Polygamy, Power, and the Pain of Not Knowing – with Greg Prince

Hello and welcome to another episode of Inside Out. My name is Jim Bennett and I am here as always with Ian Wilkes. Ian, how are you, sir?

I am doing fine. Jim Bennett, and I'm enjoying my Sunday, relaxing Sunday. And I honestly, I, in the past, my Sundays was pretty intense with, you know, senior callings and interviews and traveling around the stake and getting back literally sometimes at 11 o'clock at night. I kid you not. I don't miss those days, to be honest, to have more time with my family. And so I'm having a relaxing, enjoyable Sunday. Thank you. How about you?

Well, I am having less of a relaxing Sunday. I am still in my suit. I just come back from church. But we are joined again here by, by Greg Prince. And we are always honored to have Greg join our podcast. Greg, how are you? How are you enjoying your Sunday?

I'm doing well, but I'm feeling like the houseguest who wouldn't leave.

Well, we keep trying to get you to move in, so I think it's, it's a problem on both ends. So, um, I, I, uh, I'm excited to be able to dive back into your Roadmap for Improving Mormonism. We've had a number of discussions with you about current events, but, uh, want to get back into this one because I think the next stop on your Roadmap for Improving Mormonism, which is a document you prepared that we've been talking about in several episodes. The next stop on your roadmap is polygamy, and I just want to read a little bit of what you wrote here. More than a century after the church first moved to distance itself from polygamy—primarily polygyny, which is one man having more than one wife, but also polyandry, which is one woman having more than one husb—husband—in the 1890 Manifesto, polygamy remains the word that first comes to mind for many in this country when Mormon is mentioned. And it's interesting that in order to sort of set that up, uh, we were talking before we started recording and you mentioned, Greg, that it is not lost on most observers that President Dallin H. Oaks and his predecessor, President Russell M. Nelson, are both de facto polygamists. Both— neither were married to two women simultaneously while they were alive, but they've been sealed to two women successively and, and are presumably going to be married to both of them throughout the eternities. Uh, how problematic is this to the modern church, do you think?

Well, there are two ways of looking at this, and we'll probably discuss both. One is, what does it mean for the then and there, for the future? Um, spoiler alert, we know almost nothing about the answer to that question. To the here and now, it turns out that it is a current problem that particularly for many women just doesn't go away. Um, in 2011, as we discussed in earlier podcasts, I was part of an online survey that looked at faith crisis that gave a lot of enlightenment about the issues people are dealing with. Polygamy was right near the top of that. But not long after the word got out that we had done that, I got a phone call from Carolyn Pearson. And she said, "Can you help me do for polygamy what you and your colleagues did for faith crisis?" Which was, can you help me launch an online survey so that I can generate data for a book that I am envisioning writing? Uh, I had very little to do with the logistics of that because that's not my field. But an online survey was launched where the faith crisis survey had garnered 3,000 responses. Hers garnered 8,000 responses. Hmm. And then she went through the tedious process of reading, sorting, selecting, uh, and that became part of her book, which I believe was called The Ghost of Polygamy Present.

Well, I think it's The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy. Polygamy.

There you go. Okay. Um, and it's in those stories that your heart just aches for particularly women, but also for children, meaning for people. Whose mothers have married more than once, and to whom will they belong as their de facto father in the next existence? That's one of the issues they deal with, but the other is right here and now. This is really heartrending for many of these women. She gives examples, for instance, of a woman who was dating not long after the accidental death of her fairly young husband. And when her date found that she had been sealed to that husband, he left her standing on the dance floor and just abandoned her. So that brings it to a here-and-now perspective, and you just shake your head because you can understand immediately the pain, particularly that these women are going through, and they have no guidance from the church that's going to ease that pain. Maybe that's a good point for us to start on.

