to Christians unless it might be a case of high necessity. And he gives the example like if your wife is diseased, then you can have a second wife now. No, we were good up until that last part. Philip, of course, uses this as justification to take a second wife. And Luther doesn’t seem to have learned anything from this, because five years later he’s writing to Robert Barnes about the situation of Henry VIII. Henry VIII wants to divorce his wife, Catherine of Aragon and marry another. And Luther actually surprisingly says, no, the Anglicans are wrong, and the Catholics are right about this one. It’s a valid marriage and this divorce is immoral. But he then says, well, rather than improving such a divorce, I would rather allow the king to take another queen. And he again went through the example of the Old Testament patriarchs.

Now, I give this not to bash Luther, although he’s clearly wrong here, but just to say, as a non-Mormon, if your argument is polygamy is wrong because the Bible says so, I think you’re right, but I think you’re going to have a heck of a time convincingly arguing that. So I want to suggest that there’s another way we can go about it. In fact, three other ways, those are, spiritual abuse, lies and contradictions. I use the word lies there advisedly, and I’ll explain why when we get there. Let’s look at each of the three. The first, spiritual abuse. Now, I would say at the outset a few things. The question of whether you should focus on spiritual abuse requires you to know the person you’re talking to. In other words, don’t just willy-nilly throw this term or this concept around because it’s really emotionally charged, and in some people’s cases, it’s going to totally shut the conversation down. Anecdotally, I would suggest women are often more open to this or may be more sensitive to the reality of spiritual abuse, as are former abuse victims.

In other words, if someone realizes this serious danger and the unique danger of spiritual abuse, and I’ll explain what I mean by that in a minute, then by all means, have that conversation. But if somebody seems like they’re not open to that, then you might be wasting your time here. So I’m not just giving this as a one size fits all solution, but just another thing to consider. The second thing, if you do raise it, approach it with humility and with honesty. There’s a sort of people in glass houses, because look, we’ve had a huge crisis as Catholics in the last 20 some odd years in terms of just seeing priests who are predators. And so I think we need to start from there. Otherwise, it just looks like hypocrisy. And I’ll explain again how to do this. And then the last thing I’d say, if you’re going to do this, be prepared to make some important distinctions.

Why does it matter if Joseph Smith is a predator? If it doesn’t matter… It doesn’t disprove Catholicism for there to be a predator priest, does it disprove Mormonism of Joseph Smith was a predator? We’ll get into all that. So what does spiritual abuse look like? Now here, this, I actually want to give a trigger warning. This is going to be upsetting material for some people, and I don’t mean to needlessly upset you, especially if you have kids in the car or anything. I’m going to try to be as good about this as I can without being needlessly graphic, but it’s a serious topic. If you want use it, if you’re watching this on YouTube, there’s chapters you can jump to the next chapter or you can just skip ahead a couple minutes. Spiritual abuse is the spiritual authority, a priest, a prophet, a spiritual leader of some kind, using their authority and invoking their authority, often invoking God directly for the purpose of preying upon somebody, the defenseless, the vulnerable, sometimes the underaged.

And so like I said, start with humility. Start with a Catholic example, the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report. One of the most disturbing things I think, and I think most people would agree with this, is reading about the cases of these sexual predator priests who would use religious imagery and concepts to molest teenagers or even younger. But the particular case, it involves teenagers. And so in this case, these priests start, predator priests who know what they’re up to, they invite a teenage boy to the rectory. They start a conversation about religious statues, and they ask him to get on the bed. And then they use an analogy to Jesus who just has a loin cloth on to persuade him to take off all of his other clothes except his underwear, and then eventually they get him to take even those off. And so they’ve backed him into a corner and they’ve really put him in a very vulnerable position.

And how? By appealing to Christ on the cross. There’s something really demonic, really evil about this. And then the victim goes on to say that the priests would give the boys who were the separate of the abuse, gold crosses, which identified them as chosen boys, who, the grand jury points out, shows other potential abusers who were in on this, that they were desensitized to sexual abuse and were optimal targets for further victimization. So you can see this is worse than just, “Oh, this otherwise godly man had a fall.” No, no, no, no, this is people who are using religion in the promotion of evil in a really wicked, really demonic sort of way. And so I wanted to start with that, right? Because this is something to take extremely seriously, but this is not something that just a handful of Catholic priests in Pennsylvania were guilty of. We find these patterns throughout different religions and throughout history. And so I’m going to give a couple other religious examples.

David Thibodaux, who is one of the survivors at Waco, talked about how David Koresh would come back from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem claiming that on Mount Zion, he’d received a command to have a child with Michelle, his wife’s 11-year old sister. So he’s appealing to religious special revelation to take underage girls, and in fact take a lot of the women in the commune or compound and to sleep with them, even women who are married, even women who have husbands. And so he’s doing this thing that from an outside perspective, we say, “I don’t think you really had a revelation from God. I think you’re using God to justify base sexual desires just as those priests had done.” And, more controversially, I’d say we see something even similar in the Quran and the 33rd Surah. Mohammad is given special permission to have unlimited wives, and he’s told this privilege is exclusively for him and not for the rest of the believers.

And so other Muslims can have four wives, but he can have unlimited. And so he gets these special sexual access, which again, he uses to have sex with underage kids. And so his famous, his favorite wife, excuse me, was Aisha, who reports herself that she was six years old when the prophet married her, and he began having sex with her when she was nine. And Aisha, I mean, Mohammad dies in her arms, he’s buried in her house. He is very much a fan of Aisha, but he’s 50 and she is a child. There’s something really disturbing about all of that in just an incredible way, where it’s like this doesn’t look like it’s coming from God. This looks like men’s libido with a religious veneer. And that’s what I mean when I’m talking about spiritual abuse. So here’s where we need to make a few important distinctions.

What makes spiritual abuse particularly uniquely bad? Well, first, it’s a misuse of a spiritual fatherhood. And when you do that, you risk not only damaging that person’s personal integrity, their sense of body, all the ordinary stuff that happens with sexual abuse, you’ve also violated their trust and you’ve warped their vision of God. Second, this is different than, as I said before, a private sin. A guy who’s an upstanding man has an affair. That’s one thing. A guy who’s an upstanding man uses God or claims a revelation to justify having an affair, now we’re in different territory. Now it isn’t just like, “Well, you didn’t fully practice what you preach.” All of us fall short, right? Different ways, different sins, but all of us fall short of living out what we believe. But when you start using the language of God to justify your sin and to claim your sin is not sin, it’s actually God-given, you’ve got a special revelation, big red flags, big alarm bells ought to be sounding.

