- Okay, guys, this is the episode
that a lot of people have
been waiting for, frankly.
- Two and a half years,
people have been waiting for this one.
- We're talking about polygamy.
(uptempo synth music)
So, to talk about polygamy,
we have brought in our expert
on the history of polygamy
within the Church of Jesus Christ
of Latter-day Saints, Brian Hales.
Brian has researched this stuff for,
how many years would you say?
- Almost 30.
- Almost 30 years.
That is longer than I have been alive.
(Brian laughs)
He is the founder of the
website josephsmithpolygamy.org.
- Yes, yes.
- Which is a fantastic resource,
if you can get there to
learn more about this.
And?
- And, you've published these books:
Joseph Smith's Polygamy,
Volumes I, II, and III,
to show that the information's
out there, right?
- Yeah, Don Bradley, who I
hired to do some research for me
back between 2007 and 2013,
he was able to gather up
really almost all of the known documents
dealing with this topic,
and in the last six years,
a few other things have popped up.
But the nice thing is if somebody really
wants to understand the
topic, they can do so.
You don't necessarily
have to buy my books.
Go to the library, but the
documents are also uploaded
to another website maybe I can mention.
It's mormonpolygamydocuments.org.
And I put up almost 15
gigabytes of research material.
Everything that I compiled
for those six years is available there.
So again, this doesn't
have to be a big mystery.
We can get our heads around it,
but we have to put in the time
if we want to be able to do that.
- Yeah, and making sure
you have the right context
and good information,
because a lot of times,
people have this question
of, is it all a secret,
it's all hidden, but.
(dramatic orchestral music)
- Is it secret?
Is it safe?
- It's all online.
You don't even have to sign
in with a profile, do you?
You can just go and click on it, right?
- Right, and you can do the search,
and some of you may have
heard my name as an apologist.
I've been accused of that,
and I don't mind that title.
But I wish people would
call me a transparency-ist.
- Hmm.
- Hmm.
- I think we need
transparency on this topic
and whatever the topic
that's controversial,
that people are accusing the church
or Joseph about something negative,
transparency allows us all to understand
what's going on and prevent
spin and propaganda.
So this is my attempt to
get us to be transparent
on the issue of plural marriage.
- So there's a lot of
information out there
about polygamy and plural marriage.
That's not to say that
all of our questions
have answers yet, right?
Or would you say there are?
- There are qualified
answers to almost everything,
but you have a very good point.
We don't know nearly what we wish we knew,
but we can know all that there is to know,
and that's what these
books and the website
and Joseph Smith Papers Projects
are doing some amazing things
in making these documents available to us,
things that weren't available
except by restricted access
even just 10 or 12 years ago.
(eerie music)
So we've got like, three
pages here of questions
from our Instagram followers that we have,
and we don't have time to
ask Brian about all of them,
but we've highlighted some
of the super important ones
that we wanna touch on today.
So, just know that most of these questions
are coming from you guys.
- Yes.
- So hopefully you find some answers.
- Yeah, so, a lot of times,
people look at the church,
and they see a rather big church
that has a lot of nice people.
Latter-day Saints make
really nice neighborhoods,
have these pretty buildings, good people,
okay football team right
now, but good people, right?
And so they hear about polygamy,
and they have this idea
of, did this religion
start as some sex cult?
But then they look at
what it is and they go,
it doesn't seem like that.
So people are kind of doing this.
- There's a lot of dissonance.
- Yeah, they don't quite get it.
- What we've got here is
failure to communicate.
- Most of our audience are
people who are not members
of the church, people
who are looking into it.
So, I guess we wanna
ask, what was the reason?
Can you maintain the good nature and faith
of the church being of Jesus Christ,
and that there's polygamy in the history?
- You know, Kwaku, that
is a fantastic question,
and we need to realize
as we deal with this,
especially if we're talking
to people who don't know
our background or don't
believe as we believe
that if we say to somebody,
Joseph Smith introduced
polygamy among the Latter-day Saints,
why do you think he did
it, 100% of these people
are going to say he wanted sex.
We just have to accept
that that's the default
position for almost everyone,
but we also need to recognize
in our sexuality-saturated society
that even Latter-day Saints,
particularly the youth,
but others are going to
wonder, and worry, even,
that libido was driving
Joseph to introduce this.
Now, you just asked what
was the reason for it.
There are two answers to that question.
One is if we ask the question
why did God command Joseph
to practice plural marriage,
the answer is we don't know.
None of our prophets have ever
told us why plural marriage
was commanded between 1840 and about 1890.
But if we ask the question why
was plural marriage permitted
during that period, we
certain go to Section 132
of the Doctrine and Covenants,
and we actually find four reasons there
to help us understand why
plural marriage at least
had to be permitted as
part of the restoration.
