I watched the entire clip of a "reactivated" member that has discovered truth about the church. He attempted to share it during F & T before the bishop asked him to stop and sit down.

At what age did you learn that church prophets practice polygamy?

I was 6 or 7 and it was definitely before my baptism. While the church wrongfully hid Smith and his wives from my learning of church history, I was well aware of Brigham Young (and others).

In this clip, a member of the bishopric is upset that this member shared damaging information about Smith and his wives during sacrament meeting. It's very revealing that he admits that he is withholding common knowledge about Brigham having multiple wives from his 9 year old daughter. It's not age appropriate according to him.

https://youtu.be/092o_pYO7Sg?t=1136

If this has already been discussed, then I offer my humble apology.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/16/2019 02:28PM by messygoop.

Before I was 7.

I knew Joseph was a polygamist.

But....I have multiple relatives that were married to Joseph and my grandparents knew these wives.

I knew my Grandfather who lived to almost 100. He knew his Grandmother who lived to almost a 100 and was married to Joseph.

So my family history and stories come from close to the source.

I learned very young since mY family has proud polyg heritage. Didn't know about JS until high school.

It was in ninth grade seminary taught by the bishop's wife. Only they kept the numbers artificially low. We weren't told about Joseph's many wives. We were told he had maybe six, if that. As for Brigham, it was only like twelve. Both were bold faced lies.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/16/2019 03:16PM by Amyjo.

It didn't really compute what the reality was.

I grew up thinking polygamy was better than monogamy. It's how I was taught. My great grandfather was a Mormon polygamist, and we were taught to revere him, even though he was poor and stupid.

I was quite young when I learned that Brigham Young had a lot of wives. Perhaps I was about 8 years old. At the time it wasn't shocking to me and some of those things were taught more openly than they are now.

When I was in high school I surreptitiously read No Man Knows My History and learned about Joseph Smith. I didn't really believe the part about Joseph Smith being a philanderer and one of my seminary teachers mentioned it in passing like "he was sealed to old ladies after he was dead" or something like that. Joseph was more noble than Brigham.


But honestly, I looked forward to the celestial kingdom where I could have multiple women. I was raised thinking men have a stronger sex drive and need it more than women, so polygamy was probably a good thing.

We did have a want to be prophet polygamist who preached to our family and formed his own polygamy group out of our living room. The group grew to about 6o loosely bound members who met and adored this prophet who had charisma a charm to spare.

As a kid. I don't know when Joseph Smith's polygamy became a secret but in my ward in NY it was just common knowledge back in the 60's.
Nobody bothered discussing the details.

I don't remember when I learned about it. My grandmother was the
second wife of a pre-manifesto plural "marriage." Polygamy was
just a thing that was from God but the evil government was not
allowing. The conventional wisdom was that it would come back at
a later date.

It seems like I always knew about polygamy. I didn't really have a problem with it until I was in my 40's and learned about how it was really practiced. When I expressed my doubts and frustration with my TBM wife she called the first counselor in the stake presidency and had him talk to me. He wasn't aware that JS was a polygamist. I told him it didn't do any good to talk to him if he didn't know anything.

When two of my teenage boys who were both priests asked the bishop about it, the bishop told them that JS only had one wife and polygamy started with Brigham. I told them to tell the bishop that I would be talking to him about lying to my children. The next sunday when I talked to the bishop he had apparently read the FAIR disclaimer to Todd Comptons book because he told me he had just learned that JS had 29 wives. The Bishop who had been in a stake presidency and had been the gospel doctrine teacher for many years truely believed the JS was a monogamist. That reflects on how much the church truely hid JS's behavior.

One of my most vivid memories of lying/spinning/not being fully honest about this was from the old children's picture books on the Doctrine & Covenants. You may remember those.

They had about 6 pictures per page with a simple sentence or two underneath describing what was going on or the doctrine associated with the picture. It also had references to the scripture text along side each picture. We also had read along tapes and videos for these things.

One of the sections had a part about D&C 132, which explained that sometimes God authorized "the Prophet" to have more than one wife. Now, I may have just been a kid but that didn't pass the smell test, because I knew that not just the prophet was getting in on the polygamy thing, including some of my ancestors.

Like any good Mormon I rationalized that hearing the full story might damage the faith of young children. Little did I know that the real full story was way more crazy with polyandry and 14 year old girls subjected to ecclesiastical blackmail (family salvation if you marry so and so).

Slightly off-topic I'm interested in why present-day Mormons revere their polygamous forebears, if they find it repugnant nowadays.

My first thought is that they hold an approving, emotional attachment to their forebears while doing their geneaology, and thus come to religious and psychological terms with the early generations of polygamists.

Any other thoughts?

We all know that if the founding leader wasn't of sound mind and of good character, then the entire basis of the church collapses.

Some of us grew up in the church when all weirdness was in the open and the strength of the church was from the next social. Then the correlation program painted a very limited picture that placed polygamy squarely on the shoulders on Brigham Young.

I suppose today, members are attempting to deny that there was ever members practicing it.

I joined TSCC in 2004 when I was twenty-two. I knew NOTHING about polygamy. It wasn't taught by the missionaries, nor was it taught in the the gospel principles Sunday school.
I would learn about it in an institute class when I was twenty-five. The class just touched on the history, that polygamy happened, and then god decided that it was time for it to end. It was so long ago that I cannot remember the details.
I remember talking to a fiend about the class, and she said that she could understand why it happened - there were a lot of widows that the men married so the women could be taken care of. I bought it at the time, but the more that I thought of it, I felt that it was an excuse that gave women a passive role. And yes, I understand that things were different then, but also around that time (or before) there were women that watched over their homes and their children on their own (with no need for being a plural wife), and how women oft disguised themselves as men to enlist and serve in the battlefield.

I found out that Joseph Smith had many wives somewhere in my late-twenties and early thirties. I tried to justify his actions, but there was no justifying it. Eventually, I would realize that TSCC couldn't no matter how hard they try, or how much they try to hide their past.

Like a lot of BIC kids whose family history in the mormon church goes way back, I can't remember a time when I didn't know about polygamy. The official doctrine, as I always understood it from Manifestos I and II, is that polygamy is a commandment for some people, but it is "on hold" here on earth--for now.

Celestial polygamy (i.e., men getting sealed to a second or third wife in the temple while remaining sealed to a previous wife or wives who passed away) definitely exists to this day. Witness: RMN.

The big thing that bothers me is how little the wives of prophets are discussed *at all*--plural or otherwise. These women were just nameless, faceless "wives" not real people. Women's role in the church and church history was just not discussed when I was a kid. It's barely better now.