Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Did Joseph Smith practice polygamy, also known as plural marriage? And that is the question I cannot believe we are having to ask in 2025. So there is a small but very vocal group of people who are starting to argue that Joseph Smith never practiced plural marriage, but rather, this was something that Brigham Young practiced and then projected onto Joseph Smith. And in fact, I wanted to know exactly how big this group is because they are so vocal in my comments, and anyone who talks about this topic will get a mouthful from a ton of these people, or it seems like it's a lot of people. And so I just wanted to know how many really are there.
So I did a poll on, like, my Instagram, my Facebook, my TikTok, my Twitter. And this is very unscientific. This is a very, like, bad sample because it's just my followers. But what I found was, out of 3,500 votes, 96% of people say yes, Joseph Smith practiced plural marriage, and 4% said no. So. So that's kind of interesting. I know Josh coates at the B.H. roberts Foundation. He did a survey a couple years ago asking that question. And do you remember what the results were there?
[00:01:06] Speaker B: Yeah, this was in his 2022 survey, National Survey of Former and Current Latter Day Saints. I don't know the exact number, but one of the questions was, like, where did polygamy come from? Who started it? Right.
And like, it was. Less than 1% thought that it was somebody other than Joseph Smith. I think even the question was, did Joseph Smith practice polygamy? Like your. Like your Instagram poll there. So there's a bit more robust scientific data out there from. From a few years ago saying it is very much a minority of people who are like, oh, I think it was actually Brigham Young that started it.
[00:01:36] Speaker A: And that puts in perspective for me, because, like. Like I said, they're very, very vocal and very passionate, but it is still like, a very small group. So, Neil, could you maybe just define for us in like, a sentence or two, like, what is this movement? What is this denying polygamy?
[00:01:51] Speaker C: Well, from what I can tell, the essence of it is there's a group of people who are convinced that Joseph Smith did not practice polygamy.
And the line of reasoning seems to go something like this. There are public statements that Joseph Smith made in the Nauvoo era where he denied having more than one wife.
And so the rationale. And we know Emma immediately after Joseph Smith's death or relatively soon, and the reorganized Church, and. And so Emma's kids And everything. They took this line of this stance too, that, you know, Joseph Smith didn't practice polygamy. That was a lie of the Brighamite Church or whatever.
And, and so they kind of, it's kind of premised on this idea that, you know, in fact, I think some of them, they have this mantra, Joseph told the truth. Right? It's premised on this idea that Joseph and Emma there are. They are, Are. Are top firsthand witnesses. And they both said he didn't practice polygamy. Therefore, polygamy is just a big lie. And it's fueled further by things like the fact that Doctrine and covenants section 132 was not actually publicly acknowledged and published until 1852, so eight years after Joseph Smith died. And so, you know, and there's this story about it that, like, Emma burned the original copy, and so we only have a copy of the manuscript. But. And you know, from a, from a bird's eye view, it sounds kind of sus. Like, oh, yeah, how convenient that, you know, out of nowhere we don't have the original. And you took all this time like. And so it seems kind of sus. Just kind of from a bird's eye view. And then you, you compare it against, again, Joseph Smith's own public denials and, and Emma's denial that this happened. And it's easy from just those couple little data points to come away and be like, oh, my gosh, actually, Joseph Smith never practiced polygamy.
This is something Brigham Young started and made up or whatever. Right? And so that's, that's where I think. And I think it's motivated to some extent by the fact that there is just kind of this, for lack of a better word, like an ick factor around polygamy.
[00:04:05] Speaker B: Right.
[00:04:06] Speaker C: And so people, People don't want Joseph to be involved in it. People who, you know, consider Joseph Smith a prophet who really. And look, we all do this a little bit. We hold Joseph Smith on a little bit of a higher pedestal than we do the rest the prophets.
And so it's like, oh, could we just read. We really don't want it to be associated with Joseph Smith. We don't want, you know, deception. If, if he did practice it, that means these public denials were. Were lies or were deceptions. And we don't want him to be associated with deception in any way.
[00:04:34] Speaker A: The movie Joseph Smith, Prophet of the Restoration is scripture, as far as I. Anything that sullies that image.
[00:04:40] Speaker C: So there's, so there's kind of this distaste for Joseph Smith being involved in it. And it motivates this reasoning.
[00:04:46] Speaker B: I would also add to that, in addition to that, we live in a world where, like, all sorts of institutional narratives are just being questioned and broken down. Right. And so anybody, any schmuck with a microphone and a podcast can get. Oh, wait, no, no. People just have this, like, this impulse. And like, you know, we went through things with, like, COVID lockdowns and vaccine stuff or whatever. I'm not saying that that's, you know, true or whatever, but just that there's this movement here where, like, any institutional claim about, like, history or the government or health care or whatever, you can't believe it. Right. There's a deeper conspiracy happening that they're not letting you know about. And this feeds into that. The zeitgeist we have of, like, question everything, tear down all the institutional narratives, don't trust authority figures that tell you what's true. So I think it's tapping into that as well.