And the first one is that it was
part of the restitution of all things.
It was a practice, and God wanted it
to be practiced in the latter days.
Now, it's a head scratcher a little bit,
because we don't know why God
didn't restore all of the practices,
like animal sacrifice or
circumcision or stuff.
There are other practices
that were practiced
in the Old Testament that
haven't been restored,
and we don't necessarily know
why God focused on that one.
But verses 40 and 45
of Section 132 mention
that this is part of a
restitution of all things.
Now, the second reason is in verse 51,
and it talks about how plural
marriage was a special trial
for those people at that time and place,
and God gives people trials
to help them overcome.
As they overcome them,
then he blesses them
with blessings that they otherwise
probably wouldn't have
been able to receive.
So plural marriage was absolutely a trial
for virtually every person, man or woman,
who engaged in it in
Nauvoo, and later in Utah.
Now, the third reason is the
one we hear about all the time.
In fact, some people want
it to be the only reason,
and that is to multiply
and replenish the earth.
It's in verse 63.
And sexuality is expected
in these plural marriages
that Joseph Smith was
practicing and that others
were engaging in in Nauvoo and in Utah.
And that's the third reason.
Now the fourth reason is verses 16 and 17,
and this tells us that, and we heard this
in our last conference, that
salvation is a personal thing,
but exaltation is a family thing.
And what's that referring to
is that every exalted person,
male or female, is married.
That's part of our theology.
So, what Section 132 does is
it anticipates the possibility
that there would be more
worthy women than men.
Now, if you go into any Christian
congregation in the world,
you'll find more women there than men,
almost every single time.
That doesn't necessarily
say that there will be
more women than men, but
Section 132 allows for that.
It allows worthy women who otherwise
wouldn't be able to have
a husband in monogamy
to then be sealed in a plural marriage.
So, those are the four reasons
that we find in Section 132
why plural marriage would
be permitted, but again,
we don't know why God commanded
it during that span of time.
- Is that backed up statistically,
the idea that there
were more women than men
in these areas at the time?
- No, it's a great question,
because there have been
even leaders of the church
who have said, oh, the
reason we did polygamy
was because there were
all these extra women,
and they needed husbands.
It's just simply not true.
The data that has been gathered
by very good researchers
shows that in the areas where
polygamy was being practiced,
there really wasn't an excess of women,
and that's an idea that
really needs to be set aside,
even though it still gets
repeated from time to time.
- So I know that all of
these plural marriages
were done willingly.
Nobody was forced to do
anything, which is fine.
If that's what people wanna do, cool.
But one of the allegations
is that Joseph Smith
used his role and status as a prophet
to pressure women into
accepting proposals.
Is there any evidence of that,
or any evidence that.
- That they were coerced, yeah,
there was coercion into marriage?
- There obviously would have
been some social pressure
when the prophet who's charismatic
and is esteemed by everybody
as being a great leader,
would propose anything,
including marriage.
So other than that little
bit of a, I would call it
just a social pressure, I
think what you're really
referring to is a statement
from John C. Bennett.
John C. Bennett was a reprobate
who was excommunicated
from the church in 1842,
but he made the accusation
against Joseph that any woman
who turned him down, he
would ruin their reputation.
And that gets repeated over and over
by anti-Mormons even today.
The truth of the matter
is that we can document
Joseph proposing to five
women who turned him down,
and we know about these
simply because the women
or their family later talked about it.
In fact, in one case,
Joseph told the woman, okay,
I will pray for you that you
don't fall into temptation,
and that was how he
responded to being rebuffed.
And there's no evidence
that he was going to destroy
anybody's reputation or used
coercion or anything like that.
In fact, Joseph taught, and
Lucy Walker quoted this,
that a woman would have her choice.
That could not be denied her.
That's what Joseph taught
about a woman being sealed to a man.
Now, there are two exceptions.
There's Sarah Pratt and Nancy Rigdon.
These are two women who went public,
and they made accusations against Joseph,
and he publicly defended himself.
But those are the only
cases where we find Joseph
actually addressing the
accusations of women
or dealing with what
they said was a proposal.
- Interesting.
Why did Joseph Smith marry sisters
or women who had husbands?
Well, we'll start there.
Why did Joseph marry sisters
or women who already had husbands?
- Joseph Smith was sealed
to two sets of sisters
and at least one
mother-daughter, maybe two,
depending upon how you wanna draw the line
as far as who was actually
a wife and who wasn't,
'cause the documentation isn't very good.
And quite honestly,
Joseph was sealed to
the women that he knew.
He didn't reach out far and wide
to try to find women
to be his plural wives.
