They also “sealed” (married) Sally Hemings to Thomas Jefferson, which I thought damned presumptuous. Perhaps they thought they were making an honest woman of her, but they didn’t think about the fact that after living as his slave for 50 years and having all those enslaved kids by him she might want to get the hell away from him for the rest of eternity. And I can’t imagine it makes his first wife’s shade happy either.
And Adolf and Eva !
cite please.
cite please.
cite please.
cite please
You’ve tossed a lot of unsupported information out there, can you provide any evidence of these claims?
Today, the Word of Wisdom is considered a commandment for LDS; however, it wasn’t seen as such when it was first accepted by the Church.
Or maybe it’s that the Church realizes that they can’t hide the facts anymore in the information age. That would be a decision of strategy as opposed to conscience. A bank robber who turns himself in after getting away free gets more of my trust than one who gets repentant after being caught.
Also, it may be that the costs of holding to the old story are higher as the church expands and wants to appeal to a wider sector of the population. Some speculated that the 1978 decision to allow blacks into the highest level of the LDS afterlife was motivated in part by the interests of the BYU basketball team.
So I looked at that link on the Prophet Matthias, and although a rather tragic life, I couldn’t see any sexual maleficence other than a dubious assault and battery ( were it sexual ) around 1808. Perhaps not as an heroic figure as The Lion of the Lord — ‘In 1830 he had a vision of a flood about to descend on Albany and fled the city, leaving his wife and six children to wander through western New York’ — he seemed mostly harmless.
Except to Bro. Smith, of course, ‘False rumors circulated that Matthews had joined the Mormons, but in fact his meeting with Smith ended with the two prophets denouncing each other as Satanic’.
To be thorough I looked at the page on his housekeeper, the ex-slave ( in New York ), Mrs Sojourner Truth, and the Kingdom, Zion Hill, which is pretty. His trouble was passion in anger, not passion in sex.
But without that latter quality Joseph Smith wouldn’t have been able, nor been allowed to, sire so many descendents.
Whether this is desirable or not depends on one’s point of view. But I was delighted to discover his great-grandson, Wallace B. Smith, past Prophet-President of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (now Community of Christ) is alive at 85.
I should like to look into becoming a Prophet-President. It would look well on one’s resume.
I could, but the folks at exmormon.org have done this for the above and dozens more and do it with full citations from the Mormon scripture and historical documents
Wiki is scant on material about Matthews. I can’t find any of the material I saw long ago, but there were plenty of sexual shenanigans in his cult. There is a book on the subject, The Kingdom of Matthias: A Story of Sex and Salvation in 19th-Century America, but I haven’t read it. As I mentioned in my post this kind of situation was common in the 19th century religious cults, as it still is today.
I’ve been insanely busy the last couple of days and haven’t had a chance to respond earlier.
I grew up right smack in the heart the kingdom, in the shadow of the temple. As I said, I am 6th generation, ancestors on my mother’s side joined just a couple years after it was started. My mother grew up on a small farm in southern Idaho and my father on a farm in central Utah where the closest towns were 99% Mormon.
Mormonism was my core identity through junior high. If you would have asked me as a 15-year-old to describe myself in one word, my instinctive, immediate response would have been “Mormon.” Before I would have thought “boy,” “American,” or "Christian. I was a Mormon, through and through.
Sometime in high school, I joined the wrong crowd. We’d hang out on Friday nights doing something far more evil than drinking or smoking dope. Yep, rolling 20-sided dice. While there was nothing inherently evil about D&D, it was the first time to have non-member friends.
I couldn’t handle conscious doubts. It was just too much of my identity, of family and friends, society, everything. I went on a mission to Japan, became completely disillusioned and dropped off the radar screen. I had moved back to Japan in 1990 and it wasn’t until after I got the internet that I started looking up all the dirty secrets.
I ditched the faith in the mid 80s, and it sometime after that that the church started to attempt to mainstream itself. Growing up in the 60s and 70s, we relished being different, we actually prided ourselves on being particular. We weren’t “Christians,” we were “Mormons.”
