Posted by:
mumblingmurmurer
(
)
Date: September 06, 2022 06:34PM
As a missionary in the mid-west circa winter 2009, I sat around our upstairs room listening to a set of talks on compact disk about Joseph Smith by Truman G Madson. I was raptured. There was nothing else to do when it was minus twenty degrees outside but lose myself in Brother Madson's surety as a balm against the arguments I kept having with other Christians on their doorsteps.
There was a moment Madson recalled -- I'm not sure what primary documentation it's based on -- where one of the leading apostates behind the Nauvoo Expositor overheard Smith teaching polygamy to the Saints. With tears in his eyes, he threw his arms around Joseph's neck and begged him saying, "if you won't, if only you won't, this will be the greatest church of the age." But Madson's version of Joseph, while sympathetic to this objection, said that "keys would be turned against him" on Heaven's end if he didn't teach the doctrine.
I wondered about polygamy while pounding the cobblestones of Iowan towns trying to convince mostly other Protestants that their traditions were foolish and couldn't save them. The Book of Mormon, I noticed even at the time, was a book designed to clear up the sorts of disagreements Protestants were having at the time Joseph noticed the tension at revival camps and saw the religious divisions in his own family. It was a book designed for the Protestant-leaning mind that held itself aloof from all the churches because none of them seemed to have it right. But, its reach was damned before it had an opportunity for its arguments to be heard because the rest of Mormon history loomed over it. Plural gods. Polygamy. All the other things we teach which are heresy to those folks.
I often complained about this cosmic injustice to whomever of my peers or leaders would listen, but I don't think they understood where I was coming from. They would tell me that people hadn't rejected me but the Lord whom I represented, so they were condemned and I was not. I didn't want to condemn anyone, though. I wanted to know why the Lord was so bad at his own PR. In other words, I agree with that man who wept around Joseph's neck that Mormonism could have been the greatest religion of the age but for polygamy.
Smith was running for president in the 1844 election. The Mormons had their own city state and their own armed forces for defensive purposes. They had privileges, because they commanded respect and sympathy for their abuses at the hands of the Missourians. The missionary work to the British Isles was exploding. Right at this moment, the official church narrative goes, God forced Smith's hand to restore the institution of polygamy to the earth. My 2009 twenty-year-old Mormon brain could not wrap itself around why God would do that. I knew the ways of the Lord were mysterious, but from my experience being rejected over and over again for polygamy, a doctrine I never practiced nor associated with anyone living who ever practiced it, a doctrine I was never expected to understand except to excuse Smith and some of my great-great-grandparents for doing it, it seemed downright suicidal from a public relations standpoint. It seemed like my job as a missionary would have been a lot easier if the whole thing never happened. So what was the point?
The party of Abraham Lincoln was born in the late 1850s, and its first platform included a platitude against "the twin evils of slavery and polygamy." How did we get to that point? The first Mormon Moment was in 1844, and I can imagine how much it shocked the nation when the Mormons blew it, because its sequel has been recurring ever since. News broke of a secret sex society among the Mormons with the Mormon prophet at the center, and the prophet-mayor-lieutenant general of the largest militia on the frontier-presidential candidate Joseph Smith immediately had the press burned and its owners driven from Nauvoo. So when Madson recounts the headlines being written at the time for militant action against the religious tyrant on the frontier, I kinda understood where the the Gentiles were coming from. I didn't think my people ever posed any threat to them, but I understood how the optics fueled the drama that led to Smith's incarceration at Carthage and the eventual expulsion of the Mormon people to Utah. If that all could have been prevented by simply not pressing the prophet to press others into secret polygamous relationships... I didn't want to question the wisdom of God, but an explanation would have been nice. It was my job to teach the gospel and save souls by the only authority that could get them to the highest heaven, and I was committed to it. There were issues that kept coming up and the church in those days provided no helpful resources or even an official position to read to people. So I was on my own.