He approached people that he knew,
women that he knew that were close to him,
if they were mothers and
daughters or sisters,
and some of those
relations are not allowed
under the law of Moses,
but they were allowed
under the law of Abraham.
Some people criticize this,
but we do know that Jacob married
sisters, so it's something
that could be permitted, at
least in the Old Testament.
Now, you also alluded to a second topic
as why was Joseph sealed to
women who have legal husbands?
And this is undoubtedly the
most commonly offered question
that we encounter.
It's called polyandry, and
there have been individuals
accusing Joseph of
marrying other men's wives
so he could have sex with them,
and then they'd go home and
they'd still be the wife
of the man and have a family with the man.
And this simply never happened.
Joseph would not have tolerated it,
and it would have been adultery
under the New Testament
and under the teachings of Joseph Smith,
including Section 132.
But then that leaves us with the question,
well, why is Joseph being
sealed to these women,
and a good example is a
woman Ruth Vose Sayers.
Now, her husband was not a member,
and Ruth wanted to be sealed to a husband.
And her husband Edward
was really a nice guy
who liked Joseph, didn't
believe in eternity,
didn't believe in the Mormon theology,
but he said to his wife, Ruth,
go ahead and go be sealed
to Joseph for the next life.
That'll make you happy,
but you're gonna stay and be my wife here.
And that's what these sealings were.
At no time in Nauvoo did a woman
have two husbands at the same time
with whom she could
have conjugal relations.
That never happened.
But, at least up to maybe 11, 12, 13 women
did have legal husbands and
were sealed to Joseph Smith,
but this was just for the next
life, and not for this life.
- How many women did Joseph Smith marry
that were already married again?
- There could be as many as 14.
Two of 'em we don't know much about,
and one of 'em was a pretend marriage,
so we at least have 11.
- Were any of those already sealed
to Latter-day Saints husbands?
- No, no, you couldn't have a woman sealed
to two men at the same time,
even in that time period.
- So in every case when
he was married to a woman
that already had a husbands,
that husband was not a
member of the church?
- No, no, they were members.
- What?
- And in fact, this is a head scratcher.
And by that, I mean that
several of the women
were legally married to
active Latter-day Saints,
and you could wonder, why
did Joseph allow this?
Why did he allow the
woman to be sealed to him
instead of saying, look,
your husband's a great guy,
go be sealed to him.
And all we know is Lucy saying
that a woman gets to have
her choice, and Joseph
was gonna go with that.
But it's something that
again is not sinful,
but it just makes me wonder
a little bit why Joseph
maybe didn't just say, go
be sealed to your husband.
Of course, these husbands
could then be sealed
to other plural wives,
and most of them were.
So they all had a wife in eternity.
But at no time did a woman
have two legal husbands
with whom she could have sexual relations.
- Sounds like a very
strange, large, complex
game of switcheroo, in a sense, right?
If some of these men
have wives for eternity
that are not their wives, then their wives
are being sealed to
another person, I mean,
it works, it's just kinda, I don't get it.
But it kinda works, right?
- Well, just kinda.
If people are watching this and
they're going, that's weird,
I don't blame 'em, 'cause
I think it is weird too.
(Kwaku laughs)
Part of it could be we
don't know all the details,
but what we do know of these 14 husbands,
not a single one of 'em left
any kind of charge or
complaint against Joseph Smith,
and they all either knew at the time
or found out later.
I think virtually all of
them found out that the women
were sealed to Joseph, and they
seemed to be okay with that.
And we just don't have enough detail
beyond that to tell us
exactly what the were feeling.
- Yeah, it's like if you take a textbook
and you rip out 50 pages
and you leave a couple.
You might be able to
get, you have some facts,
you have some information,
but the reality is,
you don't have all the information.
So you can make a judgment
call with that lack of context,
or you can just say, all right,
maybe in the future,
we'll find out some more,
and I think this is one of those cases.
Joseph Smith married a 14-year-old, right?
That seems to be the consensus.
Can you tell us a little
bit more about that?
- There's a lot of confusion
about the 14-year-old
that's Helen Mar Kimball.
Because people hear 14-year-old,
they use words like pedophile
and stuff, and of course,
pedophiles are usually men
seeking 11-year-olds or younger,
so it doesn't apply ever.
If anybody ever calls Joseph a pedophile,
they don't understand the word,
or they're just looking to be critical.
But Helen Mar Kimball was 14,
and the details tell us that her father,
Heber C. Kimball, he was
in the first presidency,
he set this marriage up, and
Joseph did go along with it,
and Helen was sealed to Joseph Smith,
and we learn that Heber was afraid
that Helen was going to get close,
start dating and find
a husbands on her own.
Heber was worried about that,
so before she really got
into that dating age,
he had her sealed to Joseph.