And this is of course particularly bad when the person isn’t just a spiritual authority but is actually regarded as a prophet. In the case of Muhammad, in the case of David Thoreau, David Thoreau, David Koresh. All of those things are to say, non-Mormons should be able to see those patterns outside of Mormonism and say, “Yeah, those are all true things.” I’m not going to make the argument that Joseph Smith falls into this pattern. I’m going to present the facts and just suggest, well, do you see any similarities? Do you see anything that sounds like he’s claiming special privileges from God in secret revelations to be able to have sex with his teenage housekeeper, for instance. We’ll get into all that. So again, that argument, some people are going to be immediately alienated by it. How dare you compare this thing in Mormonism from this very similar thing in Islam.

I’ve already gotten that criticism and been told, that’s hate speech. No, it’s not. That’s just not being blind, not doing special pleading. If two things are the same, it’s okay to say this thing over here looks like that thing over there. Obviously there are major differences between Islam and LDS theology, but there are also some similarities and we can call those out. So with that, that’s the first way. As I said, it is going to work for some people, it’s not going to work for other people. Here’s where we need to dive deeper, and this will be relevant for the next two ways. The New York Times in 2014 reported that Mormon leaders had, for the first time, acknowledged that Joseph Smith who’d been portrayed in church materials as a loyal partner to his loving spouse, Emma, actually took as many as 40 wives, some already married and one only 14 years old.

Again, judge for yourself, that sounds anything like what we just heard from David Koresh or from Mohammed, but that’s what LDS leaders are just now, in 2014… I mean just now, I’m old, nine years ago, but still in the scheme of things, for a long time this was covered up or hushed up or just downplayed or ignored. Where Brigham Young was pretty openly acknowledged as a polygamist, but Joseph Smith being a polygamist was something that the church didn’t really deal forthrightly with. Now, in the tremendous defense of the LDS here, I think they’re doing a pretty good job of being forthright and handling it directly now, and I think in many ways it’s a model for how you should organizationally, or as a church, handle scandal and controversy. I have critiques. I think there’s still areas they’re downplaying, distorting, misrepresenting, or just not talking about, but nevertheless, those critiques don’t overwhelm, the majority is that they’re really directly tackling these really hard issues, and God bless him for it.

Having said that, in so doing, I think they bring out a pattern of what appears to be lies from Joseph Smith and from others. And that’s really significant if the claim is that Joseph Smith is an inspired prophet of God. If you find out the prophet is a liar, it makes it a little harder to believe that he’s a true prophet. What do I mean by that? Well, as I said, Salt Lake Tribune points out that we already knew, and it was well established within the LDS and none LDS circles that Brigham Young was a polygamist. He was very open about this fact. But many Mormons, until the late nineties and maybe even later, didn’t really realize this was true of Joseph Smith himself. And there’s a reason for that, because that was not what they were told. That was not what’s being proclaimed. The LDS website, as I said, which was doing a pretty good job of dealing with these things, acknowledges that many details about the early practice of plural marriage are unknown because participants were asked to keep their actions confidential.

The historical records of early plural marriage is therefore thin. Few records of the time provide details, and later reminiscences are not always reliable. This is going to be a problem with my presentation of all of the subsequent facts that we are trying to put together, almost two decades after the fact, what happened in this period of time, and they were intentionally secretive about it. Joseph Smith did not want this written down. He did not want there to be a written record of these marriages. This is not like temple sealings, it’s not what’s happening here. These are private ceremonies where he’s telling women that they’re now his wife and then they can have sex.

We have pretty good evidence towards it. Not all of them. There are some that are sealings for eternity, meaning that they’re not going to be living as husband and wife with him now, but they’re going to be his spirit bride in the next life. But there are others where it seems pretty clear that they are having a physical relationship and he’s telling them, “This is not sinful because we’re actually husband and wife. So don’t consider this adultery and don’t tell anyone about it.” So with that, let’s get into a little bit of the history and the timeline. The first thing to know, if you’re not a Mormon, if you are a Mormon, I suspect you already know it, is the Book of Mormon actually is anti polygamy for now, but it makes an interesting kind of point.

So this is 1830 in the book of Jacob chapter two, it says, “There shall not any man among you have saved but one wife, in concubines, ye shall have none because God says he delights in the chastity of women.” And then it says, “For if I will say at the Lord of hosts, raise up seed unto me, I will command my people otherwise they shall harken under these things.” In other words, there’s kind of an escape clause, even now in Jacob two, that yes, polygamy is wrong for now. “I could command otherwise, saith the Lord.” Now, this is actually an interesting distinction between Catholic and Mormon theology here, that as Catholics we could say there are times where God is very clear and forbidding polygamy, and there are times where he forbids it not because it’s morally good, but he permits it because the people are hardened of heart.

Look at what Jesus says about the law of Moses or because of other circumstances, but he never can command something as a positive good saying you have to engage in plural marriage or polygamy if it’s something that’s against the order of nature, which, according to Jesus, with the two becoming one flesh, polygamy seems to be. Now the Mormon view is that God could forbid it, permit it or demand it situationally. Now, we disagree on that. Nevertheless, that’s not a contradiction. And so in the LDS defense, it’s perfectly reasonable to say that at one time in one place something is forbidden and in another time, in one place, it’s permitted or even demanded. To take the example of eating ritually impure food, St. Peter has this vision where he sees delicious food descending from heaven, a lot of it being food he can’t eat as a practicing Jew, and he’s given the message, slaughter and eat. So he’s being told the ritual laws of keeping kosher are no longer binding. And so as a Christian, he’s actually being called, in his particular case, he doesn’t just have the freedom to eat ritually and pure food.

He’s being invited into the house of Cornelius, and it would be morally wrong for him to refuse to go into this Gentile’s house that he needs… He has a greater duty to go and do this thing that under the Jewish law might have been viewed as forbidden. Hopefully that’s clear. So I’m saying there’s nothing wrong with saying something is forbidden over here and permitted or even demanded over there. That’s not a contradiction. We’ll get into contradictions in the next section. But just so you know. So that’s kind of the theological framework of the Book of Mormon, 1830. And then there’s this passage in the next chapter of Jacob where it says the Lamanites, these are allegedly Native Americans. “Your brethren whom you hate because of their filthiness, and the cursings which have come upon their skins are more righteous than you, for they have not forgotten the commandment of the Lord, which was given unto their fathers that they should have saved it were one wife and concubines. They should have none.”

And so then they’re told a few verses later that, “Oh, my brethren I fear that unless you shall repent of your sins, that their skins will be whiter than yours when you shall be brought with them before the throne of God.” Now, you might be saying, hold up all this about skin color. It sounds like the 19th century racist stuff more than it sounds like the Bible. So let’s talk about that for a second. Now, I thought about making another video on this, just how would you as a faithful LDS handle the idea this doesn’t sound like God talking this sounds like a racist guy from the 19th century talking? But that’s self-explanatory. Either you of accept that or you don’t. But nevertheless, you need to know something about the role this plays in early LDS theology.