It looked like -- I didn't believe this but it looked like -- Smith really was just a sex-crazed cult leader whose power and self-endowed religious importance was going to his head and the carnal side of his male nature was clouding his thoughts at the expense of the gathering of Israel. He would never! I knew the man too well, even though I never met him, to think he would ever do that. But also I empathized enough with the people I was teaching to understand why they thought these things about the man. That's what the "Preach My Gospel" manual said to do: listen. I was a good teacher. I believed in my message, and I was serving God with all my heart, might, mind, and strength trying to bring people to the truth so they could be together forever with their families. My own remission of sins hung on the deal that I made with the Lord in my personal prayers. I wished that God had never commanded the prophet to do polygamy, because I wished the progress of the church could have been unimpeded by a doctrine we would abandon in just forty-five years anyway.
I had very mixed emotions when I read the Nauvoo expositor. When I read about the allegations Smith and his closest friends committed against the vulnerable women and girls of Nauvoo, my heart recoils and would not that I had ever been born into such a church much less asked to defend this behavior. I was willing to grant FAIRMormon an opportunity to explain each and every case away like only they can, though. At the same time, when I read the allegations that Smith was teaching heresies about multiple gods and our potential to become like Heavenly Father, I remembered the King Follett Discourse I had recently discovered and read the for the first time and laughed like I knew something they didn't. Something became very clear to me, though, as I read the King Follett Discourse, the Sermon in the Grove, and the Nauvoo Expositor together as the back and forth they were meant to be: Joseph Smith was a liar.
"What a thing it is to be accused of having seven wives when I can only find one!" It doesn't matter if I believed him to be a prophet, justifying him in a lie is hard to do according to the things I believed. I never got off the hook with my bishops if they even thought I was lying. I knew Joseph had many wives in secret at the time he said that. I did not then yet know how salacious the academically-verified historical truth got, but I knew that Smith was lying. When they accused him of teaching brand new doctrines about God that challenged everything people thought they knew as regular Bible readers, he stepped up and dropped the hammer in all the charisma of a prophet of God. He gave a sermon at the funeral of Brother Follett fueled my own thoughts about how religion and science could coexist and how Mormonism was that bridge. However, when they accurately called him out for bedding women besides Emma, he denied it like a little weasel who knew he did a bad thing. Oh, what if Mormonism had been able to deny that allegation honestly? Then the last note that Smith went out on would have had more of the idealistic force of martyrdom as my missionary heart imagined in back in 2009.
Instead, I had people I was teaching asking me if Smith had sex with a dozen women who were already married to other living men. I denied it vociferously, and then felt the bile of my uncertainty roil up in my insides as I wondered if I was wrong. I had to know that I hadn't just lied to these people who trusted me and looked up to me as a teacher. So I checked the apologists' website the next P-day at the library computers, and I didn't like what they were laying down. The assumptions they made as they entered into their apologetic granted the other side the truth from the start but tried to reason it was more complicated than it appears at a modern glance. Why does it have to be so complicated? It would have been better if it had never happened. Did the founding prophet of the restoration lead a secret sex life? No. It would have been so simple if that could have been the answer.
If the Book of Mormon is to be understood as a sort of autobiography of Smith's psychology and inner spirituality, which Dan Vogel asserts is plausible, it is very clear he was struggling with monogamy from the get-go. In chronological order, the book of Mosiah is the oldest English text in the Book of Mormon and the "Small Plates" (1 & 2 Nephi, Jacob, Enos, Jarom Omni, plus the Words of Mormon) are the latest text, even though he placed them at the beginning. So, chronologically, the words of Jacob to the Nephites in the beginning of the book of Jacob having to do with their beginning to practice polygamy, came near the close of the translation process right when Smith was beginning to feel confidence that people besides his family might actually buy this book. The mantle of prophet was beginning to settle on him, and maybe, just maybe, he tried to convince himself not to give in to the biggest and most obvious temptation that might have been on any young red-blooded male prophet's mind. It didn't stop him later, but perhaps he tried to resist it. Maybe the Marvelous Work and the Wonder was as much an opportunity for him to transform himself as much as it was an opportunity to religiously unify his family.