It was more of a betrothal,
and I wish my wife Laura was here,
'cause she's done a lot
of research on this,
but what we find is there is
no record of Joseph and Helen
being together at all after this sealing,
and in fact, we have good
evidence it was not consummated,
and that while the sealing did occur,
it really was not a marriage
in any real sense of the word
as we would consider some of
the other plural marriages.
So the idea that Joseph is
going after 14-year-olds
really is not supported.
Now, I will say this:
there was another girl
who was either 14 or 15
who was sealed to Joseph,
but we don't know anything about her.
She happened to be a best
friend to Helen Mar Kimball.
We wonder if there was a repetition
of the dynamic there, but we don't know.
There was also a 15-year-old
who was sealed to Joseph,
and what's interesting
is when Emma found out about that sealing,
Emma approached her, and
they had quite a conflict.
And the next day,
she goes off and is
married to a non-member.
- Is this Fanny?
- Actually, this is Flora Ann Woodworth.
- Okay.
- And we can talk about Fanny in a minute.
- Yep.
- But Flora Ann, the
thing that's interesting
about Flora Ann is that
she, in a reaction to Emma,
she goes off and is
married to a non-member.
And that kind of tells me
that if she'd consummated
the marriage to Joseph,
she probably wouldn't have done that,
but that's speculation on my part.
But the interesting thing is
when Joseph found out about it,
he granted a divorce.
Most people don't know
that Joseph was allowing
some of his plural wives to divorce him.
And it's important to realize
that even though these are sealings
and they can last forever,
we should recognize
that the power to seal is
also the power to loosen.
And these, I think there
will be a lot of adjustments
of these plural marriages that
will go on in the millennium
so that every woman is
married in a type of marriage
and to a husband that
she is very happy with
before the resurrection
and the final judgment.
- And if I'm not mistaken,
Helen Mar Kimball
was remarried two years
later, after she was sealed
to Joseph, when he was dead, correct?
- She was married to Horace Whitney,
but that was a legal marriage,
and then she again mentioned
that she might wanna have him in eternity,
and that certainly could happen.
But I think the case of
Marinda Hyde is interesting,
because Marinda was
sealed to Joseph Smith,
and we have two sealing dates.
And then, Joseph dies in 1844.
18 months later, the
Nauvoo Temple opens up,
and Marinda goes into the temple,
and she's not sealed to Joseph.
She's sealed to Orson Hyde.
And then Orson Hyde and
Marinda get a divorce
about 20 years later, and
then she's resealed to Joseph,
again, emphasizing that yes,
these are eternal sealings,
but God wants us to get
everything right, and he honors
our free agency as these
marriages went forward.
- So, the more I'm listening
and the more I'm reading
about polygamy, it seems to me more of,
there a new doctrine that
is given to the people,
and they're trying to
figure out how it works
and less about jumping into
bed with one another, right?
When you describe these situations,
it sounds less sexual and
more, what are we doing
with these covenants and
with this new theology?
- Well, and I'll just add
to that, 'cause I mean,
from the point of view of someone
who's not a member of the church,
hearing Joseph Smith married
a 14-year-old is terrible.
But he also married a
lady in her upper 50s?
- Fanny Young?
- What was the age of his oldest wife?
- I believe it was in her
50s, Fanny Young, yeah.
- In her 50s?
- There was no thought of sexuality there.
She just said she wanted to be an angel
in the next life and be
single, and Joseph said,
you're talking really foolishly.
Here, Brigham, seal her to me
so she'll have a husband in the next life.
That's how matter-of-fact
or ceremonial this was
rather than a real marriage.
- Yeah, so it's like, take your pick.
Did he like little kids or
did he like older women?
Which one was it?
Let's talk about Fanny Alger,
'cause I hear that name all the time.
What have you got for us?
- Well, Joseph Smith was, he
related how in 1834, in July,
an angel came to him, no sword,
just the angel, said Joseph,
we want you to restore the
practice of plural marriage.
And about this same time,
and we don't know for sure,
but Fanny Alger came into the Smith home
as a domestic to help out with the family.
And we don't know when it occurred,
but Joseph went to Fanny's
parents and said, look,
God wants us to do polygamy.
Are you okay if I am married
to Fanny, your daughter?
And they said, yes, if she's
okay with it, and she was.
And so Fanny's uncle, Levi Hancock,
performs this ceremony.
Now, I should point out, this
is a priesthood ceremony.
The sealing keys haven't been.
- Restored.
- Restored yet.
This is probably late '35.
We don't know, but that's
when I would place it.
It certainly wasn't super early,
because Fanny hadn't showed up
there until 1834, '35 period.
So this wouldn't have
been an eternal sealing,
but it would have been
a priesthood marriage
for time only that God recognized.