[00:05:33] Speaker C: And to that point, from what I've observed from people online who are espousing, you know, polygamy denial or monogamy affirmation, as some of them prefer to spin it, a lot of them are also wrapped up in some of these other kinds of conspiracy theories, if you will.
So, yeah, that's kind of where it's coming from.
[00:05:58] Speaker A: You mentioned Emma and the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
I've gotten this impression that this is kind of a new burgeoning movement. But is it new? Is it old? Where does this come from?
[00:06:10] Speaker B: It's a new version of it. Because as Neil indicated, one of, like, the founding platforms of the RLDS church was that Joseph Smith, Joseph III's dad, Emma's husband, did not practice polygamy or spiritual wifery or any of that stuff. Right.
I think it's in literally the inaugural issue of the Latter Day Saints Herald, their newspaper, where they kind of give their manifesto for why they exist. I'm pretty sure from my reading of this, one of the things to say is like, oh, yeah, the Brighamite Church in Utah that does polygamy. Joseph Smith did not do that. That's the thing. So it's not a new. Well, let me also say.
So with section 132, it gets published in the 1850s. Right.
The RLDS church fought the authenticity of that document. And you have RLDS authors then and even a couple hanging around today still who will insist that it is a Brighamite forgery. Right. That Brigham Young or William Clayton or other nefarious actors forged this document and attributed it to Joseph Smith in order to justify the practice of plural marriage. So what. What makes this new stuff new is it's taken on the sort of Internet conspiracy virality kind of factor, right? Where it's. It's now on podcasts and videos and it's linked, as Neil said, it's linked with other weird conspiracy movements a lot of the time. So that's where it's new in the sense that, like, it's been.
It's been given new breadth and new form in the sort of the broader landscape of Internet conspiracy theories.
[00:07:38] Speaker C: And the other aspect of it that is new is that some of the most vocal proponents. I don't want to say it's gaining a lot of traction because as your survey and the Josh Coates survey shows, it's not really a lot of traction. But it is noteworthy that some of the most vocal proponents now are members of the Utah Latter Day Saint Church, or were members associated with ostensibly members rather than people coming from the like, rlds or Community of Christ tradition, where there is more of this, like, historical. More historical roots for kind of denying that Joseph Smith was.
[00:08:12] Speaker B: A lot of these other people, too, are associated with sort of schismatic breakoff groups. Right. They're popping up here in Utah or others. It's all facilitated by the Internet. These typically tend to be small groups. But you, like the Venn diagram is kind of closing in terms of people who are from this polygamy denier stuff with people who are also into other conspiracy theories and people who are associated with either directly or loosely, with sort of other sort of neo gnostic Mormon groups. I don't know what you would call them. Right.
[00:08:40] Speaker C: Like, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
[00:08:42] Speaker A: So if I understand my timeline correctly, Joseph Smith kind of had his first attempt at practicing plural marriage in 1836 in Kirtland. But then later the Saints moved to Nauvoo. And then in the early 1840s, it feels like the Lord commands Joseph Smith to do this again. And he's kind of a reluctant polygamist, if you will. It sounds like there are indications that he didn't want to necessarily, but he does.
And according to, like, the church's Gospel Topics essays in the Joseph Smith papers, he had probably on the order of around 30 ish wise when all was said and done.
But that's our timeline. But when it comes to the Nauvoo period, you mentioned that one of the biggest arguments is that Joseph in Nauvoo denied practicing plural marriage. Emma denied After Joseph Smith's death. Specifically with Joseph Smith. He's alive. He's currently practicing plural marriage, according to historians. But he says, I am not practicing. Like, can we break that down a little bit? What's going on there with his denial of plural marriage while he's alive? Is he lying?
[00:09:43] Speaker B: Yeah. So there is a really important context to these public denials that Joseph Smith. And by the way, the Nauvoo Relief Society is making public denials in the 1840s. Right. Like, so both during and after we get these denials, there's a really important character in church history in Nauvoo who sets context for this. Our favorite tomato farmer, a guy by the name of John C. Bennett, also.
[00:10:06] Speaker C: The inventor of ketchup. Yeah.
[00:10:08] Speaker B: No, really, the guy was obsessed with tomatoes. It's really funny.
[00:10:11] Speaker A: Wildest, like, trivia facts.
[00:10:12] Speaker B: Okay, so. So John C. Bennett in Nauvoo begins practicing what comes to be called spiritual wifery. Okay? And there. There's two parallel narratives. And you kind of pick which narrative you believe. Right? I'll tell you which one I believe here. In a second narrative, one is John C. Bennett's claim, which is that Joseph Smith came to him and said, hey, man, God is totally cool if we have all the sex we want with all the women we want, so long as we keep it secret. Okay? And so we have divine license to have a harem of wives and sexual partners. And it's all cool as long as it's secret. We don't tell anybody. Okay? And John C. Bennett's narrative, this is in his book History of the Saints, he publishes in 1842. After he gets excommunicated, he goes on a public tour, and his version of it is. Well, yeah, but I had done this to, like, infiltrate the Mormons to expose how bad Joseph Smith was. Right? And really, Joseph Smith is this bad guy, this lecherous dude who's just preying on women and, you know, it's all about sexual license and gratification. Right.