They did that thing about being pissy whenever called them Mormons, people here may remember posters who would careful remind others to not call them “Mormons” and there would be respectful posters who would type out CoJCoLDS.
Then when that effort failed, the church launched their “I’m a Mormon” campaign without notice to the members. My True Believing Mormon (TBM) mother faithfully follows along with whatever Salt Lake decides today is kosher.
The reaction to releasing the video of the garments was split between TBMs, who thought it was an incredibly inspired move, on one side, and ex- and cafeteria Mormons, who rolled their collective eyes.
This is part of a series of essays on the “tough” issues including the blacks and the priesthood. While they seem to be releasing information, the essays read like they are written by a PR firm or Clinton himself, arguing about the definition of “is.” There is considerable speculation on the ex- and liberal Mormon forums and blogs about what is the intended purpose.
As I noted above, the church is hemorrhaging members and all the new converts in Africa can’t make up for the loss. While the gross numbers still inch upward, there is no real growth. Some speculate that the number of active members is actually starting a slow decline. This is despite the 85,000 full time missionaries.
Before the net, they could control the information. Now they can’t, and people are finding out that the neat little stories we grew up with are really much, much messier. It’s a lot like Truman discovering he lives on a set. We talk about “putting things on a shelf;” that is, pushing away doubts (or “doubt your doubts before you doubt your faith” as one leader said recently). Then, when there are too many doubts, the shelf collapses. Sometimes over a period of years. For some, it can be in just a matter of hours.
More later.
Huh. I guess I’ve known about the polygamy stuff for so long that it is surprising to me that this is news. (The Mountain Meadows Massacre, in contrast, I only learned about in college – ironically from a guy who is much more faithful than I, but also grew up in a family that talked about these kinds of things a lot – and was really shocked by.)
You want an even bigger irony? A long time ago (long before he went cuckoo), Card wrote a book called Saints in which he confronts head-on the practice of polygamy – and it’s pretty clear that he’s doing so as a conflicted descendant of polygamy. It’s been a long time since I read it, but although his characters’ perspective is that Joseph Smith is a prophet of God, it also doesn’t sweep under the rug the fact that polygamy was deeply unpleasant for a lot of people, not least Emma Smith. (One of the incredibly emotional scenes in the book I still remember is Emma, after Joseph’s death, insisting that she was Joseph’s only wife. To one of the plural wives.) (Okay, it also doesn’t talk about Zina in detail, I think. It didn’t go that far.) Card even came up with a secular reason for polygamy (not “God wanted this”). Although I would never recommend the book to someone who was anti-Mormon, it was a really good book for me to read as a kid/young-teen to get at more of what was really going on in Church history than I was getting at church.
ETA: Saints even talks about how the Church covers up information getting out about these things. It was really a very good book for me to read.
In your experience, are there many Mormons who doubt (or altogether dismiss) the divine origins of the church but remain openly faithful due to friends/family/community/a genuine like of the church’s practices/etc.?
It’s easy to mock; but it shouldn’t forgotten that this was a terrible struggle for most of the old gents — many of whom looked like old lemons ---- forced to take nubile young wives, and their sufferings should not be minimized. Eventually they ceased their stiff-necked opposition and came to appreciate God’s Imposition as wisdom, but they didn’t relish Mormonism being synonymous with Bunny Warren Central.