The State of Ohio didn't,
but in God's eyes and in the angel's eyes,
this would have been a plural marriage.
What unfolds then is that
Emma finds out about it,
and of course you can criticize Joseph
for doing a plural marriage
without telling Emma,
but she finds out about it,
throws Fanny out of the
house, and at that point,
we find that she goes and
she lives with the Webbs,
and what's interesting there
is that everybody that Fanny
associated with describes
this as a plural marriage,
her parents, her uncle, the family.
It was the Webb family, Chauncey Webb.
They all heard from Fanny that this was
an actual plural marriage with
a ceremony and everything.
But, the people that Joseph told about it,
this would be Emma, this would be Oliver
and others on the high
council that heard rumors,
they all thought it was adultery.
They're gonna accuse him
of being libido-driven
when he's saying, no,
this is religion-driven.
God is commanding this,
and they're saying,
no, we don't believe you, Joseph,
and that's a lot of the
same sentiment we get today,
I think, as we see how people
hear about polygamy and make assumptions.
Well, that's what happened to Joseph.
And so, Fanny moves out,
goes with her family.
She may have been pregnant.
My dear friend Don Bradley,
who's a great researcher,
thinks she was pregnant,
and she quickly remarried
to a real good guy.
His name was Custer up in Indiana.
She lived there, had eight kids overall.
If she was pregnant, there's
no record of that child,
and people have looked very hard.
So I'm not sure.
She's way down the list on
people who I think Joseph
may have had sexual relations
with, but it's a possibility.
But she never comes back to the church,
but she becomes a Universalist
and raises a really good
family there in Indiana.
So, that's kind of the long
version to Fanny Alger.
- Did she express hatred
toward Joseph in her life?
- Not that we have record.
In fact, Benjamin Johnson
related that her brother
went to her and asked her about it,
and her response was simply,
I have nothing to say.
So, there's not a record
of her showing animosity towards Joseph.
- I think one of the things
that disturbs a lot of people
is the fact that Joseph kept these things
from Emma, from his first wife.
Why would Joseph?
- I would have done the exact same thing.
I would not have known
how to tell my wife that.
- Well, why would he
have kept that from Emma?
Why would he have done these
things in secret, so to speak?
A lot of times, pretty will
pull out the Bible and say,
God doesn't work in secret like this.
But what's kind of going
on in Joseph's mind?
- The episode with Emma
is one of the more,
I think more difficult
things to understand,
for a couple of reasons:
one, we don't have
the documentation that we would like.
Plus we need to realize,
Joseph wasn't perfect,
and I'm old enough to
remember back when Joseph
was this pristine prophet
who was nearly exalted
because he was so perfect.
That wasn't Joseph.
In fact, Joseph tells us several times.
We have several records of him saying,
I never told you I was perfect,
and if you expect me to be perfect,
I'm gonna expect you to be
perfect, and he had a temper.
So, he could have handled
this plural marriage
and Emma better, I would say.
The timeline briefly is,
of course there's this big
blowup in probably 1835.
Joseph doesn't wanna do it.
I believe that's true, but he
relates the angel comes again,
probably 1841, and says Joseph,
God really wants this practice restored.
So he is sealed to a woman, Louisa Beaman,
for time and eternity.
There's pretty good
documentation of sexuality
in that marriage, and it
was April fifth, 1841.
But then Joseph goes on
this string of being sealed
to legally married women,
just for the next life.
Again, a testament Joseph
isn't looking for sex here,
because sex would be adultery
in any of these sealings.
But he might be trying
to appease the angel
who's saying do this,
and at the same time,
not do things that are going
to hurt Emma's feelings.
Well, then the angel comes
again the third time,
and this time, with a sword.
It wasn't a flaming sword;
it was just a sword.
But the angel's saying, Joseph,
God wants the same kind
of practice of polygamy
that the ancients did restored today,
and then we see after that
date, it's February 1842,
Joseph is now proposing to
young women, unmarried women,
who then when we look at
the historical record,
we actually can document
sexuality in some of these.
So we see a pattern here,
that Emma didn't know anything
about what's going on, and she
didn't know about it in 1842.
It wasn't 'til about the middle of 1843
that she became aware of these teachings.
and that's the same time Hiram Smith,
Joseph's brother, and William Law,
second counselor in the first
presidency, became aware.
So Joseph was a pretty good secret-keeper,
not only from Emma, but from
his brother and his counselor.
But about May, Emma understands
what's going on, and she accepts it.
She is involved in two plural marriages,
and then another two.
They're sisters,
the Lawrence sisters and
the Partridge sisters.
This is in May of 1843.
But once she's sharing Joseph physically
with plural wives, she can't do it.
