WUNRN
USA Mormon Church Founder Had Up to 40 Wives
A statue of Joseph Smith and his first wife, Emma, at
Temple Square in Salt Lake City. Credit Jim McAuley for The New York Times
By LAURIE
GOODSTEIN - NOV. 10, 2014
Mormon leaders have acknowledged for the first time that
the church’s founder and prophet, Joseph Smith, portrayed in church materials
as a loyal partner to his loving spouse Emma, took as many as 40 wives, some
already married and one only 14 years old.
The church’s disclosures, in a series of essays online,
are part of an effort to be transparent about its history at a time when church
members are increasingly encountering disturbing claims about the faith on the
Internet. Many Mormons, especially those with polygamous ancestors, say they
were well aware that Smith’s successor, Brigham Young, practiced polygamy when
he led the flock in Salt Lake City. But they did not know the full truth about
Smith.
“Joseph Smith was presented to me as a practically
perfect prophet, and this is true for a lot of people,” said Emily Jensen, a
blogger and editor in Farmington, Utah, who often writes about Mormon issues.
She said the reaction of some Mormons to the church’s
disclosures resembled the five stages of grief in which the first stage is
denial, and the second is anger. Members are saying on blogs and social media,
“This is not the church I grew up with, this is not the Joseph Smith I love,”
Ms. Jensen said.
A series of Mormon essays disclosing Smith’s polygamy
reflected the church’s effort to be more open about its past, Elder Steven E.
Snow said.
Smith probably did not have sexual relations with all of
his wives, because some were “sealed” to him only for the next life, according
to the essays posted by the church. But for his first wife, Emma, polygamy was
“an excruciating ordeal.”
The four treatises on polygamy reflect a new resolve by a
church long accused of secrecy to respond with openness to the kind of thorny
historical and theological issues that are causing
some to become disillusioned or even to abandon the faith.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as the
Mormon Church is formally known, has quietly posted 12 essays on its website
over the last year on contentious topics such as the ban on blacks in the
priesthood, which was lifted in 1978, and accounts of how Smith
translated the Book of Mormon, the church’s sacred scripture.
Continue reading the main story
Elder Steven E. Snow, the church historian and a member of its
senior leadership, said in an interview, “There is so much out there on the
Internet that we felt we owed our members a safe place where they could go to
get reliable, faith-promoting information that was true about some of these
more difficult aspects of our history.
“We need to be truthful, and we need to understand our
history,” Elder Snow said. “I believe our history is full of stories of faith
and devotion and sacrifice, but these people weren’t perfect.”
The essay on “plural
marriage” in the early days of the Mormon movement in Ohio and Illinois says
polygamy was commanded by God, revealed to Smith and accepted by him and his
followers only very reluctantly. Abraham and other Old Testament patriarchs had
multiple wives, and Smith preached that his church was the “restoration” of the
early, true Christian church.
Most of Smith’s wives were between the ages of 20 and 40,
the essay says, but he married Helen Mar Kimball, a daughter of two close
friends, “several months before her 15th birthday.” A footnote says that
according to “careful estimates,” Smith had 30 to 40 wives.
The biggest bombshell for some in the essays is that
Smith married women who were already married, some to men who were Smith’s
friends and followers.
The essays held nothing back, said Richard L. Bushman,
emeritus professor of history at Columbia University and author of the book
“Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling.”
Dr. Bushman said of church leaders: “Somewhere along the
line they decided they were just going to tell the whole story, not to be
defensive, not to try to hide anything. And there’s no single fact that’s more
unsettling than Joseph Smith’s marriage to other men’s wives.
“It’s a recognition of maturity,” said Dr. Bushman, who
is a Mormon. “There are lots of church leaders who say: ‘We can take anything,
just let us know how it really happened. We’re a church that is secure.’ ”
The younger generation of Mormons will benefit from this
step, said Samantha Shelley, co-founder of the website MillennialMormons.com
in Provo, Utah.
She said she knew of Smith’s polygamous past, but “it’s
so easy for people these days to stumble upon something on the Internet, and it
rocks their world and they don’t know where to turn.”
In 1890, under pressure by the American government, the
church issued a manifesto formally ending polygamy. The church’s essay on this phase
admits that some members and even leaders did not abandon the practice for years.
But the church did renounce polygamy, and Mormons who
refused to do the same eventually broke away and formed splinter churches, some
that still exist. Warren Jeffs, the leader of one such group, was
convicted in Texas in 2011 of child sexual assault.
There remains one way in which polygamy is still a part
of Mormon belief: The church teaches that a man who was “sealed” in marriage to
his wife in a temple ritual, then loses his wife to death or divorce, can be
sealed to a second wife and would be married to both wives in the afterlife.
However, women who have been divorced or widowed cannot be sealed to more than
one man.
Kristine Haglund, the editor of Dialogue: A
Journal of Mormon Thought, said that while she found the church’s
new transparency “really hopeful,” she and other women she had talked with were
disturbed that the essays do not address the painful teaching about polygamy in
eternity.
“These are real issues for Mormon women,” Ms. Haglund
said. “And because the church has never said definitively that polygamy won’t
be practiced in heaven, even very devout and quite conservative women are
really troubled by it.”
The church historian, Elder Snow, said that the process
of writing the essays began in May 2012. Each one was drafted by a scholar,
often outside the church history department, then edited by church historians
and leaders, and vetted by the church’s top authorities. They may issue one
more essay, on women and the priesthood, an issue that has grown increasingly
controversial as some Mormon women have mobilized to challenge the male-only
priesthood.
The church has not publicly announced the posting of the
essays, and many Mormons said in interviews that they were not even aware of
them. They are not visible on the church’s home page; finding them requires a
search or a link. Elder Snow said he anticipated that the contents would
eventually be “woven into future curriculum” for adults and youths.
The church recently released an informational video about the
distinctive Mormon underwear called “temple garments” — and it received far
more attention among Mormons and in the news media than the essays on polygamy.
Sarah Barringer Gordon, a professor of constitutional law
and history at the University of Pennsylvania, and a non-Mormon who has studied
the Mormon Church, said it had dealt with transparency about its past before
this, addressing Mormon leaders’ complicity in an attack on a wagon train
crossing southern Utah in 1857, known as the Mountain Meadows massacre.
But she said this recent emphasis on transparency by the church was both
unprecedented and smart.
“What you want to do is get out ahead of the problem, and
not have someone say, ‘Look at this damaging thing I found that you were trying
to keep secret,’ ” she said.