I know the stories from the Jeffs compound and the like say that boys and young men are essentially rejected from these small groups, and that makes sense since there wouldn’t be enough girls and women to go around.
But what is the actual doctrinal explanation for what is supposed to happen if some men have lots and lots of wives, leaving too few women to go around? I may know just enough to be dangerous, but I was thinking FLDS sects believe that you have to be married in order to, um, get the really good afterlife stuff (technical term there), so what would they say if little Billy stuck up his hand and said, “If all the women marry those two guys, who is left to marry me?”
I wonder why the mainstream Mormons don’t take them in, either via a dedicated orphanage or by having them adopted by members. The government may love this situation for use in anti-religion propaganda, but for the LDS they ought to be wayward co-religionists. Or is it not as simple as that between them?
Many of the charities that take in exiled boys and child brides are in fact run by LDS-affiliated organizations. What “anti-religion propaganda” are you talking about?
These questions concerning the theological basis for polygamy should be addressed by the mainstream LDS church, because it is responsible for the doctrine.
It seems that the early leaders assumed that they were elites who were deserving of more wives and would have a greater position in the next world.
Early Mormon leaders encouraged leaders to have second (and third and etc) wives but did not necessary do that for Average Joe (technical term here) who would be considered less faithful, and who may not be eligible for the highest degrees of salvation which included becoming a god himself.
“Take some more tea,” the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly.
“I’ve had nothing yet,” Alice replied in an offended tone, “so I can’t take more.”
“You mean you can’t take less,” said the Hatter.
But anyway, don’t people inside these sects (or inside mainstream LDS when it was polygamous) start questioning the leaders about the math? Or does everyone think they are themselves destined to be one of the leaders? Even so, what about the women?
They tend to be a little old for orphanages and adoption - but they are fostered by mainstream LDS homes - if they are found and can be helped in time. However, the boys themselves usually don’t know enough about the outside world to get help, so they have to get stumbled onto by someone who can help.
It isn’t as simple as the FDLS giving the guys over at the Temple in SLC a call and saying “hey, we have another batch of boys we need you to take off our hands.”
If you have a society where a) men tend to marry at an older age and woman at a young age and b) everyone has a lot of kids, then its possible to have a situation where the men get multiple wives but no men are left as permanent bachelors. And those things seem to be the norm in a lot of FLDS communities (in some cases to the point where the woman are married off at an age where consummating would be statutory rape).
Why not? If every man marries two woman from the first generation younger then his own, and each woman has an average of four children, then no men will need to be bachelors. Each generation will have two woman for each man in the next older generation.
That’s a really good point…as long as you have some way of disposing of the two boys from each successive generation. Which, in point of fact, is what these "Family Oriented’ clans have done for decades.
Sorry, but you have touched a nerve. I have no sympathy, understanding or compassion for anyone that advocates the marriage of tweens to 50-year olds, while simultaneously casting off their own sons to homelessness.
You don’t have to dispose of the two males, thats my point. They just have to wait an extra 15-20 years for their sisters to produce younger wives so that they can get their own pair of spouses.
Well I’m certainly not endorsing such a scheme. Just pointing out that its possible to have a polygamous community without half of the younger males being inevitably resigned to bachelorhood or exile.
Thank You for the non-endorsement, but you are still factually wrong. There is no way that an even mix of Apples and Oranges is the same as a 2-1 mix of Apples and Oranges, no matter how long it goes on. In point of fact, the mix gets more unequal with the passage of time.
Those sisters are going to be producing boys as well as girls, you know. And the excess males don’t start dying off in greater numbers until they reach something like 65 or 70. So you’re gonna have an excess of females who are in the 50+ range. Remember, these guys like to marry YOUNG gilrs. As in girls in their teens, or even younger. This means that there’s always gonna be males in the 25-65 range who don’t have wives. Unless those excess males are kicked out of the community, which is what is happening now.
Your thinking about it incorrectly. If people were married for life, instantly upon their births, then to give each man two wives you’d need a 2-1 female male mix, as you say. But by having people spend a large chunk of their lives unmarried (40 years, if each woman is married on her 20th birthday), you can have an even number of men and woman born to each generation and still provide two wives to each man.
Say our founder generation (g1) is one 40 yearold man. g2 is two 20 year old men and 2 20 year old woman. Older man takes the two g2 woman as wives and impregnates them so that they each have two boys and two girls (g3). Now the boys from g2 have to wait till the g3 girls grow up, but then they can each have a pair of wives of their own.
But then what do the boys from g3 do? The same thing their fathers did, wait for the next generation. Indeed, think about it a bit and you’ll see that every new generation will have this option. As long as each generation is twice as large as the one previous to it (so four children per woman), then the process can go on without end.
Obliviously you haven’t been in an organization which specializes in brainwashing.
The church never discussed the math, and if you start to question it (or anything) on your own, you quicker are discouraged from doing that.
The doctrine is that a woman’s degree of salvation is determined by the person they are married to. (I’ll welcome challenges to this point, and will be glad to provide quotes showing what Joseph Smith and other leaders have to say). It’s in conflict with the doctrine that each person is responsible for their own salvation, but no one ever accused Mormonism of being rational.
Even if you didn’t wait one generation, Mormons aren’t a contained population. If a guy can’t get a wife from within the population, he can go out and convert one. It puts a new meaning to missionary work.
And, from what I understand, there is actually a shortage of single men in Mormonism, not women. A quick google reveals this from BYU’s encyclopedia (granted from 1992): “For example, among singles over age 30 who attend church weekly, there are only 19 men for every 100 women.” It also includes a chart (Figure 11) showing that only Africa has more men than women. The U.S. (including Utah) are balanced at the same rate as the rest of the population, but everywhere else women outnumber men.