She goes on the war path,
and this is why we have Section 132.
It was dictated July 12 of 1843,
and it's saying to Emma,
forgive Joseph his trespasses.
That's one of the
statements in Section 132.
It tells me Joseph
trespassed against Emma,
and again, we need to recognize it.
Joseph seems to be
doing the best he could,
and though I don't defend
him as being perfect,
I do defend him as always being worthy.
But he probably could
have handled it better.
And the nice thing about the story,
the ending of the story, is
that if we fast forward to 1844,
the end of June, when
Joseph is going to Carthage,
and Joseph may or may not
have thought this was the end,
but he tells Emma, he says,
Emma, I want you to come with me.
Come with me to Carthage
and be my comfort there,
and Emma goes, I can't,
we've got the children,
we've got the house obligations.
So Joseph say, Emma, write a prayer,
your heart's desires, and I
will sign it when I come back.
And one of the lines in
that is that Emma says
that she asks God to grant
her her place next to Joseph
in all eternity, and I'm paraphrasing it.
But it's very clear at this very late day,
and they've gone through all the polygamy,
this is 1844, that Emma
still loves Joseph,
still sustains him as a prophet,
and still wants to be
by his side in eternity.
It tells me that Emma forgave Joseph,
and if Emma could forgive Joseph,
and she knew all the details,
I think the rest of us
probably should be able to
find a way to do that as well.
- Hmm.
No, I like that.
A question I have is Joseph
wrote love letters to Emma.
Do we know of any other
love letters he wrote
to these other women?
- There's a record of Joseph
writing letters to Eliza Snow,
and Eliza left Nauvoo because
of Emma's pressuring her
and moved up to Yelrome.
And so we have that
record, but I don't recall
that these are the kind of
love letters that he always,
he always held Emma in special esteem.
When he was looking for
counsel on what to do
about the Missourians or about
the need to go to Carthage,
he always just talked to Emma.
We don't have him talking
to any of the plural wives.
She was always special in his affections.
- And do we have any children
that have come from any
of Joseph's other wives?
- This is a great question.
We get asked it a lot, because
there are some who say,
multiply and replenish the earth
is the reason for polygamy.
Some people wanted to make it
all, that's the only reason.
They want it to be all about sex, okay?
And that's not, that's
not the only reason.
But it is a reason.
And there's good evidence of sexuality
in three of the marriages.
There's moderate evidence
in about five or six more.
There's a chart on our website,
josephsmithspolygamy.org,
and you can go there and look at it.
There's also a couple more
that are kind of dubious evidences.
So we maybe have 10 or 12 women
that we can kind of document
that the marriages were consummated.
But what we also have is
no documented children,
and Ugo Perego, a dear friend of mine,
he's an italian geneticist,
he has looked at eight
of the most likely candidates
to be Joseph's children,
and it's all negative.
But there's also a big chart
there if you go to the website
where I've looked at every candidate
that anybody's suggested as
being Joseph's son or daughter,
and you can look at it there.
But there is also rumors
of two or three children.
In fact, there's a very
good, pretty reputable story
of Joseph Smith cleaning
his hands one night
after Emma had just served as a midwife
for one of his plural
marriages delivering a child.
But we don't know who it is.
But it would not surprise
me if DNA turned up
one or two children from Joseph.
That was one of the reasons,
and you have to think of it
from the woman's standpoint.
Joseph is her only husband.
If she can spend time with him
and give him a son, or a daughter,
that would be just the
greatest thing for them.
So they would have wanted
to have these kinds
of relationships with him,
but they didn't happen often,
and certainly, I don't think,
often enough to create
very many pregnancies.
- When a lot of people
think about polygamy,
they think of the Warren
Jeffs's break off of the church
and living in compounds and
the whole family's there.
But how many of Joseph
Smith's wives lived with him?
'Cause it seems like he
married a lot of people
and they stayed in their own house.
If they had a husband,
they would stay with their other husband.
And certainly in all of the
video representations I've seen,
he's always just with Emma, but do we know
if he lived with 15 other women as well?
- Another really great question.
The answer is that Joseph
Smith cared for his wives.
If you look at them, he took care of them,
not in a traditional sense,
but every one of them had a place to stay,
a roof over their head,
food in their mouths.
There's no record of Joseph
having a relationship
outside of a marriage covenant,
a ceremony with witnesses
and an officiator.
That is the only way
that Joseph saw these
relationships as being legitimate.
But, we do know that
after May of 1843, see,
Emma participated in these four marriages.
These four women lived in the mansion,
and there were others, Melissa
Lott and one or two others
that did live in the mansion.
And what we really don't know
is how Emma regulated their
access to Joseph as a wife.