[00:11:10] Speaker C: Man, if there ever was a case of projection.
[00:11:13] Speaker B: Yeah, right. It's. It's so. So that's kind of the John C. Bennett narrative of it that you can believe.
The other narrative which you get from Joseph Smith and others, and full disclosure, this is the narrative I believe, both as a Latter Day Saint and because I believe the historical evidence favors this narrative, is that Joseph Smith in Nauvoo begins to introduce plural marriage to others. And it's. It's trusted leaders and friends and confidants. John C. Bennett is One of them. He's a member of the First Presidency. He's mayor of Nauvoo. Right. He's an important figure in Nauvoo. He introduces this.
This. This practice of plural marriage. And John C. Bennett takes that as an excuse to justify his own perverse, sort of bastardized version of plural marriage, which is this spiritual wifery, okay? And so when Joseph Smith excommunicates John C. Bennett, and he goes on the public tirade saying Joseph is a horrible guy that's sleeping with all these women, and it's all this bad thing, Joseph has to deny and distance himself from the. From the public claims of John C. Bennett that basically, in Nauvoo, if you're a church leader, if you're one of Joseph Smith or his friends, you get to have any women you want and all the sexual license you want.
[00:12:20] Speaker A: Right.
[00:12:20] Speaker B: Does that make sense? So this is the context in Nauvoo, when we get the Nauvoo Relief Society, when we get Joseph Smith, we get Hyrum Smith, right?
The big gorilla in the room is John C. Bennett's accusations of spiritual wifery. The other little gorilla next to it is the fact that there actually is plural marriage happening among Joseph Smith and others, but not that. So it's. You're in this weird, like, matrix of we have to respond to John C. Bennett, but we also have to tell the truth about the fact that we are practicing plural marriage. But also we have to keep this secret because it's being persecuted. We're being persecuted. And it's a thing. It's a sensitive thing. So this is the matrix. This is the complicated tightrope walk Joseph has to do with these. And Emma and others in Nauvoo with these denials.
[00:13:01] Speaker C: So another important kind of thing going on.
It feels like it's in the background now because we don't know or talk about it as much, but it is very much present and I think directly relevant to at least one of Joseph Smith's public denials is there are legal actions being taken in 1844 against Joseph Smith. I mean, once William Law defects, he's trying to find some kind of premise to get Joseph to Carthage.
And so he's filing tons of different legal lawsuits, lawsuits and challenges against him. And one of those is he's being charged with adultery.
[00:13:43] Speaker B: Okay, we forget that. That used to be a crime, Right.
[00:13:47] Speaker C: It's kind of funny because you wouldn't think. But, yeah, back then, it was actually a crime to commit adultery. And so there is a legal charge against Joseph that's filed in May of 1844.
I think it's on May 24th or May 25th. And then May 26th, you have Joseph give a speech where he's making a denial. And it's right directly within the context of this legal charge that's being filed. And there's an important legal context. I actually, I have this book here, Sustaining the Law, because there's paper by Scott Bradshaw in here about the technicalities of Nauvoo law.
Not. Not just Nauvoo law, but Illinois law around adultery and bigamy that are important context for the statements Joseph Smith makes here.
But one of the technicalities in the law was that adultery had to be open and notorious.
[00:14:36] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:14:37] Speaker C: Okay. And so one of the ways to position himself for a legal defense against the charge of adultery is.
Is to keep it private. Right.
And so he's. He's trying to. He's making public statements to.
To. To deflect against this charge of. Of adultery and to make it so it's not like this open thing that's being talked about his. His other relationships. And there are other nuances to the law. He talks about how the Nauvoo charter was actually written in a way to.
To make it so that private marriages, normally marriages had to have a marriage certificate and witnesses. Witnesses and had to have, like, a public announcement and stuff like that. Nauvoo charter was written a way to make it so that marriages could be authorized by Joseph Smith as the mayor or by clergy in the church without any public notice.
Gee, why would they have done that?
[00:15:34] Speaker B: Yeah. Kind of strange.
[00:15:35] Speaker C: And so there's other legal technicalities at work where, you know, that are being done to where Joseph could have legally defended himself that, like, no, these are legitimate relationships. But the most important legal defense would have been, hey, if no one knows about it, it's not illegal. It has to be open and notorious.
[00:15:51] Speaker B: The bigamy angle is interesting, too.
We don't know what bigamy means today, but technically it's when you're, like, legally married to more than one person.
[00:15:59] Speaker C: Right.
[00:15:59] Speaker B: It was common in the 19th century. If you're moving around states, going to the territories of the frontier, you might just bail on your legal life back in, like, New York or Massachusetts and marry a new wife legally in a new territory or state. That would technically be bigamy, right? Yeah. So like, when he says, I have only but one wife, and they say, I have seven, it's probably responding in the context of accusations of legal bigamy or things like that.
