A new essay by the Mormon church admits that founder Joseph Smith married many women, including those who were already wed to other men, and girls as young as 14.
For many of those who are Mormon, former members or study the religion, this admission is unprecedented. Polygamy was practiced in secret for over a decade until they made it safely to Utah. They publicly proclaimed their adherence to the practice in 1852 and continued until pressured by the Federal government to abandon it in the early 1900s.
Most members have never heard of these facts about Smith and scholars have been excommunicated for publishing details admitted in this essay.
Okay. First observation, anyone who knows anything about the pre-20th-century world shouldn’t be surprised to hear that teenage girls were getting married. Even young ones. A 13-year-old gets married in the Little House on the Prairie books. So that particular aspect sounds like a tempest in a teakettle.
Hearing that Smith married women who were already married to other men, that is interesting. Not interesting as in, I as a non-Mormon want to know the fine details of it, but I understand how somebody somewhere would want to know the details.
I always thought that everyone knew this and other indelicate details about early Mormons, but apparently many members are shocked when they find this stuff out. I wish I could remember where I was reading about this. Some article about people having crises of faith re: stuff that I thought was common knowledge.
To paraphrase George Carlin, “It used to be a sin against Catholic doctrine to eat meat on Friday. Now it’s not – but I bet there are lots of Catholics still serving eternity on a meat rap.”
And this is why it is so dangerous to judge the behavior of historical figures by the standards of today. Early marriage was considered proper, or at least acceptable, even more recently in history - I have a WW1-era “social guidance” book that was published by, or in association with, the Episcopal Church that states that marriage between girls in their mid to late teens and men in their late 20’s or early 30’s was often a good idea because it provided a wife who was at the beginning of the period where she was at her fittest to give birth (remember, until recently, giving birth was very dangerous and led to a lot of deaths) and have several more years where she could do so, to produce a fair number of children, and a husband who was likely to be well-settled into a career and able to provide for a growing family.
I read an article on this in my Sunday paper. Given the newspaper’s ability to screw up even the most basic facts I’m not offering this as any kind of an argument.
Their article mentioned the age (non)-issue. The article also touched upon the question of whether the added marriages by Smith included sex. There’s no verification either way whether the marriages were sexual or purely spiritual.
Read “Under The Banner of Heaven” by John Krakauer. It’s the story of a horrible double murder committed by two fundamentalist Mormons, as well as a history of the faith itself, including the development of the “revelation” of plural marriage. Many distinct and overlapping types of up-fuckedness.
Cite? This isn’t snark - I’d be interested to read the Mormon reaction to this, since from my outsider’s view none of this seems particularly revelatory.
It sounds really groundbreaking for them to roll back some of their revisionist history and admit that Joseph Smith practiced polygamy and married other mens’ wives, but if you read the article it’s still all optimistic doubletalk.
Of course marriage was a utilitarian business partnership and noting but a means of transferring property and social status until the Mormons invented romantic love in the 1800’s.
And Joseph Smith was some kind of conflicted hero, fighting his own moral revulsion to keeping a harem and servicing dozens of teenager girls, pressing forward only because of his enduring faith in God.
And God doesn’t allow polygamy, except when he does allow polygamy. It’s not a quarterly bonus for dirty old men, it’s a solemn duty enabling more efficient breeding to rapidly increase the size of a church. But many of Joseph Smith’s subsequent marriages were not sexual in nature.
They don’t address the tall tale that God tipped the scales and an overwhelmingly disproportionate number of girls were born to facilitate polygamy. But Joseph Smith might have married other mens’ wives. But only if their husbands were nonmembers and therefore unable to provide postmortem marital blessings.
Joseph Smith’s actual wife, well, she was well documented as being against polygamy, but she was actually a confused flip-flopper and she probably died on their side of things.
And although God commanded a man to get his wife’s consent to enter into polygamy, he also commanded wives to give their consent, and if they defied that order then God commanded men to ignore their protests and do it anyway without recourse.
If you were addressing me, I just summarized the article. They dance a little jig around everything they say to explain why it’s the most normal thing in the world and nothing they’ve ever done is wrong and all the lies thus far aren’t actually lies. Read it - it’s much longer, but that’s the gist.
My great-great-grandmother, a Mormon in Utah, was married at age 15, sometime in the 1860’s. She and her husband left the state with their three children a few years later because of the overwhelming pressure for him to take a second wife.