Well, in the guidance they get, or at least the references they get, uh, I don't think ease the pain at all. I think to some degree they exacerbate it. I'm thinking back to when President Oaks opened one of his talks with a story about a woman that had approached him who was concerned Her husband— she was a second wife and her husband was sealed to both her and his first wife. And she was concerned about where she was going to live in the next life. And would she have to share a house with the first wife? And President Oaks sort of framed this as an icebreaking joke at the beginning of his conference talk. And just kind of played it for laughs and just said, well, you should just trust in the Lord. You shouldn't worry about this. And, and there was a great deal, I think, of online pushback to that story in that it was just so insensitive to the reality that Carolyn Pearson describes in her book, that so many women are affected by this idea that they're going to have to share their husband in this life. Whether or not they die before their husband and their husband is sealed to somebody else in mortality, they still are sort of haunted by this idea of eternal polygamy. And, you know, I, I'm looking through your roadmap here, and it's— it talks specifically about the things that you've just mentioned and talks about Carolyn Pearson's book, um, And it, you know, it is stunning to me that we have not addressed this institutionally, that we really don't have any kind of direct answer to this other than just trust in the Lord, it will all work out, which is just another way of kicking the can down the road or You know, worse, just dodging the question altogether. I mean, Ian, what is your reaction to this?

As a convert to the church at the age of 16 and going through the missionary discussions, this never came up. Polygamy never came up. I only heard about polygamy from neighbors that were living in the, uh, on the street at the time when they heard I was being taught by the missionaries. I'd never heard of the word before. I didn't even understand what the word— at the age of 16, it was completely— and I had, I had no inclination to inquire after it. I just wanted to escape home and, uh, find a, a better life. I only came into it in terms of learning a bit more about it more directly on my mission. And in the MTC, they said that, uh, sometimes the question of polygamy would polygamy would come up. And so we discussed it, what it was. And when I learned about it, it just seemed the strangest, oddest, cruelest practice I'd ever heard of. It had temporal implications for women historically, you know, where do they live and, uh, what's that, the dynamics of the family, the children, the economics of it, et cetera. But it also had eternal, uh, implications. You know, being, uh, with, uh, a man and with other wives and what does that look like eternally? We discussed that to some extent in the MTC, very, to some limited way, may I add. The MTC really didn't do much to prepare me for serving in the Missionary Training Corps in Scotland. So fast forward when I landed in Scotland as a missionary, within days, within the first day, I think it was. There were people on the doorstep saying, we don't want to be part of a religion that practices polygamy. And the joke amongst missionaries was, or the response was, when that came up was, well, we don't have more than one wife, but we have more than one girlfriend. And so the response advice I got was to kind of make fun of it and joke about it and kind of play it down that, yeah, we did that, we don't do it anymore, and let's focus on the other parts of the conversation. There were times on our mission where we got into the conversations with non-members of the church who had more knowledge and understanding of the practice, but it never went away. You know, from me, the time of investigating the church where it came up a little bit from non-member friends, right through the mission experience and all the way through my membership experience and leadership experience, it was always a question of concern. I think it was the most, the issue that was asked most about from members with me who had questions about doctrine and polygamy. And a lot of it was, um, just confusion that the church, you're right, hasn't, and still to date has not addressed the issue of polygamy in the way that it could. I believe we do have answers, absolutely have answers. I think we don't want to talk about those, uh, answers. We don't want to admit that polygamy was a mistake and that it caused, well, if you read, um, The American Crucifixion by Alex Beam, and there's some references in there, uh, and other research, it talks about the mental and emotional impact on women at the time. The internal conflict, social dynamics, and just the whole, uh, personal and psychological, uh, damage that it caused women and such trauma and pain and cruelty, especially with doing things behind, you know, Joe Smith practicing this at times behind Emma's back and other men doing this without the full knowledge of their wives and doing it privately and, and, you know, secretly. Um, the practice was, I think, introduced in the 1830s. It was part of the, uh, eternal salvation, the new and everlasting covenant. It was a condition of being with God in the eternities that the new and everlasting covenant meant that you, uh, you were sealed to your husband and that there was the possibility of having more than one wife. And that as long as you're sealed to the man with the priesthood, that was eternal, you were pretty much guaranteed, uh, eternal life. And that was significant, I think, for the women. I'm not an expert on polygamy, but the, the emotional and psychological and economic impact on women was just, um, absolutely cruel. And for the church not to acknowledge that only adds to the suffering. And I think the answers are, and this is where we talk about bold leadership, is for the church to come out and admit that polygamy was a mistake and was, uh, wrong and we no longer practice it. But they can't do that and they won't do that. Why? Because the church leadership still believes it and still practices it. There are men who are sealed to more than one wife. And just to close here at this part of the conversation, in September 1886, John Taylor had an extraordinary revelation. And in that revelation, it became very clear that the revelation was significant and controversial. And basically, it said that the principle of eternal marriage, the new and everlasting covenant, as it was dictated, uh, at that time, a reveal at the time referring to plural marriage, that it was, it would never change. It was a permanent, everlasting covenant and doctrine, and the doctrine would never change. And that revelation, uh, was, uh, detailed and then, and then buried. It was hidden from public view and from membership view, and there's lots of references where the church leaders denied the existence of that revelation. But under pressure, perhaps from the internet and other scholars, the church finally, uh, acknowledged that the existence of the revelation where John Taylor stated very clearly that the revelation was permanent, could never be removed or revoked, and was new and everlasting. So the church is in a difficult position because That was the doctrine. That is the doctrine. Privately, as I spoke to senior leaders, that's still what we believe and, uh, uh, the practice that we will follow after, uh, this life. You can be sealed to more than one woman. And so they can't deny it or disavow it or reject it or say it's a mistake because they still believe it and they will practice it in the next life. So yeah, it's not going away, and the church, it's in a very interesting position for sure.