So carefully worded, he only has one legal wife, Emma Hale.
[00:16:27] Speaker C: Wife. Right.
[00:16:28] Speaker A: Interesting. So if he has 30 some wives. Don Bradley has done some research to what I think is pretty persuasively argue that Joseph Smith's motive was not sex necessarily, because at least the first few wives are women who are already married and pregnant. So sex would have been kind of a weird taboo thing anyway. But we also have later statements that seem to affirm that there were some conjugal relations between Joseph and these others. But if he really was married to all of these women and had sexual relations with them, why no children?
[00:16:57] Speaker B: Ah, right. Well, should we have a lesson on the birds and the bees on corn of saints?
Okay, ready, boys and girls? Not all sexual activity results in pregnancy. So what this probably means. And John Turner in his new biography, I think it's in his new biography says this and others have said so we have accounts, it's yeah. From about 10 or 12 women who talk about sexual intercourse with Joseph Smith. Right. And they use these Victorian like euphemisms like yes, we were in bed with each other or he stayed the night with me or whatever. Right. He was my husband. Yes, he was my husband in very deed. But they're clearly talking about sexuality. Okay. Probably what this indicates because there's no children, at least that we know of, that we can determine is they probably had sex only once or infrequently. So in other words. And again, this is in contrast to John C. Bennett's deal, which is that have as much sex as you want with whoever you want. Also, you know, if you get pregnant, I'll give you an abortion. That was kind of John C. Bennett's thing. Right. Like no, no, no. What this probably indicates is that in some instances the marriage was consummated with sexual relations, but just once or maybe even not at all after that. Right. Very infrequently. And so therefore the woman we do know he's having regular sex with is Emma. Because they have lots of kids. Right. Like so, like we can safely say, yes. S his legal wife. He's having lots of sex with her and they're having kids with these other women who are wives in the sense of their sealed to him. They're not his legal wives. They're keeping it secret. They're not seeing each other often. Probably that means sexuality is not happening often with these women.
[00:18:26] Speaker C: Well, and to add to that, like part of the context, like first of all, Joseph is. He's the head of a church, he's running a large Community of saints. He's the mayor of Nauvoo. And so he's got a ton of duties that he has to perform in that context.
And then we're talking about a lot of women. Right.
So he's kind of spread pretty thin.
[00:18:50] Speaker B: Right.
[00:18:51] Speaker C: And these relationships are things he's trying to keep on the down low. Right. And so there's just. It would have been really, really hard for him to have a lot of conjugal relations with any one of these women.
[00:19:04] Speaker B: Right.
[00:19:05] Speaker C: There just would not have been a ton of opportunity within the time span that he has. So. Yeah, it's just. It's not the kind of thing where, yeah, minimal opportunity would have probably made it unlikely that there would have been very many children in the first place, if any.
[00:19:26] Speaker A: Right, okay.
[00:19:27] Speaker B: Yeah. There have been claims of offspring from plural unions with Joseph Smith. Ugo Perrego, our friend has done a lot of good DNA testing on this.
So far, the ones that have been tested have come up negative.
[00:19:38] Speaker C: Yeah, pretty much every line of inquiry has.
[00:19:42] Speaker B: In terms of some of them, like, they died as a kid, so we don't have their genome, so we can't know for sure. Others, it's like, well, there's a family tradition. My favorite is Fawn Brody saying that, like, well, this picture of the sky looks like Joseph. Come on. But like. But the ones that you can do testing on, it's negative. That does not mean that there wasn't plural marriage or sexuality in some of the plural marriages. What it does mean most likely is that there's not a lot of sexuality happening specifically with these women that Joseph Smith is sealed to.
[00:20:07] Speaker C: Or that. Or that sex was the primary purpose for it.
[00:20:10] Speaker B: Exactly. Was motivated for it.
[00:20:12] Speaker A: Interesting. So another contention that people have with Joseph Smith's plural marriage is that in the 1835, Doctrine and Covenants forbade polygamy. And there's a statement in there about how a man's only supposed to have one wife. What do we do with that? If that is like, in canonized scripture.
[00:20:30] Speaker B: Right. So, yeah, this is the 1835 Statement on Marriage. It's introduced in the Doctrine and Covenants, like, literally at the last minute, they stick it in. Oliver Cowdery and I think William Phelps, along with the section that's all called. It's like on. On government. Latter stviews on government. It's not section like 134. I think of, like, on what we think about government.
Those are stuck in. At the very end. Joseph Smith is out of town. He's in Michigan at The time when they have the conference, he comes back and it gets published.
Okay. So I think it's discussed here in this book, too.
Trying to perform marriage in Ohio. Okay. So they're trying as clergy in a legal church. They're trying to perform marriages in Ohio. In Kirtland.
[00:21:10] Speaker C: Yes. And it's also Scott Bradshaw.
[00:21:12] Speaker B: Yeah, it's Scott Bradshaw talked about it. Right.
This Section 130. Well, it's not Section 25. It's in the 1835 Doctrine and Covenants.