You just heard these two references to skin color being a result of wickedness. And so this is the curse of Ham. And before that, the curse of Cain. There’s the idea that there were wicked men who got punished with dark skin. And so in the American context, it’s Native American red skin. And of course, the old world context, this would be black skin. Obviously both black and red are silly social labels for the skin color, but that’s it. And so in Pearl of Great Price, which also comes out in 1830, we’re told that Enoch also beheld the residue of the people, which were the sons of Adam. They were a mixture of all the seed of Adam’s [inaudible 00:32:06] It was the seed of Cain, for the seed of Cain or black and had not place among them. So there is this idea that allegedly going all the way back to the second generation of humans, Cain and Abel, that’s where black people come from and they’re not to be in the community.

And Brigham Young really goes nuts with this. The second prophet of the LDS makes, I’m going to share it, but look, I’m as uncomfortable as you probably are. He says, “You see some classes of the human family that are black, uncommonly disagreeable, low in their habits, wild and seemingly deprived of nearly all the blessings of the intelligence that is generally bestowed upon mankind.” And then he says that this is because the first man that committed the odious crime of killing one of his brethren will be cursed the longest of anyone. So that’s Cain, right? And so he said, Cain might have been killed and that would have put a termination of that line of human beings. This was not to be. And the Lord put a mark upon him, which is the flat nose and black skin. So again, this sounds much more like 19th century racism than it does like anything you see in scripture. Young goes on to say, traced mankind down to after the flood, then another curse is pronounced upon the same race.

They should be the servant of servants, and they will be until that curse is removed. And the abolitionists cannot help it nor in the least alter that decree. Now, you’ll notice Young is being very explicit that he doesn’t just mean black skin in some metaphorical way of saying, “Oh, you’ve darkened the intellect,” or something like. No, no, he’s actually arguing against this caricature of black people. And then he says that they’re not to be part of the priesthood and says, “How long is that race to endure the dreadful curse that is upon them? That it’ll happen until all the descendants of Adam have received the promises and enjoyed the blessings of the priesthood and the keys thereof. Now, the LDS church in 1978 declared that time had come, and now black people can be Mormon priests. So congrats, I guess. But I bring all this up, not just to say, “Hey, this sounds weird and wrong,” but because this is actually going to be a really important background to why polygamy starts to happen. And that sounds very strange, but we’re going to get there.

So just bear in mind, there’s this skin color theology, and that’s 1830. 1831, doctrines and covenants, which is also considered scripture by the LDS church. It explicitly forbids polygamy. Speaking to the church doctrines in covenants 42 says, “Thou shalt love thy wife with all thy heart and shall cleave unto her and none else.” And then in 49 it says, “It’s lawful that he should have one life and man have one wife, not many.” Now, this is in response to someone coming from the shaker background that viewed sex as evil, and saying it’s like, “No, no, marriage is not evil. Sex is not evil, but it needs to be monogamous. Totally fair, totally reasonable. We’re on board with all that.” However, at the same time, in 1831, you also have the secret beginnings of polygamy, that while these things are being said publicly, allegedly from the Lord, Joseph Smith is privately claiming the Lord is giving him a different message.

And so the LDS website explains that after receiving a revelation, commending him to practice plural marriage, Joseph Smith married multiple wives and introduced the practice to close associates. Notice this is still very secretive. This is not out in the open. And then we already read that other part, but the details are really sketchy here because it was really hush-hush. But LDS newsroom, the PR dimension to the website, addresses this and says, “In 1831, church founder Joseph Smith made a prayerful inquiry about the Old Testament practice of plural marriage. This resulted in the divine instruction to reinstitute the practice as a religious principle.” So notice you’ve got three claims allegedly all coming from God in 1831. You’ve got these claims in Doctrines and Covenants about how no, this is wrong, and then in Pearl of Great Price, a year before, but then you also have Joseph Smith privately saying, “God actually told me this is okay.”

Now, the LDS website doesn’t tell us what this 1831 revelation is. It doesn’t give us any details, but we do have details of this. We will get into those details in just a moment. It’s going to tie into the skin color thing. The other thing to know, and we’re going to get into Doctrines and Covenants 132, which is going to be the real critical kind chapter here. It is publicly recorded as a revelation of 1843, but, the LDS say, evidence indicates some of the principles involved in this revelation were known by the prophet as early as 1831. So there’s a secret beginning to plural marriage 12 years before even Doctrines and Covenants 132, and well before, I believe it’s 1854, when there’s an open acknowledgement by the Mormons that they’re engaged in plural marriage or polygamy. So what is this 1831 revelation?

We don’t have it directly from the church. We do have W.W. Phelps. Now he is the person who actually… I think he’s the scribe for Joseph Smith, who actually wrote a lot of the Book of Mormon or all of the Book of Mormon. He actually did the transcribing. That’s what I mean by wrote. And he writes to Brigham Young, again, Joseph Smith’s successor, describing to him how in July of 1831, there were seven elders, Joseph Smith, Oliver Cowdery, Phelps himself, Martin Harris, Joseph Coe, Zeba Peterson, Joshua Lewis. And that they were praying about what to do with the American Indians, the Lamanites and Nephites, because they were about to go preach to Indian country. And they were saying like, “What are we going to do here?” And what he says, the revelation of Joseph Smith was, “Verily, I say unto you that the wisdom of man in his fallen state knoweth not the purposes and the privileges of my holy priesthood.” This all allegedly coming from God.

“And that it is my will that in time you should take unto you wives of the Lamanites and Nephites that their posterity may become white, delights him and just, for even now, their females are more virtuous than the Gentiles.” And so there’s this idea, “Hey, go take some American Indian wives because you can fix their skin color, you can make them lighter skinned, and this is going to make them holier. And again, that’s why I had to go into the part before about there are these strange parts in early LDS theology that really associate black skin with moral evil, and it been a curse from God and consequence of the sins of the forefathers, Cain and Ham, neither of which I would argue is actually a good reading of the Genesis account. But nevertheless, plural marriage is first introduced, not generally, not everybody gets to do it, but these seven guys get to take extra wives or will get to take extra wives so they can have white kids with Indian women.

And Phelps talks about this. He says three years later, he approached Joseph Smith and asked how this was going to be because all seven of these guys were already married, and that Joseph Smith had pointed to the patriarchs in the Old Testament. So that’s the secret 1831 revelation, as recounted 30 years later. Now remember that thing about how recollections, reminisces can fail. Nevertheless, Phelps is a scribe. He’s a guy who is really detail oriented. He had a very detailed account of this, and he’s not writing this in a hostile way. He’s totally cool with this revelation. He’s writing to Brigham Young who’s also totally cool with it. And the fact that the LDS church now says, “Yeah, this seems to go back to 1831,” seems to be an implicit acknowledgement that at least the substance of this is true, unless there’s some other 1831 revelation of Joseph Smith that I don’t know about. In my research, all of the 1831 stuff Joseph Smith was secretly teaching about plural marriage was right here.