Yeah, it's important to distinguish between two things. The church disavowed the practice of polygamy, although at the time it had its fingers crossed because it became very clear during the Reed Smoot hearings, which began in 1904, where Smoot's senatorial seat was contested, in part because of the polygamous practices within the church. It became obvious that the church had continued to practice polygamy even after the 1890 Manifesto, albeit at a much reduced rate. Uh, so eventually Joseph F. Smith, as church president, had to give what is generally termed the second manifesto in 1904, saying, no, this time we really mean we're not going to be practicing or entering into any new polygamous marriages. But they've never disavowed the doctrine behind it. Yeah. And I think therein is the problem, particularly as you try to gaze beyond the horizon. The question is, is polygamy delayed polygamy denied.

Well, and that's here in your roadmap. And when you talk about it, you also, you say, to say that Smith's embrace of the principle was a mistake puts the church in a very difficult position, where it would cause people then to have second thoughts about others of his doctrines and policies that do not go down easily with them. But to reaffirm that it is an eternal principle does not sit well with many church members, or for that matter, non-members. Let's make up our minds. It's been really interesting to me as I watch the comments come in for the Inconvenient Faith documentary. Uh, a large number of them, um, come from people I would describe as polygamy deniers. There, we interviewed a woman by the name of Michelle Brady Stone on this podcast., who gathered a very large following, uh, insisting that Joseph Smith never practiced polygamy. And, and eventually her— she ended up having to take her entire channel down and delete all of her videos, uh, at the instruction of her priesthood leaders, or, or suffer church discipline if she didn't, uh, because she was getting a huge following. And there, there are a large number of members of the church that have decided, okay, you know, Joseph Smith publicly denied being a polygamist. Emma Smith denied that Joseph ever practiced polygamy. And so polygamy was an invention of Brigham Young, and he attributed— he forged D&C Section 132, attributed it to Joseph Smith, and this was all something that happened later. And this is gaining, I think, some momentum because people want Joseph to be pure, I guess. But I look at that and I think that makes it even worse to some degree, because then it means that Brigham Young becomes kind of a monster and a complete and total fraud as he attributes a practice to Joseph that, that Joseph ostensibly wouldn't, didn't actually do. And so I think it's a greater indictment of the church as a whole. Greg, have you encountered any of these polygamy kind of deniers? Is this an argument that you've ever engaged with?