Again, it's most likely from what we can tell in the context of we need to have a statement on what our church in 1835 believes about marriage in, in the sense of what we can legally recognize and get recognition for in the state of Ohio. And so, of course, it's going to be, we believe in but one man and one woman, and we do not endorse bigamy. Again, that's a specific legal term in the 19th century. Right. And these sorts of things. We don't accept polygamy. Right. That's another terminological issue. Plural marriage versus polygamy and how they're just using those terms early on. So the punchline is here in 1835. Yes. The church's official practice in Ohio was. Was monogamy. Okay. And they needed a statement in their book of scripture to codify that for legal purposes to perform marriages in Ohio. So of course, they're not going to come out and say, oh, yeah, we're totally down with polygamy. It's totally a thing that we're going to do for everybody. Of course I'm going to do that.
[00:22:15] Speaker A: At that point. It wasn't even revealed yet.
[00:22:16] Speaker B: It was even. Probably wasn't even revealed yet. Or probably he hadn't even entered into this plural marriage with Fanny Alger. Right. So. So without knowing any of the context of the statement on marriage, people will take that, they'll latch onto it and say, see, this means that polygamy has never been authorized and never is a thing. Neil and Jasmine, we believe in a church of continuing revelation, do we not? And we believe in an open canon, do we not? When the practice was revealed and when section 132 was given and then it was canonized. I mean, I'm sorry, people, I don't know what to tell you. We believe in progressive revelation that may supersede past revelation on things. Right. I don't know what else to tell you other than if you have this fundamentalist assumption that like, no, the canon can never change and the Earliest stuff is always the right, better stuff, and the later stuff is always wrong. If you have this weird assumption, then it makes sense why you would have issue with this. But when you look at the broader context and the theological trajectory of how canon works, I think this explains that statement.
[00:23:10] Speaker A: Well, speaking of worse late stuff and better early stuff. So once the saints moved to Utah and they openly practice plural marriage, it's no longer secret. It's a public knowledge that Latter Day Saints, they practice plural marriage, they have multiple wives. And that's when we start to get statements from women who sealed to Joseph Smith attesting and in some cases legally testifying that they were sealed to Joseph Smith. They were married to him in very deed in some cases.
But do we have those are late reminiscences? Do we have anything contemporary to Joseph Smith that affirms, yes, he was practicing plural marriage?
[00:23:46] Speaker B: So take it away.
[00:23:47] Speaker C: Well, so there, there is it. It's true that like this is one of the big talking points and we do need to state up front, most of what we know about Joseph Smith's polygamy comes from late sources. That's true.
But we do have some contemporary pre1844 documents and evidence that attests to Joseph Smith practicing polygamy. I think the biggest one, the kind of the main calling card, is the journal entry of William Clayton on July, July 12, 1843, where he states, and I don't have the text of it in front of me, but he states that he transcribed a revelation given to Joseph Smith. He says it was about 10 pages and it talked about the practice of polygamy by Abraham, Moses, David, Solomon. I can't remember the exact language in the journal entry, but there's this. It's a journal entry. Some people have disputed whether it was really a contemporary journal entry, but it is.
It's a contemporary journal entry from William Clayton saying that he recorded this revelation. We have a contemporary entry in Joseph Smith's own journal that says he dictated a revelation, but he doesn't go into the contents of it for obvious reasons. The other thing we have is we have a contemporary notes from the High Council, the Nauvoo High Council, where Hyrum Smith read the revelation to the Nauvoo High Council. And again, the official minutes are vague about the details of the revelation. But we have affidavits from seven different people who were there, some of whom opposed polygamy and some of whom accepted polygamy. So it's people across the spectrum and they're giving these statements completely. And actually one of these affidavits is printed in the Nauvoo Expositor in 1844. So it's a. It is itself a contemporary document.
But we have these. But some of those, some of these affidavits are later, but they're coming from people, some in Utah, some in other places. William Marx is part of the Reorganized Church that's opposing polygamy. And in 1865 he gives a statement saying, yeah, I was there in the High Council when Hyrum Smith read the revelation on polygamy.
So we've got eyewitnesses who are saying, yes, in the High Council, that revelation that's referred to in those minutes, that was the revelation that's DNC 132. That's on polygamy.
[00:26:10] Speaker B: Language from the revelation also appears in.
[00:26:13] Speaker C: Sources of the time.
[00:26:13] Speaker B: So people, mostly antagonists in the Nauvoo Expositor and others who react negatively to it, they will quote in private, in letters or in others, they will say they'll quote language from section 132.
[00:26:26] Speaker C: There are sources from between 1843 and 1845, some from a lot of it from antagonists, some of it from supporters, some of it from sermons that Joseph and Hyrum were giving at the time that uses language from that revelation.
And so there's just this whole network of sources that like can. The best and easiest way to explain their existence is there was already a document, a copy of this revelation that a small group of people knew about and were able to actually quote or paraphrase that talked about it.
One of the interesting ones that I read recently that I don't think gets talked about a lot, though I'll be honest, I'm not. The most informed on the broader discussion is a letter from Jacobs. I can't remember his first name or Henry Jacobs. Henry Jacobs. He wrote a letter in January 1844.