So then you have this period for about four years where somewhere in here, Joseph Smith first starts to practice plural marriage in his own life. Now, you’ll notice there is not a special permission in 1831 given for him to take another white wife. This is specific to the Native American women. Nevertheless, they have a housekeeper, and we don’t know exactly when, but somewhere seemingly between 1832 and 1836, he and this housekeeper, Fannie Alger start some kind of sexual relationship. And the evidence is frankly lacking in terms of whether he was secretly married to her without his wife’s knowledge or whether it was just adultery. Either way, Emma Smith is going to find out and seemingly gets her kicked out. Again, all of this stuff is testified to decades after the fact. So the details are a little shaky, but there’s numerous witnesses to there being a Fanny Alger incident where he was caught having a relationship with her.

And this is very controversial. The LDS website talks about this and explained, she was born in 1816, so she was a teenager at the time, and that several Latter Day Saints, who lived in Kirtland, Ohio, where they were before the move to Nauvoo, reported that she had married Joseph Smith, becoming his first plural wife. Now that timing is really significant. This is the early to mid 1830s, well before Joseph Smith claims to have gotten a revelation from God saying, he’s able to do this. He just already is doing this. So again, I’ve got no theological or logical problem with the idea that God could tell you you can’t do something in one era and then in the later era telling you you can do it. But it is a problem if while you’re not supposed to be doing it, you’re secretly doing it.

If 10 years before St. Peter was told to take and eat the ritually impure food, he was secretly having bacon on the side, that’d be a problem. And so likewise, if Joseph Smith was secretly having a relationship with a teenager on the side, that’s a problem, because he doesn’t have, from anything we see, divine permission to do so. There is no written revelation telling him he’s allowed to do this. Not until 1843. And the LDS website points out, this seems to have been a short relationship. She gets kicked out of town in 1836, she goes to Missouri, and within a few months was married to another guy.

Now, this becomes a really pivotal moment in early LDS history because one of the highest ranking officials, remember the seven who were told about plural marriage, well, six and Joseph Smith, one of them is Oliver Cowdry. He is the assistant president. He’s just called the president, but he’s not the actual number one guy. I believe he’s number two to Joseph Smith. He is, at the very least, extremely high ranking. He discovers this and is horrified by this relationship with Fannie Alger. He calls it a dirty, nasty, filthy scrape. Originally he’d written affair and then he changes it to scrape in a letter to his brother. And he voices his discomfort with this because externally, the LDS Church is saying they only believe in monogamy. And here Justice Smith has either started having an adulterous relationship or a bigamist relationship, both of which are condemned by everything the LDS church is saying publicly.

And so he’s horrified by this, and he starts to talk about the adultery, which, by all documentary evidence, is what is going on. And for this, he’s excommunicated from the church. And so we actually have the minutes, which are a little vague about some of the details, but we know that he is charged with destroying the character of President Joseph Smith by falsely insinuating that he was guilty of adultery. Now, notice Joseph Smith, we now know, from the LDS website and from plenty of Mormon sources, he was having a relationship with her that his wife didn’t seem to have known about, wasn’t happy with, and seemed to have intervened to end, and a relationship that we have no record of there being a marriage. So maybe they were secretly married, in contradiction to what the LDS Church was saying about the prohibition against secret marriages.

We’ll get into that. Or maybe they were just having adultery. Either way, Cowdry seems like he has a completely reasonable basis upon which to say something seems really off here. Nevertheless, he’s brought up on charges of destroying Joseph Smith’s character, and David Patton talks about how he had gone to Oliver Cowdry and Cowdry had told him that Joseph had actually admitted to the affair and confessed it to his wife, Emma. And it’s still a little vague in terms of all the details. In any case, Joseph Smith gets up and denies all this. He says that Oliver Cowdry had been his bosom friend and that he had entrusted him with many things, and then in the minutes to say, he then gave a history respecting the girl business. We’re not told what that history is. We’re not told what Joseph Smith’s defense is, whether he denies it, whether he explains that it’s a secret marriage, whatever it is.

Nevertheless, they end up kicking Cowdery out of the church. And so I just think it’s an important detail that this is not just some private sin. This is something where the mechanism of the church itself is getting involved in saying, “Hey, if you think this is adultery, you’re out. You’re excommunicated.” And it’s really a shocking thing. And then Smith also impugns Cadre’s character. He suggested this is really that Cowdery wanted to get some property and decided that God or no God, devil or no devil, he was going to get it. And that’s why he’d made up this stuff against Joseph Smith. Now we now know that doesn’t seem to be true. Maybe there was some property interest, maybe Cowdery was really a bad character, even though Joseph Smith had really praised him throughout, including in things that were allegedly scripture.

But it also just seems like smearing the whistleblower, right? Someone has called attention to your adultery and you’re saying, “Oh, what a horrible person you are.” And there’s kind of this, for lack of a better term, almost, gaslighting gets misused, but that kind of discrediting of a legitimate witness. Either way, that’s 1838. I’m jumping forward in time because that’s an important part of the Fannie Alger story. But the Fannie Alger story, the relationship itself is the early 1830s, probably between 1832 to maybe 1836 or early to mid. Around this same time, in 1835, maybe three years after this has begun, the Mormon Church has been getting these whispered rumors about their being polygamy being practiced, and they deny them very explicitly in what was considered scripture. Remember, Doctrines and Covenants is considered scripture. In the 1835 edition of Doctrines and Covenants it was unanimously voted on and passed.

There’s section 101, it is now removed. There’s a new Section 101, so if you go and look up Doctrines and Covenants 101, you’re not going to find it anymore, but in the 1835 edition, I actually have a picture of it on screen, you can see the physical copies in the Joseph Smith papers. The original 1835 Doctrines and Covenants, section 101, denies explicitly that Mormons believe in polygamy or secret marriage. It says, “We believe that all marriages in the Church of Christ of Latter Day Saints should be solemnized in a public meeting or feast prepared for that purpose.” So you can’t just go and get married to a woman in a barn, which is what Joseph Smith is alleged to have done with Fannie Alger. And then we were told, “We declare that we believe that one man should have one wife.” That’s really super clear. There’s no, “Oh, well, it’s not adultery, it’s plural marriage.”

No, no, no. One man, one wife, super clear in 1835. Now, what’s striking about that is Joseph Smith helps write Doctrines and Covenants in 1835, and he is not living by this. He is publicly declaring from God one thing and privately declaring from God an opposite thing. That’s what I mean when I say a lie, that those two things can’t both be true, and he has to know those two things can’t both be true. He’s lying about what God is saying about marriage, either to the public or to these women that he is seducing or both. But it either case, he’s using his authority in a way to suggest that God has said X, and then in private using his authority to say, God has said the opposite of X, and those can’t both be true. One of those has to be a lie in 1835.