Was she doing like maybe
modern polygamists have done,
where people get different nights,
or was she just putting
her foot down and saying,
sorry, Joseph, I'm your wife.
They're not part of the picture now.
There is one quote from Lucy Walker,
where she describes Emma
actually holding the door
and keeping uninterested
parties from bothering Joseph
when he's with a plural
wife, but independent
of that one quote, we really
just don't know very much
of what happened between
about September of 1843
and his death in June of 1844.
We do know Emma became
pregnant in January, February
with David, who was born
after the martyrdom,
and we also have a quote from somebody
who lived right across the
street from the Smiths,
and this woman didn't know
that Joseph was a polygamist.
So the idea that there's
this undercurrent of polygamy
in Nauvoo that everybody
knows about, wink, wink,
that's just not the way it was.
In fact, by my research, there
were only 115 polygamists
in Nauvoo at the time of the
martyrdom, when Joseph died,
115, and of course, 35
of those, by my count,
were Joseph and his
wives, so we really have
less than 100 other
polygamists that are there,
and this is in a town of
10,000 people, give or take.
So, again, polygamy was there,
but it was only there
for a few hundred people,
maybe two or three hundred at the most.
Stories of them being
brothels or polygamy,
places for women to go and deliver
their polygamous babies
and all that stuff,
that's just all fantasy and not supported.
- It's brought up a lot,
the idea of polygamy in the next life.
Will people remarry and
be polygamous in heaven?
Do you think so?
- Another excellent question.
In fact, it's more of a
question now than I think it was
even 10 or 15 years ago
when I started my research.
People today hear about
polygamy in the next life,
and let's face it, if my
wife dies, Laura dies,
I'm sealed to her,
I could remarry and be
sealed to a second wife.
That would make my first
wife a polygamist in heaven,
even if she didn't wanna be.
And that doesn't seem fair, and
people are bothered by that.
And let me make a couple of comments.
There are books and authors
out there telling us
that women should fear this,
and they're fearmongers,
because we have no idea
what external marriage is.
We have no idea what eternal
plural marriage might be,
and God has promised us happiness,
eternal joy, if we are exalted.
And so, these authors are saying, look,
ignore what God says
about eternal happiness,
and let's all be victimized
or let's all fear this
eternal polygamy configuration
that, at least from an
ordinance standpoint,
seems to be programmed into
our future, and I'm just saying
we can believe God that
we are going to be happy
if we attain that exaltation,
and personally, I believe
that in the eternal worlds
where there's no time and
there's eternal resource,
a polygamous wife might
feel exactly the same
as a monogamous wife, if
there is polygamy there,
and we really don't
understand these dynamics.
And then let me add a second thought.
During the millennium,
there's going to be loosenings
and bindings and sealings and unsealings
of lots of marriages,
and as I said earlier,
I don't think any man
or woman is going to be
in a relationship, whether
it's polygamous or monogamous,
for eternity, against
their highest desires.
And there will be lots of time
to get this all figured out,
and it should not be something
that we should fear in any way.
- Also, it's important
to note that we believe
all those who die before the age of eight
are heirs of the Celestial Kingdom,
and they're going to be
the same age as all of us,
and they've never been married, right?
So there's a lot of people
who will need spouses as well.
So there's a lot of speculation,
but the reality is, we just don't know.
But your thoughts shouldn't be
you're in some big suburban house,
and it's a guy in a suit and
then a bunch of women around,
like that's Mormon heaven.
It looks like, what is it,
that creepy HBO show that they had?
- That was Big Love or
something like that?
- Big Love, yeah.
We don't think heaven
looks like Big Love, right?
So it doesn't have to be a scary thing.
It might just be a, we'll
figure it out when we get there.
- I think, was it Elder
Eyring just related
in the last conference, and
he's given this story again,
that he was talking to his father,
I think he was quoting,
anyway, and they're saying,
you're worried about
the wrong things here.
These are unresolvable; we cannot know.
And so, why worry about it?
Why write books about it?
There's books out there on this.
It's unfortunate.
- What do you say to those
people who, you know,
attack the church for having
polygamy in its history?
- Well, the easy answer
is that Abraham practiced
it, Jacob practiced it.
Moses was a polygamist, and
so we believe in the Bible.
We believe in the Old Testament.
If somebody is a non-Christian
or they don't believe
in the Bible, there probably
isn't an answer to it,
and they're going to assume
libido is driving it,
and they're probably not
gonna be opening to changing.
But the easiest answer
is that the ancient patriarchs did it.
Joseph was a prophet
restorer, and he restored it.
- Yeah, I guess my answer's always been,
if the Book of Mormon and
these Latter-day scriptures
are true, then God used Joseph Smith,
and so he probably wasn't
a serial sexual adulterer.