So this is contemporary. Joseph Smith is still alive.
And he's saying he talks about.
He's rehearsing a sermon he heard Joseph Smith or Hyrum Smith, I can't remember which, give where he talked about the sealing ordinance and he talked about eternal marriages. And there's a ton of language in this letter that you can find right in DNC132. But what's interesting, he doesn't explicitly talk about plural marriage as an active practice, but he specifically talks about how men could be sealed to multiple of their deceased wives, two or three deceased wives. And he specifically talks about how women could Be sealed to only one.
So yeah, so he doesn't talk about living polygamy per se, but he does talk about basically eternal polygamy, if you will.
[00:28:10] Speaker B: We've also got a really important revelation given a year before in July of 1842 to Sarah Ann Whitney and her father, Noel K. Whitney.
Right. And then a month later, in August 1842, when Joseph is in hiding, we have a letter to Newell K. And Elizabeth and Sarah and Whitney saying, please come visit me. Here's where I'm hiding. Don't let Emma know that you're coming. Make sure you come privately and don't let Eddie be know. But especially Emma, like, so Sarah Whitney.
[00:28:39] Speaker A: Is one of the wives.
[00:28:40] Speaker B: She's sealed to Joseph Smith. We have the. The revelation in July of 1842 is the sealing ceremony that Newell K. Whitney is supposed to pronounce upon Joseph Smith and Sarah Ann Whitney.
[00:28:49] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:28:50] Speaker B: And then a month later he says, come visit me in hiding and don't tell Emma where I am and don't tell her. Don't let her know that you're coming. Gosh, why would he specify don't let Emma know that you're coming to visit me a month later? You know, I mean, so, so we've got that we should talk about the Nauvoo Expositor briefly.
[00:29:04] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:29:04] Speaker B: Right. So there's this tendency to have these extreme reactions to either like, oh, we just reject all of it as anti Mormon lies. That's what a lot of polygamy deniers do. To be fair, that's what a lot of just mainstream saints have done histor today. Right. They just hear, oh, the Nova Expositor was bad. On the other hand.
[00:29:21] Speaker A: Yeah, that's the reasons they used for.
[00:29:23] Speaker B: For suppressing it. Yeah. On the other hand, you get sort of this idea like, oh, it was just totally honest and true about everything and above board and these guys were right about everything. So you get these extremes. Critical historians recognize that there are some things in the Nauvoo Expositor that are outlandish or far fetched or like, you know, like they call Joseph Smith like the blackest villain since Nero or something like that. Like, I mean, this is absurd. Right.
But there's other things.
[00:29:46] Speaker C: And that's the kind of thing you could, if you're Joseph Smith, you could point to and say, this is defamation.
[00:29:50] Speaker B: Inciting. This is trying to incite riots.
[00:29:52] Speaker C: Inciting riots. Yeah.
[00:29:53] Speaker B: But it also contains the affidavit. I think it's Austin Cowles, William Marx and his wife. Right. So we have. Or Sorry, William.
William Sarah Law. So we have affidavits from people and what critical historians do is they take those historical sources and they say, can we corroborate what is being claimed in these sources without just rejecting, knee jerk, rejecting or accepting them? And what we find is yes, in some specific details, in specific cases, like Austin Cowles, who's on the Nauvoo High Council, who leaves the church over polygamy and says, hiram, read this, this thing to us. Right. So we have contemporary anti Mormon and Mormon sources attesting to the fact that in Nauvoo Joseph Smith is practicing plural marriage. The reason we don't have more.
There's a couple reasons, but the big one is they're trying to keep it secret. Again, like they're not publicly broadcasting this. So it makes sense that you're going to get lots of hearsay and sort of through the grapevine accounts of these things because at the time they were deliberately trying to keep it a private secret practice, that it's not a conspiracy, that they just made up all the evidence later. It's the fact that later, as the RLDS church is publicly claiming Joseph Smith never practiced polygamy. That's when Joseph F. Smith and George A. Smith and others say, we need to get these women and other people on the record before they all die so we can get these accounts so we can to corroborate and shore up what they already knew was the case, which is that it was being done in Nauvoo.
[00:31:17] Speaker C: And, and I think I would like to add to all of this, like these are some of the key pieces of contemporary evidence. But I do think we need to challenge the notion that late evidence is inherently fabricated or unreliable.
Certainly historians, as a general rule, they prefer contemporary to late, but historians use late evidence all the time, all the time to reconstruct historical pictures. And you have to look at the broad picture of evidence. You have to do that when you're trying to reconstruct what really happened in history. So Brian Hales has a document on his website, MormonPolyGamyDocuments.org it's right at the header. Right. You can. It's eyewitness accounts of Joseph Smith's involvement with polygamy and he doesn't number them. So I don't know for sure, but I counted 75 people. I may have miscounted, so there might be a few more or a few less or whatever, But I counted 75 people on that document who were in nauvoo in the 1840s, who talked about, either in contemporary sources or later sources, Joseph Smith practicing polygamy.