This is only speculation, but I find it fascinatingly plausible. By 1831, he was caught having a romp with his maid in the barn, so clearly he was losing whatever private battles he was having in himself. He stepped over the red line that he tried to draw for himself by making it a doctrine in the stick of Joseph. However, despite all the fire and brimstone, he gave himself a backdoor: "if I will, saith the Lord, raise up seed unto me, I will command my people; otherwise they shall hearken unto these things," Nephi's brother says in the text. It's one thing if these are words on gold tablets written by someone else long ago, but as we now know it was only ever just Joseph looking into his hat, presumably at the magic seer rock. In that context the "Gold Plates" could have said anything he wanted them to say, and he dropped the ball. Emma kept Joseph honest for a little while longer, but eventually he began to do it again, only this time with a very elaborate theological justification, years of prophetic experience selling thousands of people on his product, and all the right excuses. DC 132 always chafed me with the authoritarian, anti-agency way it begins. DC 132 expects the reader, originally Emma, to believe that Joseph was just asking questions about the past for understanding but that by asking the question he accidentally activated a theological India Jones trap that was also kinda like something from Mission Impossible. Lo and behold, a recording of the voice of God audible only to him told him that if he didn't live the doctrine he was about to be taught, he would be damned, period, but if he lived it he would be on the path to become as God even the Father despite all his other sins. My, my, what a pickle that must have been. Surely if phrased this way, this revelation wasn't the least little bit suspicious. It's not his fault that he has to marry other younger women, Emma, you see, God forced his hand. I'm sure you can understand. He didn't want to have sexual access to all of Nauvoo: he wanted to be a good Christian, but God had other plans.
What actually happened in Smith's mind? I don't know. Nobody ever will. Nobody can read other human beings' thoughts. All we can do is go off of what people give us.
The Latter-day Saints generally had no idea what their leader was doing except for rumors, and William Law thought he would have more sympathy than he ended up having. The Mormons drove him from the city because they thought he was a liar trying to rile up mobs against the Saints and defame their prophet. Polygamy was secret, so logically that meant only a few initiates knew about it as well as some people Smith attempted to initiate that turned on him over it. Most of the Mormon residents of Nauvoo thought monogamy was given, a commandment, and the 1835 edition of the Doctrine and Covenants then in circulation affirmed this. William Law's Nauvoo Expositor appealed to these facts, and Smith himself affirmed that most Mormons didn't know when he lied to them in the Sermon at the Grove. They didn't know. So when Smith taught the King Follett discourse for the first time, the doctrine was devoid of the polygamous undertones that celestial marriage would have for most of the rest of the nineteenth century. It was this sterilized, plausibly monogamous version of these Mormon doctrines to which I was first converted as I sought a deeper understanding of the gospel for the people I was called to teach.
Lorenzo Snow coined the term, "as man now is, God once was; as God now is, man may become," but Mormons today forget that Snow understood the doctrine polygamously. Anyone who has read the Journal of Discourses at any length knows that Brigham Young understood God to be married to more than one goddess. Once, over a century ago, the temple rituals were much more ideologically consistent and people were prepared to go to the temple with a clearer knowledge of what they were doing. Today, the church puts an emphasis on eternal families your whole life and then you find yourself nude in the House of God but for a thick white tarp while some old geezer in a white suit washes and anoints you to become a priest and king to the most high God and you wonder what's going on. Nobody prepares you for that. They used to. It used to be much more commonly understood among Mormons in Utah that we need to be polygamists in order to be like God, because he is a polygamist. This is the celestial law of marriage he lives and abides by, the new and everlasting covenant of marriage, and the fullness of the priesthood. That's how he has so many spirit children, notwithstanding the mysterious specifics of reproduction on that level are yet to be revealed. Well, up to a certain point that's how it was understood anyway. Post-Manifesto, the Mormons were taught a different set of interpretations that allowed for polygamy to go away, but not everyone was sold and the fundamentalists remain with us to this day. This is how Mormonism was, but this is not how Mormonism was from the beginning, and our bizarre forty-five year reign in the wilderness where a man with dozens of wives lectured the Saints on how monogamy was the sin that brought down the Roman Empire never needed to happen. God knows we've tried our hardest to forget about those years as a people. I think in 2022 we all kinda wish it never happened, but it did and we are obligated to defend the dignity of our faith, or else what are any of us doing.