This is not, he used to do this, and then God stepped in and changed it. It’s like, no, no. In 1835, he was simultaneously seemingly having a sexual relationship with Fannie Alger and claiming that, no, that’s impossible because you can only have one marriage. So how does the LDS church respond? They just remove this section of scripture. Okay, that’s 1835. The next seven years until… So remember 1843 is when the Doctrines and Covenants official announcement happens. You have this pattern of secret, plural marriages or secret polygamy and public denials, that it’s not just a one-time kind of lie. We see repeated lies about this. And so the LDS website says, “Joseph told associates that an angel appeared to him three times between 1834 and 1842 and commanded him to proceed with plural marriage when he hesitated to move forward.” Now, there’s two things that are striking about that timing.

First in 1835, the LDS Church is denying the thing that Smith claimed an angel taught him in 1834. On the other hand, because Smith appears to have been, it’s not totally clear, he appears to have already been having a relationship with Fannie Alger, because she’s gone by 1836, and she’s in the household by 1832, I think. So he seems to have already been in a sexual relationship with her, which may or may not have been considered marriage by those involved before 1834. Seemingly. That part’s shakier. But either way, the 1834 date is strange because it doesn’t really make sense of what we’re seeing publicly in 1835 or what we’re seeing in private in the early 1830s, which by the way is also after he told these six other men in 1831 that they could have multiple wives among the Native Americans. So none of this timeline works.

His claim about an angel telling him in 1834 doesn’t make any sense. It’s way too late to explain his behavior in 1831. It’s too early to explain the behavior in 1835. So this doesn’t ring true. It looks false. Nevertheless, we’re told that between 1834 and 1842, an angel, three times, has to tell him… He really doesn’t want to have to have sex with these women. He really doesn’t want to have take on any other wives. But finally, the third time in 1842, an angel drew his sword and Joseph Smith was threatened with destruction, and so he realized he had to obey. It’s really a strange and striking thing because why would this be the one area that he disobeys God or disobeys the angel? Or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe he was regularly disobeying God and the angel. But either way, this is a strange story from his own perspective.

It’s even stranger because prior to 1843, the LDS also acknowledged that he was sealed with Louisa Beaman, because we know that was in April 1841. There’s much more clarity in terms of the timeline there. The Fannie Alger thing was much more hush-hush. The Beaman thing was much more open. It’s still not open, open, but more people knew about it. And so if he’s allegedly not obeying the angel in 1843 and has to be threatened with destruction, how do we make sense of the fact that he already has another wife in 1841? So we’re up to wife number three now. Now he’s gotten separated from Fannie Alger, she’s married to somebody else, but it seems why is the angel criticizing him when he’s doing it? Nevertheless, Joseph Smith is after Beaman, then sealed to a number of other women who are already married. That’s an interesting line. Remember… Look, I understand Mormons aren’t going to want to be compared to David Koresh and the Branch Davidians, but there’s a similar pattern where the prophet claims special authority to not only take wives that are single, but also to take other men’s wives.

This should be setting off some red flags in terms of that looks like unchecked male libido and power. In any case, we don’t know a lot about the details. Some of those women, it doesn’t appear to have been a sexual relationship. He was claiming them to be his brides in the next life. Some of them may have been sexual. We don’t have the documentary evidence. I don’t want to claim more than what could actually be claimed. Either way, it’s surprising at the very least. And one of the reasons we don’t have more evidence is these other men’s wives are among those who he’s swearing to secrecy. Nevertheless, word of this starts to trickle out. You can only take so many wives within a community before people start to notice and start to ask questions.

And some of the people are starting to use this seemingly for their own purposes, saying they too have the authority to take these other women. So they’re just using it to seduce women. By the way, this is what’s called spiritual wifery. And so the LDS say what Smith was doing was not that, even if it kind of looked like that, but that other LDS were doing that and that the church was not cool with it. So this then kind of leads to an explosion. These men are cut off from the church and they’re like, “Hang on a second, I’m just doing what Joseph Smith did.” And so they start to publicly talk about how Joseph Smith was doing the same thing with women. And so then, “The rumors prompted members and leaders to issue carefully worded denials that denounce spiritual wifery and polygamy, but were silent about what Joseph Smith and others saw as divinely mandated, celestial, plural marriage.”

So in other words, this is how you can get something like in 1835, the proclamation that a man is to have one wife because they’re like, well, you’re saying one thing with carefully worded denials. No, no, no. That’s not a carefully worded denial, that’s a lie. A carefully worded denial is where you say something that is technically true but misleading. When someone says, did you steal that? And you say, no, I didn’t because in your mind you don’t call it theft, you call it plural ownership. No, no, it doesn’t work. Like you can’t just have a private system where the word polygamy means something different to you than it means in the English language. What is going on here with plural marriage is literally polygamy. Whether it’s demanded of God or whether it’s in the course of nature, whatever, it doesn’t matter why you’re committing polygamy. Plenty of polygamists would say God told them to or gave them permission to. It doesn’t make it not polygamy any more than you would say, “Oh, Christian marriage isn’t monogamous.” Of course it is.

Monogamy doesn’t have anything to do with whether God called you to it or not. Neither does polygamy. Nothing in the term. I mean polygamy, many wives. All it says is you have many wives or many women technically, and Joseph Smith did have many women. So when he’s making these carefully worded denials, these are what a less generous interpretation was called lies. He’s repeatedly lying about this. And so we have plenty of examples of this. You can judge for yourself. Is this a carefully worded denial or is he lying? In the Elders Journal, which he is an editor of, in July of 1838, there’s a Q and A section, and his name is listed on it. It says Elders Journal, Joseph Smith Jr. Editor, Far West Missouri, July 1838, and then has a Q and A section, running under his name, and the seventh question is, “Do the Mormons believe in having more wives than one?”

There’s a very straightforward answer, and the answer is yes, privately, no publicly. That is not what he says so. He says, “No, not at the same time.” But they believe that if their companion dies, they have a right to marry again. Well, no one’s questioning whether you can get remarried if your wife dies. The question is, can you simultaneously have two wives? And he’s saying, no, we don’t believe that, while he is secretly practicing it. Carefully worded denial? Perhaps. Looks more like a lie. In 1842, remember, you’ve got the Beaman ceremony. That was, I believe, 1841. Yeah, 1841, April 1841. After that October 1842, word of this is spreading far enough that other LDS leaders have to come in and also lie, also deny that this thing is going on. That includes, tragically, Emma Smith, herself, the aggrieved wife of Joseph Smith. In an October 1842 statement, she and other leading women certify and declare that we know of no system of marriage being practiced in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints save the one contained in the Book of Doctrine and Covenants.