And these are people who were die hard supporters of Joseph Smith. These are people who were die hard enemies of Joseph Smith. These were people who were supporters but then denied polygamy later or rejected polygamy. I shouldn't say denied because they knew he had practiced it, but rejected polygamy. People that we've already talked about, like William Marx, who remained faithful to the gospel. In some sense he was part of the reorganization of the reorganized church. But these are people across the spectrum who all bear witness that they knew Joseph Smith practiced polygamy. And we talked about John C. Bennett and his stuff earlier. But like John C. Bennett publishes lists of initials.
[00:33:06] Speaker B: I was going to say of women, names of women, and we can cr.
[00:33:09] Speaker C: And they are corroborated by later sources by the actual women themselves in many cases.
And so again, when you're trying to figure out, well, what really happened here, you have to take this whole network of evidence and say what's really more plausible that all of these people across the spectrum either lied or are completely misremembering or are fabricating this conspiracy.
[00:33:36] Speaker B: Or my favorite one, that Brigham Young is like this evil mastermind that's coercing them into coercing things.
[00:33:43] Speaker C: And critics of the church even coercing critics, even coercing people who join, like the RLDS movement or people after he was dead or people who align with Sidney Rigdon, like, it's just.
[00:33:53] Speaker B: Yeah, it's.
[00:33:54] Speaker C: The whole notion is absurd. You have to look at this whole body of evidence and say, what's really the best explanation for it? And look, if we can deny the veracity of all this testimony that Joseph Smith practiced polygamy, then we have nothing to hang our hats on as far as Joseph really having a set of metal plates translating the Book of Mormon.
[00:34:14] Speaker A: Touche.
[00:34:15] Speaker C: Okay. Because this is. This is a very compelling network of sources. And I know critics of the polygamy deniers or monogamy affirmers will go through these sources one by one and pick out little weaknesses. You can do that with literally anything. There's no historical document that you can't nitpick to try and make its data go away if you want to. In fact, some of the best historians will fall prey to this sometimes when a document is inconvenient to the narrative they want to tell.
But you have to look at the totality of this evidence and try to figure out what's the best explanation for all of this, and I'm telling you right now, it's that Joseph Smith practiced polygamy.
[00:34:55] Speaker A: I mean, you had mentioned that Joseph Smith needed to hide this from Emma. And I think that kind of highlights one of the pain points people have with marriage, that there's elements of secrecy, betrayal, feeling like it's unfair. And those are very valid concerns to have with this practice. I can see why the theory of denying Joseph Smith's polygamy would be appealing. I mean, I, as a woman, I would feel very strongly and very passionately about sharing my husband or things like that. But because of we're seeing all of this evidence, like, why. I can see why this theory is appealing to people. Why is it important to affirm that Joseph Smith was a plural practice?
[00:35:34] Speaker B: So one of the big reasons why is.
Okay, so let me back in here and say a second. Yes, you can have a nice, neat, tidy little narrative that Joseph Smith was a monogamist and there was no conflicting or compromising or problematic, you know, behavior on his part or whatever, right?
And he was squeaky clean. He was. It's like the. The video prophet of the restoration just had this heroic aura and glow to him the whole time, right?
That's a nice little squeaky clean narrative that you can have. But that comes with a trade off. And the trade off is Brigham Young, John Taylor, Wilford Woodruff, Lorenzo Snow, Heber C. Kimball, William Clayton, Willard Richards, all these guys were evil, lying, deceptive monsters who were in it for their own glorification, to gratify their lusts, right? To consolidate their power. This is what they say. I mean, like, I'm not making this up. I'm not. This isn't hyperbole. That's a trade off you get, okay, so you can have Joseph the monogamist, but guess what? All of his successors were evil, rotten, scoundrel liars. And like, like. And this is where they jump to, which is why you get on the Brigham bashing bandwagon. Naturally, this is where it leads to that Brigham Young, the big evil, bad Brigham Young, with his base desires to control women and have them be his sexual objects. He just cooked it all up and pinned on Joseph Smith to justify this horrible thing. So with that comes questions of prophetic succession, questions of prophetic credibility. Sealing keys, right? The theology of eternal families of temples, of all this stuff. That's the trade off.
[00:37:01] Speaker A: Hold the keys today.
[00:37:02] Speaker B: Does Russell and Nelson hold the keys? Can we say with confidence and that he is a true prophet teaching us true things? If he is a Guy who sealed to two women, one married, one dead. Right? Who. And who has these keys purportedly that section 132, this forgery that Brigham Young made up says that he has. So that's the trade off you get for it. Is everybody else after Joseph Smith is just their credibility, their believability is absolutely fraught.
[00:37:25] Speaker C: And I. I have seen people who try to, like, work around that right there. There are people, they'll probably be in the comments of this video, right, Coming at us saying, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. And they try to work around that.