From the wiki on Mormonism and Polygamy, one of the giants, Mr. Heber C. Kimball had a severe reaction — and Kimball had given over his own 14-yr-old daughter to Smith — [ even more so than Brigham Young’s — who conquering his own initial revulsion, had stated at the Proclamation of the doctrine in 1852: ‘…He said openly that Joseph had hit upon the best plan for re-invigorating men, and assuring a long life to them; and, also, that the Mormons are very good and very virtuous. We could not have proclaimed this principle a few years ago; everything must abide its time, but I am now ready to proclaim it. This revelation has been in my possession for many years, and who knew it? No one, except those whose business it was to know it. I have a patent lock to my writing-desk, and nothing gets out of it that ought not to get out of it. Without the doctrine which this revelation makes known to us, no one could raise himself high enough to become a god.’ — wiki : Origin of Latter Day Saint Polygamy
Whilst the last sentence is a little worrying, it is pleasant to imagine the old fellow peeking into his desk every now and then, reading the founder’s revelation that lots of wives are good, and then shoving it back, rocking himself back and forward. ]
In Kimball’s case:
When Kimball first heard of the principle, he believed that he would marry elderly women whom he would care for and who would not be a threat to his first wife Vilate. He was later shocked to learn that he was to marry a younger woman. His biographer writes that he “became sick in body, but his mental wretchedness was too great to allow of his retiring, and he would walk the floor till nearly morning, and sometimes the agony of his mind was so terrible that he would wring his hands and weep like a child”.
But through grace he overcame his aversion and his own wiki entry says: Kimball eventually married a total of forty-three women, although it is stated that many of these marriages were merely caretaking arrangements lacking a physical intimacy component.
The latter could be misleading, since the next sentence shows he sired 65 children.
IIRC, he had children with 17 of his wives.
The number of Brigham Young’s wives ranges from 27 to hundred, but he had children with 16 and probably had sexual relations with a few more who didn’t conceive, and had several that almost certainly weren’t consummated physically. In his final decade he was said to have become almost a monogamist with his wife Amelia Folsom (number 25 by the 27 counts), with whom he had no children; after her ascendancy he had only 1 child by his other wives (born when he was 69) and Amelia, who had no children, is said to have flipped out.
Both Young and Kimball married several of Smith’s widows. Smith has not been proven to have had children with any woman other than his wife. Eliza Roxey Snow (later married to Brigham Young, childlessly) allegedly had a miscarriage by him and a few people were rumored to be his children (including Zina’s son whose descent from Smith was disproven by DNA testing of his descent), but to date there’s nobody.
There are rumors of regular abortions being performed by John C. Bennett.
Well, that’s part of my point - even before Algore invented the Internet people identified the LDS with polygamy. So they did kind of a crappy job hiding the facts even back in the day.
Apparently it looks more shocking to ex-Mormons than to never-Mormons.
Regards,
Shodan
Those 17 were kept busy. Still, the fact he begat no children with his other 26 wives in no way indicates he didn’t try. Nor indeed, that there aren’t other sexual consolations available between a childless couple — Idle Hands Are The Devils Playground.
However I shouldn’t like to give the impression I am anti-mormon, nor anti-polygamy. As with most things, I couldn’t give a toss. I think their theology and doctrines are deliciously, and overtly, goofy; but generally they seem as much sinned against as sinning. People massacred them as well. Massacring people was a pleasure and a duty for 19th century Americans.
Possibly idle dicks as well.
Then head your posts with “In my humble opinion” instead of acting like you have a clue, which you clearly lack in this case.
With 17 wives there is no such thing as an idle dick. 
That’s something I’ve wondered about: this was an age without Viagra, and even though people were more physically active then, these were not young men. Brigham and Heber were born the same month, both started practicing polygamy in their early 40s, and kept taking wives constantly for the next decade then at an only slightly slower pace afterwards. Brigham’s fathered 49 children by 14 plural wives between ages 44 and 69 and Heber more than that by plural wives.
Even assuming they eliminated non fertile wives from the rotation of wives they had sex with, that’s a lot of sex. There are few monogamous women who complain that their middle-aged to senior husbands want to have sex too much; I wonder how these men found the energy and drive to service as many wives as frequently as they did. (I’ve seen pics- it wasn’t the erotic beauty of said women.)
It was also the days before birth control. Plenty of men have fathered children at an advanced age. I am assuming Young was between ages 44 and 69, and not his wives.