That’s the one we saw earlier. And so it explicitly denies what they call a secret wife system. And they claim that JC Bennett, this ex-member who’d been calling, sounding the alarm about this, he’s just making it up. It’s a disclosure of his own make. “Yeah, you’re just making that up.” This is a lie, right? This is just… Yes, there was a secret wife system. Yes, there was a system of marriage being practiced by her husband and many other leaders other than the one outlined publicly in Doctrines and Covenants. There’s no way I think of squaring those two statements because they’re just falsehoods. And in fact, the LDS website almost acknowledges this. It illustrates the complex situation which they found themselves in responding to these claims, that at least three of the undersigned women had firsthand experience with plural marriage.

Eliza R. Snow was sealed to Joseph Smith on June 29th, 1842 in the presence of Sarah M. Cleveland, and Elizabeth Ann Whitney was present on July 27th, 1842 when her daughter Sarah Ann Whitney was sealed, dismissed. So three of the women have directly witnessed these plural marriages, and they’re publicly saying, no, there’s no such thing. That doesn’t happen. It is unclear when Emma Smith learned of the plural wives, Joseph Smith married a Nauvoo, though she knew of some of them by spring 1843. That is an interesting detail by the way, that Emma Smith seems to have been not cool with any of this. So I guess it’s possible. Maybe I’m being too harsh on Emma Smith, maybe she really didn’t know that what she was attesting to was a lie, but certainly at least three of the other women who were signing this did know because they had firsthand experience. There’s no way they didn’t know that their own children, or in some cases they themselves were involved in polygamous marriages while they’re denying any such secret marriage system exists, nor is it just the women who are doing this.

Also in October 1842, several of the leading men do the same thing, including future LDS president, Wilford Woodruff. They have an actual declaration where they say they know of no other rule or system of marriage than the one published from the Book of Doctrine and Covenants. And so they put their own credibility on the line and they sign it with their names. And so we know that they’re not telling the truth. And in fact, we know that several of these men knew better, that they were saying things that were not true. And I say all of this… Look, people lie in every religion and every denomination, but when you are using the apparatus of the church to declare “God has said this, and that’s what we’re obeying,” when you’re secretly teaching God has said the opposite thing, and that’s what you’re obeying. That’s more than just some private failing. That calls into question, how reliable of a prophet, how reliable of a leader are you in a way that should be sounding a lot of alarms, I think, for LDS believers.

Okay, so now we’re getting to the part of the story that I think more people know. July of 1843, the semi-public institution of plural marriage. Now this is something that is still not known to the non-Mormon outside public, but you’re starting to have a greater number of people who are brought into the circle. And it declares a new and eternal covenant. I think that word new is important because remember, Joseph Smith had been doing this for 12 years now, but in Doctrines and Covenants 132 verse four, it says, “For behold, I reveal unto you a new and everlasting covenant.” So we’re told two things, it’s a new revelation and it’s everlasting. And then we’re told that if you don’t abide in that covenant, you are damned. That’s going to be really important as well. We’ll get into why. What is that covenant? There’s a lot to it, but to give a simplified or maybe even simplistic account, a man can marry a woman by this in the new and everlasting covenant and be sealed to her with the Holy Spirit.

And as long as they don’t do anything like commit murder, they will be written in the Lamb’s Book of Life and they will rise again and they shall be gods. And so there is a celestial marriage is what this is called. But with that, that you’re not just able to be celestially married to one person, you’re able to be married to multiple women. Women can’t do this, but men can get married to multiple women. And so jumping down to verse 61, “That if any man espoused a virgin desires to espouse another, if the first woman gives her consent and they’re both virgins and not vowed to anyone else, then he’s justified,” he’s okay. “He cannot commit adultery for they are given unto him. For he cannot commit adultery with that, that belongeth unto him and to no one else.” Your wife is your property, and so therefore you’re not committing any crime if you have owning, a bunch of houses, right?

They don’t say that, that’s maybe unfair, but there is this language of women just belonging to the men, and that’s why they can take many and he can take 10 virgins if he wants to. Verse 62 says that. Women of course cannot do this. If a woman who’s espoused then wants be with another man, she’s committed adultery and shall be destroyed. Because yeah, God isn’t cool with that. And that’s right there in verse 63. Verse 64, “If any man has a wife who holds the keys of his power and he teaches her the law of the priesthood, and then she shall believe and administer under him or she shall be destroyed.” That a woman has to accept this spiritual principle. So that puts a real… As a woman, if you got married, say, in the 1830s, and now your husband comes home and says, “Oh yeah, God told Joseph Smith, I can have a second wife.”

Your vows aren’t enough. You can’t say, “Well, you promised fidelity to me, you’re violating that.” Doesn’t matter. You’re told you have to accept this new law or you will be destroyed. And in fact, Emma Smith is explicitly singled out, which it may be a sign that she was not cool with this stuff. In verse 52, Emma Smith is told to receive all those that have been given unto my servant Joseph, who are virtuous and pure before me, but those who are not pure and have said they were pure shall be destroyed. So if you claim to be a virgin and you’re not, you’re going to hell. But otherwise you can be Joseph Smith’s wife. And then in verse 53, we’re told, “I’m the Lord thy God and ye shall obey my voice, and I give unto my servant, Joseph, that he shall be made ruler over many things for he has been faithful over a few things, and from his forth, I will strengthen him.”

Now, you’ll notice here there’s an invocation of this biblical imagery that the one who’s been faithful in small things will be faithful in many things, that God will basically bless faithfulness. And is being used in this way that as a non-Mormon seems evil, seems like you’re using it to promote infidelity and unfaithfulness to your wife while using a passage about the good of faithfulness. But nevertheless, you’ll just notice this invocation. It’s not a private failing or sin. This is Joseph Smith claiming, “No, no, this is what God is saying.” And so this is coming at the hand of Joseph Smith telling his wife, God says, you have to let me have other wives or you’re going to go to hell. It’s right there. And then we’re told in verse 54 that Emma Smith is commanded by God to abide and cleave unto Joseph and to no one else.

If she will not abide this commandment, she shall be destroyed. So the other women, at least on paper, have the ability to consent to their husbands taking extra wives. Emma does not have that ability. Joseph Smith is already doing it, and he’s going to continue doing it, and she’s not allowed to leave and she’s not allowed to object to it. And that is a really important spiritual principle at play. And I would suggest in that it’s not just that there are some red flags from a modern non-Mormon readership, and even I think for many modern Mormon readers looking at this saying, “This looks sketchy,” but the timeline just doesn’t work, that this isn’t some new thing, this is what he’s already been secretly doing. So it’s strange that he’s claiming that God tells him 12 years later, “Oh, this new revelation telling me I can do this thing thing I’ve already been doing.” Doesn’t work at a timeline level because he’s been secretly doing it while lying about it.