But honestly, like, if. If Brigham Young is the legitimate successor of Joseph Smith and he holds the keys, then you have like, then either, like, there's no getting around the fact that he practiced polygamy and he endorsed it and he supported it and he had a revelation canonized on it. So then you are kind of still in a position then that you need to accept that polygamy was God sanctioned. God sanctioned. And we have to ask, then why would. If that's the case, why wouldn't Brigham Young have just been honest, like, hey, it's actually my revelation. It's my revelation that we practice polygamy. Like, you have a couple of different paths you can take, and one of them is that route, in which case you have to, like, you can say, okay, it was sanctioned, but it was sanctioned under Brigham Young. Okay, then why wasn't he just transparent about that? Or it wasn't sanctioned. And then you're saying that the Lord's anointed basically cooked up a conspiracy for all the reasons Stephen just talked about. I think this is. People aren't going to like this. Well, certain people aren't going to like this. But I think the problem here is that polygamy denial is, in effect, a Trojan horse.
It is a Trojan horse that smuggles in all this other stuff that Stephen's talking about that undermines the credibility of prophets today and the succession. It undermines the legitimacy of canonized revelation and Doctrine Covenants 132, which with it comes with it, the undermining, the legitimacy of temple ceilings and families being eternal.
It's. It's a Trojan horse that smuggles in all of that other stuff under the guise of something that you probably do kind of want to bracket and set aside and get out of our history and get out of the gospel because it is squirmy and uncomfortable. But it's a Trojan horse that bring. That brings down the whole rest of the. Of the structure of the. Of the.
Of the building. Right. And so it's not. That's, that's the danger, that's the risk. There's.
[00:39:36] Speaker A: Well articulated.
[00:39:37] Speaker B: Good take, Neil. Here, here. Actually, I unironically think you're right about that. And if you follow some of the key players of the polygamy denier movement, you see the sort of the mask drop on some of these other issues. President Nelson with vaccines or masks or whatever, right. That's a big one I've seen. Right. How dare he tell us to get vaccinated or whatever. Right? Like, and yes, you can see the effect here that you're describing where it's not really just about polygamy, it's about these other things that they also don't like that they're doing. And this is a way to sort of bring that into the church.
[00:40:06] Speaker A: If I'm having questions about whether Joseph Smith practiced plural marriage or not, where is the best place for me to go to learn about his polygamy?
[00:40:14] Speaker B: Well, if you want the documents, go to the Joseph Smith Papers, right? Like they, like, you know, we could start with high level, like, oh, Brian Hales or whatever, right. But go to the documents. They're on the Joseph Smith Papers and things like that. Now I have to caveat this though, because you can't just throw primary sources at people, right. This is a mistake that people have that I can just do my own research and I can just plop open the document and know exactly what's going on here.
[00:40:37] Speaker A: They're written in English.
[00:40:38] Speaker B: Yeah, right. Anybody can read them. No, go to the Joseph Smith Papers and pay attention to the careful documentation, the citations, the historical introductions. Right? They can. The proper contextualization of these documents that the Joseph Smith Papers gives. Right. So that's where I would first direct people to go, is to say, like, look, we have the documents. But more than that, there have been scholars who have properly contextualized and made sense of these documents. And that needs to also be paid attention.
[00:41:05] Speaker C: On the same vein I mentioned earlier, MormonPolyGameDocuments.org, which is run by Brian Hales, he wrote a three volume set on Joseph Smith's polygamy that is the absolute gold standard as far as it's top shelf.
And in the process of doing that, he scanned and digitized every primary source he looked at, I think even every academic source he looked at. And there are all accessible on his website there.
And so again, if you want to get into the documents, this is where you go. But he also has a link there to a paper he published with interpreter specifically on the question Joseph Smith, monogamist or polygamist. Okay.
So he's got a paper taking that topic head on that I would recommend. It's a long paper. It's like well, maybe three, 30 something pages.
[00:41:56] Speaker A: Yeah, that's not bad.
[00:41:58] Speaker C: But it's.
Let's see, I'm about to open it and it'll tell me how many pages. 44 pages.
So that's not counting the title page in here. So 41 pages or so.
So he goes through the evidence and that's a few years old. He might. There might be some updates to make to it, but I have an update.
[00:42:16] Speaker B: I made to it on Mormoner. Mormoner.org I was the primary author researcher on three articles, Joseph Smith and Plural Marriage, DNC 132 and broadly Latter Day Saints and Plural Marriage. And like Brian, all the sources have been digitized, transcribed, uploaded so you can see all of our sources as well there. So this is. Yeah, from what, 2014 or something?
[00:42:37] Speaker C: 2017. 17.
[00:42:41] Speaker B: So a little more recent would be the work I've done on Mormoner.
[00:42:44] Speaker A: So clearly there is a plethora of sources I could go to if I wanted to learn more about this. And we're. But we will be sure to put all of them in the description down below so that you can learn more about this topic. It is a challenging doctrine. Plural marriage is not easy. There is a lot of complexity with this, but I do think it's worth grappling with and I think there's a lot of great sources for us to dive into. So be sure to not just take our word for it, but to actually dive in and become informed yourself.
Sam.
