NEW MANUAL ON JOSEPH SMITH MENTIONS POLYGAMY
By Peggy Fletcher Stack
The Salt Lake Tribune
January 19, 2008
Original LinkFor the first time in recent memory, a new manual Mormons will use to study the writings of founder Joseph Smith acknowledges Smith's role in introducing the practice of polygamy.
The acknowledgment may not seem groundbreaking to many Mormons or historians, nor will it likely satisfy most critics, but its inclusion in an official course of study is a departure from past practices and may signal a new openness about Mormon history.
The change is "not a response to critics who think the church has not been straightforward about its involvement with plural marriage in the 19th century," said David Marsh, manager of curriculum development for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. "It is included . . . to illustrate a few of the doctrines or principles that do not have application to our day and which are therefore not included in the book."
Still, it is noteworthy.
The church launched its church presidential writings course in 1998 with Brigham Young. In Sunday meetings, the all-male priesthood and the all-female Relief Society used the same manual to separately examine Young's thoughts on a particular topic. Critics quickly noted, though, that the book's biographical sketch of Young listed only one wife, not the more than 50 women he had married. The volume made no mention of polygamy, a practice Young followed and defended throughout his life.
Nor was polygamy acknowledged in the manual about President Joseph F. Smith, who had five wives, or the one about President Heber J. Grant, who had three.
Much has happened in the intervening decade since Mormons looked at Young.
In 1998, current church President Gordon B. Hinckley told CNN interviewer Larry King that polygamy was "behind us. I condemn it as a practice. It is not doctrinal. It is not legal."
Yet Americans continue to have trouble distinguishing Mormon beliefs from those of convicted polygamist leader Warren Jeffs and those portrayed in the fictional HBO's series "Big Love." For clarity, the LDS Church posted on its Web site articles explaining early Mormon notions about plural marriage.
It took eight years for a committee of scholars, historians, volunteers and church employees to research, compile and organize Smith's writings into a single volume meant as a two-year study for church members.
Marsh, a member of the committee, does not know why the paragraph about polygamy was included this time.
"It could have been a function of the makeup of those writing committees," he said. "We like to give them autonomy."
All the manuals were, of course, approved by the church's governing authorities.
In addition to the paragraph about plural marriage, the Smith manual is distinctive for the thoroughness of its footnotes. The first chapter about Smith's "First Vision," in which he claimed to see God and Jesus in a grove of trees, includes a footnote about how Smith described the encounter in different ways to different people.
"The endnotes provide the date and the place the prophet spoke, the names of those who recorded the prophet's discourse, corrections to information in the History of the Church that has been discovered since its publication . . . and other helpful information," Marsh said. "The endnotes are unprecedented in [LDS] Church Curriculum manuals, and are one of the book's strengths."
He is pleased with the product.
"This book will be translated into 29 languages," Marsh said. "For the first time in the history of the church, the teachings of the prophet Joseph Smith will be accessible to members all across the world."
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WHAT THE PREFACE SAYS
A new manual LDS Church members will use to study the writings of Joseph Smith notably includes references to polygamy. The preface includes these two paragraphs:
"The Prophet taught the doctrine of plural marriage, and a number of such marriages were performed during his lifetime," the book's preface says. "Over the next several decades, under the direction of the church presidents who succeeded Joseph Smith, a significant number of church members entered into plural marriages."
In 1890, President Wilford Woodruff issued the Manifesto, which discontinued plural marriage in the Church (see Official Declaration 1), it continues. "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints no longer practices plural marriage."
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ABOUT MORMON POLYGAMY
Original LinkJOHN TAYLOR ON POLYGAMY:
John Taylor, January 4, 1880, President, Prophet, Seer, and Revelator, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints:
"We believe in honesty, morality, and purity; but when they enact tyrannical laws, forbidding us the free exercise of our religion, we cannot submit. God is greater than the United States, and when the Government conflicts with heaven, we will be ranged under banner of heaven and against the Government..."
"Polygamy is a divine institution. It has been handed down direct from God. The United States cannot abolish it. No nation on earth can prevent it, nor all the nations of the earth combined,..."