Most of the Saints did NOT go west to practice polygamy! They didn't know their leaders were polygamists at first. They thought the allegations of polygamy were calumny intended to defame. It would come as a shock to many only after they had made it to Utah, and I imagine it was a big part of Mormon Reformation. As many as half, according to John Larson of the Mormon Expressions podcast fame, of the people who made the original trek west went back -- a time before the rail lines got there. Those are rarely ever talked about, and when they are it is with contempt, but consider that many of those people may have simply realized that William Law was right and they went back to civilization in disgust. The people who stayed were the ones not offended to receive this doctrine as a commandment from God. None of it ever had to happen, though. There is a parallel universe somewhere in the infinite multiverse of plausible realities where Smith learned from his episode with Fanny Algers, won his own private moral battle, and kept it in his marriage or else kept it in his pants. In this universe, he may still have been killed at Carthage and the Saints may still have gone west, and Mormon history would have played out very differently. Maybe people would be more open to its theological innovations if the church didn't have this awkward polygamous baggage to lug around.
What does it take to make the Mormon people self-aware? Well, there's more than one Mormon church for starters. Not everyone went West but they still wished to believe that Joseph had been a prophet at least up to a point. These people stayed in the midwest and formed the RLDS church and some other smaller ones, and they learned to deal with the reputation of Smith and integrate with American society. Then there's the other kind of Mormon, the ones that fled into the wilderness and had no society but their own and the natives for half a century -- these have been very late to learn self-awareness. I don't think they ever properly squared the thought that William Law had been right about polygamy in all its implications. Why should Law's name be held in the same contempt as Judas Iscariot to this day? He told you the truth! Your ancestors ended up not caring so much that they were lied to, but William Law did not make things up to get Joseph killed. He was simply a Mormon who held the prophet to the same standards he held himself. Actually, it's quite a story to read about the prophet putting the moves on his wife. She rebuffed him, and fearing that she would tell people what he was doing he attempted to shame her like she was attempting to entrap him, and Law did what a good man should have done and sided with his own wife against a man with far more power than she had. I don't think any Mormon in Nauvoo ever thought such things would happen to them. Even the ones who accepted polygamy as a revelation said as much: they were all shocked at the doctrine. It was either Brigham Young or Wilford Woodruff said that when they first had it commanded of them, they passed a funeral procession and wished to be the one in the casket. They probably meant those words honestly. Literally no one saw this coming from Joseph Smith until he had them cornered and was asking it of them. And then one day they just accepted the new doctrines without thinking about what they had said or did to their own brethren trying to warn them this was coming. The term brethren came to mean the general authorities, and after shocking the Mormon people into living polygamy and then shocking them with its ending, reality was for practical purposes whatever the leaders said it was.
The church would have been far better off if Smith had just not taught such a doctrine. I mean in terms of our "key indicators", our numbers, that every missionary reports to their zone leaders at the end of every week who in turn report it to the mission home. There would have been far more appeal in the world, especially as we entered the digital age. The complications of the historicity of the Book of Mormon, the book of Abraham, and the issues of the church's past racism would still be there. But the church would have just been another American church having to wrestle with the distasteful historical reality that they ever taught that dark skin is the curse of Cain and that servitude is the only fate fit for the descendants of Ham. The Mormons actually had very progressive opinions on racism and slavery in the 1830s and 40s, and it cost them blood and property in Missouri to hold those opinions. They could have built on that tradition and shown that American Christianity could be innovative and socially progressive rather than go off on the polygamous tangent only to half regret it later.
There was a version of what could have been nix polygamy that entered my mind as my mission came to a close, and it caused me to mourn. It was what I had thought the church was in my young faith, but I had learned too many complicating facets of my own history to think so anymore. I thought it was the final answer that showed how science and religion went together and held religiously communities together. Early Mormonism was a crude attempt by a New York Yankee to square religion and science and unite people behind a renewed faith in the savior. Mormonism was at its best in that vein. That's why it attracted people. They didn't come for Smith the polygamist; they came for Smith the American prophet who seemingly had all the answers that Protestants in enlightened age of industrial-revolution-paced scientific discovery lacked to defend traditional religion from the criticisms of the rising tides of the godless. If the Great Terror of the French Revolution showed how depraved man could become when he glorified his denial of God and put too much stock in his own reasoning, as James E. Talmage once claimed, then I argue that the whole Mormons and polygamy thing discredits the opposite extreme when people rely too much on faith and don't think often enough before leaping. What we got in the end is not the church we would have needed to prove that JudeoChristian traditionalism had a point. So, if this is the one true church and we are to believe the polygamy episode was God's will, it's almost as if God is conspiring with the devil to ruin his own image and drive people away from it.