No, and to the contrary, over the past, oh, probably 6 years, I've had some very close friendships develop within the polygamy community. Now, these are not people who are what I think are extremists of the fundamentalist LDS Church. Uh, the, they would call themselves secular polygamists who honor the practice, but they no longer put any religious overtones to it. But all these groups, and there are countless numbers of them, literally countless, I don't think anybody has a clue what that total number is. They all trace their pedigree back to that 1886 revelation. So therein is the real problem for today's church. It's not just Joseph Smith. In fact, they're not trying to claim that their pedigree goes back to Joseph. It's John Taylor. And with the church acknowledging the authenticity of that revelation, I think it just makes it more difficult for them to deal with this. When Helen Whitney was working on the PBS documentary, The Mormons, which was broadcast 18 years ago now, she told me, you have a good religion, but your members are borrowing it. They need to own it. And this is one of the principal issues that people have not been willing, or perhaps not been able to own, to deal with the data and say, all right. What is the current status and what does this mean and where do we go from here? And we can't hide the ball anymore. Yeah. That's the discussion I wish we could have.

Yeah. I completely agree. And I love your differentiation between, um, we reject the practice, but we, we still haven't rejected the doctrine. I think that's so such an important point. This is yet another example of the only true church upon the face of the earth failing to address longstanding historical major issues that cause so much untold pain and suffering for so many families and children and relationships. The, the, the price that these people paid back then was extraordinary. Another example. Is another example of the church not being forthcoming and open and transparent and accountable for this heinous practice because of the reasons that you said, Greg. They will not reject or disavow the doctrine. It's the same with the race in the priesthood. We read the essay there. It disavows the practice, but even on that major issue, it still hasn't, in my opinion, been bold enough and committed enough and dedicated to addressing the issue of race in the priesthood head-on. The same is with polygamy. I'm frustrated, like so many, the church appears to be at best disingenuous and at worst lying, trying to cover up elements of this and not being honest. We know, for example, that Joseph Smith made a number of public denials of polygamy while still practicing polygamy. There's that famous quote, if I get it right here, he said, he said that, Smith said that, I have to confess, I have never been ashamed to say that I have not more than one wife. I have no other wife but my wife, whom I have taken in the Lord. He also said, I have no more wives than one, in response to accusations about him practicing polygamy. And he also said in another speech publicly, what a thing it is for a man to be accused of committing adultery and having 7 wives when I can only find one. And he also reaffirmed later, I'm the same man and as innocent, innocent as I was 14 years ago. So again, if you look at the, some of the material like the Alex Beam American Crucifixion, Alex is a non-member. Uh, we, we currently trying to, uh, get him onto, uh, our podcast. He's a very diligent researcher, scholar, non-member, no axe to grind with the church. And his research is pretty phenomenal. And, you know, this is the behavior of Joseph Smith where he was frankly, no way of putting it, lying about practicing polygamy, denying it when he was actually practicing it. So I, I think the church has still got a long way to go to address this issue and have a position on it, disavow it, uh, reject it. Uh, but as I said earlier, it can't and won't do that because privately, from a, a doctrinal, uh, perspective, it still believes that. It still believes like the New and Everlasting Covenant is part of the essential tenet of the, uh, of the Watchword Meals price, and that you cannot achieve the highest status of eternal life with God in the celestial kingdom unless you are accepting that, uh, you know, that, uh, doctrine that is eternal. We, we, we talk, we've had conversations on a podcast about God having more than one wife. There are multiple wives in heaven. And so if you were to reject the doctrine, you would have to rewrite the doctrine on the nature of God, which we've talked about quite a bit on some of the podcasts. The church teaches that God has more than one wife, although it keeps it quiet. So you'd have to rewrite the relationship and their nature with God and heavenly mothers, which the church has confirmed exist, and that we have multiple heavenly mothers. And so it's in a mess. I don't have any, I can't think of how the church can get out of this other than to be honest to say, hey, this is wrong. The doctrine's wrong. We don't believe, we don't practice it. And then we're going to have to rewrite the doctrine or take a new position on the doctrine. I don't have any answer how the church can get through this other than just being honest. And if it is, if it does believe that polygamy is actually, continues to be an eternal principle, an eternal piece of doctrine, it should say so and not let members, uh, struggle with all the confusion and all the opinions because we've had people on a podcast who still believe that blacks shouldn't have the priesthood. We've got people that think polygamy should come back, should be returned. It can't for legal reasons, but that the church should reaffirm its position that polygamy is an eternal principle. So I don't have any solutions there. It's in a real mess. My position is that it's false. It's false doctrine. I don't believe in it. I never was comfortable with it at all. I was told, Ian, you know, you might feel like this right now, but when you die, you'll feel differently about polygamy. Well, I don't want to feel differently about polygamy. I just, the whole thing, it goes against everything, every decent thing I can think of. And I wasn't raised in the church. I was raised in a very difficult environment, but even I felt instinctively, emotionally, spiritually, I felt that was wrong. It's wrong. And the church needs to be bold and just say so. And if not, say so. What's the position?