Now, as a sort of addendum to this, this is also a really important factor a year later in his death, because this is a very controversial moment. Once he starts to get a little more public about polygamy, a lot of LDS followers, including some really high ranking ones, just say, “Peace out, we’re done. This is too far. You’re sinning and you’re a fallen prophet and you’re lying about this stuff.” And so some of those ex members form a newspaper called the Nauvoo Expositor, and they include the former first counselor and the first presidency, William Law. So you have some really high ranking Mormons who break away from Joseph Smith over this bit of him and some women. You have Cowdry before that, you have actually a whole series of really important Mormon figures who get excommunicated, who are also like the witnesses that are relied upon to prove Joseph Smith is telling the truth, who he’s also saying are unscrupulous people in the next breath, and are excommunicated from the church.

It is a fascinating history. I didn’t even get into the role of the three witnesses and the eight witnesses. We’ll leave all of that aside, the Nauvoo Expositor, in Mormon narratives about this, we often hear about the martyrdom allegedly of Joseph Smith, that he’s basically… The version of the story that I’ve heard, and at least as someone who was moderately exposed to it, just sounded like there were a bunch of bigoted evangelical Protestants on the frontier who were freaked out by a new religious system and they ganged up and they killed Joseph Smith. And I think that’s the popular version that a lot of Mormons have as well. And frankly, there are elements of truth to that. And look, again, Catholics who were in the 19th century, there’s plenty of anti-Catholic violence and back and forth and all of that. It’s not an unreasonable story, but that story can miss a couple important details.

So the Nauvoo Expositor is a new newspaper that is publishing what the LDS website claims were inflammatory thing. They used inflammatory language to voice their discontent with the practice of plural marriage, Joseph Smith’s teachings on the nature of God from his recent King Follette sermon, and his mixing of religious and civic authority in Nauvoo. Now, that is an important detail that Joseph Smith has quietly created a theocratic state where he controls the military in the United States. And that’s something that a lot of Americans weren’t totally comfortable with, including a lot of disaffected Mormons. And so in the Nauvoo Expository, they publish this. Now you can judge for yourself. This is inflammatory language. William Law, you heard of before, describes what he calls the revelation so-called authorized certain men to have more wives and one at a time in this world and in the world to come.

It said this was the law and commanded Joseph to enter in as the law. And also that he should minister to others. That seems to me to be a very dry, straightforward and completely accurate description of what happened in 1843 with Doctrines and Covenants 132. It’s distinguishing celestial and marriages for time and marriages for eternity, and explaining that Joseph Smith was told he had to do this, and that he had to instruct others to do it. All of that is right there in the writings secretly. But this was not something that the LDS were being open and honest with the non-Mormon public about. And so how did they respond to this. “With the sanction of the city council,” this is from the LDS website, “Joseph Smith ordered a marshal with the assistance of the Nauvoo Legion to destroy the printing press. So the marshal and a posse of a hundred men remove the press, scattered the type and burned the remaining copies of the newspaper.”

Hey, you’re getting bad press, this is definitely one way to respond to it, burn the newspaper, and not just the newspaper, destroy the printing press so they can never publish again. This is a direct assault on basic principles like freedom of speech. And it’s not that there was something that was particularly offensive and you needed to be confiscated. There’s a ground and a basis on which to do that. In destroying the printing press to make sure they can’t say anything, you’re actually impeding their ability to express even future ideas. And so at this point and only at this point that Joseph Smith is arrested on charges of inciting a riot, which fair. And now, this time a mob comes, it’s not a pro Mormon mob. There’s an interesting detail here without getting into the whole thing, Joseph Smith had had a gun smuggled into prison. He seemed to have been planning a prison break.

When the mob arrived he seemed to have thought it was a mob of Mormons coming to free him, but it actually was a mob of people who were worried about the Mormons, didn’t like the Mormons, and he gets into a gun battle with them and is killed. You can judge for yourself if that constitutes martyrdom. It seems like that’s closer to a war or even gang warfare, and I would be hesitant to call those situations martyrdom. Usually with a martyr, someone is laying down their life nonviolently. Nevertheless, that is just a thing to know. This is an important detail. You can’t understand the role of plural marriage without knowing the skin color thing, and you can’t understand why Joseph Smith was arrested and ultimately killed without understanding the plural marriage thing. All of these things are interconnected. So there’s one last thing I want to cover, which are the scriptural contradictions.

Oh, by the way, just in case this was not well-known. In 1890 in what’s called the Official Declaration One, president Woodruff, who you saw earlier, denied even knowing about this system that he knew about. He puts an end to the practice. It continues secretly for a while, but we can skip over that whole… But oh, this new and everlasting covenant is put on hold and there’s a debate about to what extent plural marriage could happen in the future. And all of that is much deeper water than I feel comfortable trying to explore as a non-Mormon, and isn’t super relevant for this. But just know your Mormon neighbor in America does not have multiple wives if he’s LDS, if there’s a splinter group, some of them continue to practice polygamy, those groups are very small. So that’s just an important… I don’t want you coming away from this thinking, “Oh, Mormons practice polygamy.”

They don’t anymore. They might in the future, they might outside of the US. There’s a little debate about all that stuff. We’ll leave all of that alone. The third, remember I said there were three things to cover the spiritual abuse, the pattern of Joseph Smith and other leaders lying about plural marriage. But the third are scriptural contradictions, and this is a short section. Don’t worry, we’re almost done. And here I want to reiterate what is and isn’t a contradiction. It’s not a contradiction for God to treat two different people differently. There were two different groups in different times and places or even the same person in different times, in different places differently. If you’ve got two kids, the older kid, you say she can go to bed at 10, but the younger kid has to go to bed by eight, that’s not a contradiction. You’re treating different cases differently.

That’s completely consistent with justice. It’s completely consistent with rationality. What would be a contradiction? Well, the law of contradiction prohibits contradictory propositions, which cannot both be true in the same sense at the same time. In other words, you can’t say, “Yeah, my daughter’s bedtime is at 10:00 PM but it is also not at 10:00 PM.” That is a meaningless assertion. You’ve just said two opposite things. If one is true, the other is false. If one is false, the other’s true. Right? They can’t both be true. That is a contradiction. And so what a lot of people say in response to Mormonism is, “Oh, look, in the New Testament, it’s clearly pro monogamy, and this is a contradiction.” And I think the Mormon response is fair, which is, “Well, maybe it’s a contradiction, or maybe God treats different people differently in different times.” That’s a pretty convincing counterargument.

What’s not a convincing counterargument is that he can treat the same people in two opposite ways. I’m going to give you two examples involving three people. Well, more than three people. The first contradiction, did God want Abraham to take Hagar as a second wife or not? The second contradiction. Ignoring the particular case of Bathsheba upon which both Mormons and Catholics and everybody agrees, was sinful, were the other wives of David and Solomon given by God or not? Were they good for David and Solomon to have a bunch of wives or not? This is not different times, different era. These concrete times and places. What does God say? And so let’s talk about Abraham first. Doctrines and Covenants 132. One of the rationales given is the citation to the patriarchs. And so we’re told in verse 34 that God commanded Abraham and Sarah gave Hagar to Abraham to wife.