"I defy the United States; I will obey God."
Source: John Taylor (on January 4, 1880), President, Prophet, Seer, and Revelator, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Quoted in Under The Banner of Heaven John Krakauer, Doubleday (July 15, 2003)
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"THE MOST HOLY AND IMPORTANT DOCTRINE EVER REVEALED"
The LDS Church happens to be exceedingly prickly about its short, uncommonly rich history -- and no aspect of that history makes the church more defensive than "plural marriage."
The LDS leadership has worked hard to persuade both the modern church membership and the American public that polygamy was a quaint, long-abandoned idiosyncrasy practiced by a mere handful of nineteenth-century Mormons.
The religious literature handed out by the earnest young missionaries in Temple Square makes no mention of the fact that Joseph Smith -- still the religion's focal personage -- married at least thirty-three women, and probably as many as forty-eight. Nor does it mention that the youngest of these wives was just fourteen years old when Joseph explained to her that God had commanded that she marry him or face eternal damnation.
Polygamy was, in fact, one of the most sacred credos of Joseph's church -- a tenet important enough to be canonized for the ages as Section 132 of The Doctrine and Convenants, one of Mormonism's primary scriptural texts.
The revered prophet described plural marriage as part of "the most holy and important doctrine ever revealed to man on earth" and taught that a man needed at least three wives to attain the "fullness of exaltation" in the afterlife. He warned that God had explicitly commanded that "all those who have this law revealed unto them must obey the same ... and if ye abide not that covenenant, then are ye damned; for no one can reject this covenant and be permitted to enter into my glory."
Source: Under The Banner of Heaven John Krakauer, Doubleday (July 15, 2003), pages 5, 6.
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POLYGAMY REJECTED - SORT OF
In 1856, recognizing the strength of the anti-polygamy vote, Republican candidate John C. Frémont ran for president on a platform that pledged to "prohibit in the territories those twin relics of barbarism -- Polygamy and Slavery." Frémont lost the election, but a year later the man who did win, President James Buchanan, sent the U.S. Army to invade Utah, dismantle Brigham Young's theocracy, and eradicate polygamy.
The so-called Utah War, however, neither removed Brigham from power nor ended the doctrine of plural marriage, to the annoyance and bafflement of a whole series of American presidents. An escalating sequence of judicial and legislative challenges to polygamy ensued, culminating in the Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887, which disincorporated the LDS Church and forfeited to the federal government all church property worth more than $50,000. With their feet held to the fire, the Saints ultimately had no choice but to renounce polygamy.
But even as the LDS leaders publicly claimed, in 1890, to have relinquished the practice, they quietly dispatched bands of Mormons to establish polygamous colonies in Mexico and Canada, and some of the highest-ranking LDS authorities secretly continued to take multiple wives and perform plural marriages well into the twentieth-century.
Although LDS leaders were initially loathe to abandon plural marriage, eventually they adopted a more pragmatic approach to American politics, emphatically rejected the practice, and actually began urging government agencies to prosecute polygamists. It was this single change in ecclesiastical policy, more than anything else, that transformed the LDS Church into its astonishingly successful present-day iteration. Having jettisoned polygamy, Mormons gradually ceased to be regarded as a crackpot sect. The LDS Church acquired the trappings of a conventional faith so successful that it is now widely considered to be the quintessential American religion.
Source: Under The Banner of Heaven John Krakauer, Doubleday (July 15, 2003), pages 6, 7
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REVELATION OR PRAGMATISM?
Plural marriage was commonly practiced in Utah until the federal government made statehood contingent upon the abolition of polygamy. The church's president, Wilford Woodruff, issued a manifesto outlawing the practice in 1890, six years before Utah joined the union.
Mainstream Mormons hold that Woodruff issued the anti-polygamy manifesto as the direct result of a revelation from God, not in an effort to curry favor with the federal government. "A key tenet of our faith is the belief in continuing revelation," says church spokesman Michael Purdy.
Source: Two Many Wives Valerie Richardson, Insight on the News. Volume: 17, Issue: 17. May 7, 2001.
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