The questions about polygamy
and this sexual stuff
essentially have to be
tossed up in the air
in hopes that in the next life,
you'll have a greater
context and understanding.
- I agree.
If you know the Book of Mormon
is true, then it gives you
a different outlook on the
whole topic of polygamy.
It should make you uncomfortable.
You shouldn't first hear
about the history of polygamy
and be like, oh, yeah,
sweet, that's awesome.
You should have questions.
- Yeah.
- And I have a ton of questions.
I mean, we have three pages
of questions right here.
- Yeah.
- We've gotten to like,
five of them or something.
And so, hopefully we can
have you back on the show.
- Sure.
- And just do a thousand of these episodes
and just answer all these questions.
(Brian laughs)
But the last question
that we want to address
to kind of wrap this up is
like for you personally,
you know more than probably anyone
about the churches history of polygamy.
You know the ins and outs of it.
You know everything there is to know.
How have you reconciled it?
How have you been able to
maintain your own faith?
- Do you have a testimony of
Joseph Smith being a prophet?
- Great question.
The answer's kinda long.
- Oh, that's all right.
- When my wife and I go out and we talk
about plural marriage, 'cause
there's lots of questions.
We do firesides and
conferences and things.
We never defend polygamy.
Polygamy is unequal.
Men can do it, women can't.
That makes it unfair.
Polygamy is, it's sexist, and
I don't mean to be critical.
I'm just talking about the practice.
So we don't defend
polygamy in any setting.
You don't have to like it.
We can only rejoice that we
don't have to practice it now,
and when Elder Cook, when he
was speaking with Kate Holbrook
and Matt Grow in front
of the Nauvoo Temple,
hopefully you've watched that,
when Elder Cook said
that the brethren think
that polygamy has served its purpose,
suggesting it's not coming back,
it was a time for a shout
of yes, I like that idea,
'cause it's not something
I would wanna practice.
But, the process that I spent,
and it was six years of
gathering information,
putting it together into 1500 words,
put me in contact with Joseph
Smith's work, his words,
his actions and everything,
and I didn't really
think too much about him.
I never thought of him
as being evil or anything, or good, even.
I was just kind of like, here's Joseph.
Then one day, once we were
done and it was being typeset,
I went in to Desert
Books, and I walked in,
and I saw a picture of Joseph.
It was kind of up hanging
about the door there.
And I felt this feeling of appreciation.
I maybe could say love, but it
was mostly just appreciation,
because I'd studied how hard it was
to do what he was asked
to do, and God does that.
He puts us in situations, it's
like, okay, how do I do this?
Emma's on one side, an
angel's on the other.
How was he supposed to do this?
So I had this overwhelming
feeling of appreciation for him.
So, we don't defend polygamy,
but I always defend Joseph as worthy.
Not perfect, but as a worthy prophet
who was tasked with one of
the most difficult things,
and that would be
establishing this practice
that was so contrary to
traditional values at that time.
And in fact, I think most of us recognize
that had he not done that,
he probably would have lived a lot longer.
Plural marriage was a huge contributor
to his death there on June 27th of 1844.
- You also wrote this book.
It's a paperback, and it's a lot shorter
than the three-volume
series you have there.
This is, you mentioned that
this is just a great overview,
kind of scratching the
surface of polygamy, right?
- Well, actually it's
co-authored with my wife Laura.
So she has taken all this
stuff and given together,
but mostly with her
great ability to discern
what is really necessary.
I'll be honest with you, it
won't make you feel good.
Polygamy doesn't make
anybody feel good, really,
and I should say, though, if
you wanna understand polygamy
and try to feel good, the
only way to really do it
is to see it through the
eyes of the participant.
Try to understand the
accounts that we have
of Nauvoo polygamists and
what they were feeling.
You'll discover God was there.
There were dreams, visions,
angelic visitations
of God telling the people,
yeah, we really want this.
We're serious about this there.
But if you just read the book,
it won't necessarily make
you feel good about polygamy,
but you will understand what
happened and how these people
were tasked with something
that was very difficult.
- So if you can't wait 'til
our next episode with Brian,
check out some of his work,
and your stuff online
is fantastic as well.
I've been there's several
times checking it out.
- Thank you for talking about
a complex subject with us.
It's very complex, and sometimes,
complexity has to just be complexity,
and we have to be okay with that.
- Yep.
If you have questions, we
have our big list right here,
but if you have further
questions for Brian,
let us know in the comment section.
We might direct you to some of his work
that he's already done on it,
or hopefully we'll be able
to get to them on another episode,
'cause there's so much more to talk about.
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- [Woman Offscreen] Oh, no, no, no, no.
- Okay, no, cut, okay.
(all laughing)