And why did she use? Because this was the law. And so then it asks, was Abraham therefore, under condemnation, verily I say unto you, nay, for I, the Lord commanded it. Abraham received concubines and they bore him children and it was accounted unto him for righteousness. Now, you’ll notice earlier Mormon stuff had talked about these whoredoms, so we didn’t even talk about this, but concubines were evil. And now Doctrines and Covenants 132 is saying concubines are good because they’re God-given, in some cases. And so, again, this is just saying whether concubines are good or bad depends on whether God issued it. Whereas earlier Mormon teaching said, God hates whoredoms, and so he’s not going to presumably tell you to do something he hates. Nevertheless, I want to contrast that presentation that God wanted Hagar, Ishmael and all this to happen, and that he actually commanded it. Compare it to what Genesis actually says.

So jumping back to Genesis 15, this is the theological basis, said, God famously has Abraham go outside, look up at the stars and say, number the stars, you’re able to number them, so shall your descendants be. And so this is a problem because Abraham doesn’t have any kids. And so in Genesis 16, Sarah or Sarai, as she’s still known, his wife says, take my servant Hagar. She’s a presumably much younger woman. Sarah’s very old, which is why she can’t have kids.

So Sarah says to Abram, “Behold now the Lord has prevented me from bearing children go in to my maid. It may be that I shall obtain children by her.” So notice what’s happening here. God has promised to bring up descendants in Genesis 15, and now they’re trying, by human effort, to fulfill God’s promises in Genesis 16, and this is something that they’re smacked down for. Abraham in Genesis 17 laughs at the idea that his wife is going to bear a child. And when God promises to raise a bunch of descendants again, he says, “Oh, that Ishmael might live in thy sight.” And God says, “No, but Sarah, your wife, shall bury you a son and you shall call his name Isaac.” So in other words, the son of promise is Isaac, who is brought about miraculously rather than the son Ishmael brought about by male virility.

And so to really reinforce this point, in Genesis 17, we also see the creation of the covenant of circumcision. This is a very physical repudiation of relying upon your own virility, and instead entrusting in the Lord. This is what the whole covenant of circumcision is about. You might be wondering why did the Jews have to get circumcised? Well, because of this right here, this incident with Ishmael and Hagar, that Abraham relied on his own work, his own effort, his own virility rather than trusting in the Lord. Now, this is not just my interpretation. St. Paul and Genesis four… Galatians, excuse me, Galatians four talks about this. He says, “It is written that Abraham had two sons, one by a slave and one by a free woman.” Now, you’ll notice he doesn’t have a bunch of women by concubines. That’s all new to Doctrines and Covenants 132. It’s important he has exactly two.

The son of the slave was born according to the flesh, the son of the free woman through promise. He goes on to say, “We brethren, like Isaac, are children of the promise.” So this is the contrast. Galatians four is commenting on what we just saw in Genesis 15 to 17 and saying, yeah, one of them, Ishmael is produced through human effort by the flesh. The other is produced by the promise of God. So you can either rely on the flesh, your own authority, your own virility, your own power, or you can rely on God. All as to say, when Doctrines and Covenants 132 claims that God wanted this to happen, that seems completely at loggerheads with the actual biblical presentation of this event, where it was Abraham not trusting as much as he should have in God, not God giving him Hagar and a bunch of other women to raise up a bunch of kids.

No, no, no. The whole point is there’s going to be one son miraculously conceived through whom this promise will be fulfilled. So that’s Abraham. Let’s jump over to David and Solomon. This is very clear because this time it’s not even from Genesis or Galatians, it’s from the Book of Mormon itself. In the book of Jacob, chapter two, verse 24 very explicitly says, “Behold, David and Solomon truly had many wives and concubines, which thing was abominable before me, sayeth the Lord.” That could not be clearer, right? David and Solomon have many wives, many concubines, that’s evil. But then what is that, 13 years later, Doctrines and Covenants 132 says the opposite. “David also received many wives and concubines, and also Solomon, Moses, my servants,” that’s not really true of Moses, “and also many others of my servants from the beginning of creation until this time, and in nothing did they sin saving those things which they received not of me.”

Jacob 224 says it was evil for them to have many wives. Doctors and Covenants 132 says, it was not evil. It was actually good. In fact, God called for it to happen. Those two things can’t both be true. Doctors and Covenants 132 goes on to say in verse 39, “That David’s wives and concubines were given unto him of me by the hand of Nathan, my servant.” And we’re told again with the exception of Uriah and his wife, that Bathsheba, she’s married to another man. It would be wrong to take another man’s wife, but all the other women that he has and all the other women that Solomon has, this is good and God-given. Now again, when you go back and read the accounts, that’s not how it’s presented. Solomon particularly is presented as being led away from God by his many foreign wives. But we can leave aside the Old and New Testament and just say within Mormon scriptures directly, you’ve got one place where it says this is abominable and one place where it says this is good and given of God.

That’s a contradiction. There’s no way those two things can both be true. Okay, final thoughts just to close this whole five week series up. To summarize, Mormons are often the object of contempt and mockery. Be better than that. Instead, present the truth with love and with humility. Second, both Catholics and Mormons agree that the great a apostasy is a major issue which should be sorted out. And obviously, of course we take opposite views. So if you’re going to, as a non-Mormon, particularly as a Catholic or Orthodox for that matter, do a deep dive on one doctrine, do that. I am sure it can be overwhelming. You’re hearing all these things we disagree on. That’s okay. You don’t have to answer every contradiction, every disagreement. Just get really good on one area. Learn about the great apostasy if you’re finding yourself in conversation with Mormons. Third, Mormon theology, particularly regarding the Godhead, is often further than it seems from Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant theology. And so recognize when we might be using the same words to mean different things.

And fourth and finally, the history of plural marriage or polygamy in Mormonism is a problem not only because it contradicts survival, but I think more importantly for our purposes, because it’s easier to show, because it appears to be spiritual abuse, it certainly appears to be dishonesty by Joseph Smith and other leading LDS authorities, including those considered prophets. And it appears to be internally contradictory, that it relies on believing two incompatible beliefs about David, about Solomon, about Abraham that cannot both be true.

So for all of those reasons, regardless of whether you think polygamy is against nature, regardless of whether you think polygamy is against the New Testament, we should view this with a little bit of suspicion and say it does not look like Joseph Smith is a true prophet of God. It looks like he’s someone who is doing something privately, that he’s using scripture and prophetic language to justify that doesn’t appear to be justifiable, and that his moral conduct in lying to the public and in contradicting the Book of Mormon as well as the Bible, should give us some serious question as to whether we take him to be a true prophet or a false prophet. For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.

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