Well, let me come at this from a little bit different perspective. I said earlier, we, we can't really see over the horizon, but sometimes it's an interesting thought experiment to just make a couple of assumptions about what's over the horizon. For some of my well-meaning dogmatic co-religionists, occasionally I will make life a little uneasy for them by saying, If you think you understand what's out there, then explain to me how it will be determined where you spend Thanksgiving and how many turkeys you have to buy. That sounds very flippant, but it, it brings the conversation to a standstill because as simple a projection as that might seem compared to whatever the complexity is of what's out there. It stops them cold because they don't have that answer. Now let me move that into the discussion about polygamy. 40 years ago, Dialogue— the complete title of the journal being Dialogue, I'm blanking on it now— Journal of Mormon Thought. There you go. Published a tongue-in-cheek and yet revealing brief article that very few people, I think, even recognize now exists. The title is In the Heavens, Are Parents Single? Report Number 1 of the Committee on Celestial Demographics. What they did, and they had some sociologists and statisticians weighing in on this. They said, we can make a couple of assumptions, but we also can weigh in with some verified statistics. One assumption they made is, all right, there have been 70 billion people born on the earth. A fact is that throughout recorded history, the ratio of male to female births is not 1 to 1. It's 104 male births for every 100 female births. Added to that is the infant mortality rate is higher among male babies than among female babies. So you can start to see where this is going already, that If you just track those things out and combine them with a doctrine that many of our leaders up to the highest level have taught, that you don't gain access to the top level of the celestial kingdom without plural marriage. We don't hear about that anymore. We haven't really disavowed it. You find out that that's an impossibility. Because it goes on to say the sex ratio places limits, limits on marriage partners. If all 19.2 billion women and none of the 18.9 billion men who survived past 8 were exalted, the sex ratio in the heavens would barely exceed 2 women per man. Now, that's a ridiculous assumption that all 19 billion women are going to reach that level and none of the 19 billion men are going to reach that level, but it just points out the absurdity of a reality once you start to plug numbers into it. Does that make any sense? Yes, absolutely.

No, I, I've thought about that a number of times when, when, you know, the Godmakers movie talks about the endless celestial sex that Mormon gods end up having with their billions of wives. And the math just never, never added up. The idea of, you know, just two women for every man requires the kind of mathematical loop-de-loops that you've just described. But if you listen to Brigham Young and you listen to the early Brethren and the way they talk about polygamy and the way that that was interpreted, It's a whole lot more than 2. It's, it's, it's bordering on infinite. I mean, it just doesn't make any sense. It doesn't marry up to, no pun intended, but it doesn't, it doesn't match up with what we understand about how all these ratios work. And Greg, I want to read your response. You talk about regarding the here and now aspects of polygamy, we should consider taking a step back. And saying something like, while we embrace the reality of afterlife, we know nothing about the details, including the mechanics of intra-family relationships established on Earth, but we have faith that a loving God will not allow any earthbound activities to interfere eternally with relationships built on love. I thought that was a very interesting sentence because I think it encompasses more than polygamy. Uh, am I reading too much into that? What would you—

that is our hope. That's where faith really comes into this, to acknowledge there's very little that we know for sure and very much that we base on our faith. Wow. And yet we have so many of our coreligionists who act as if they know everything and that there's nothing that requires faith because we already have the answers. We don't. Now there's another here and now problem that we don't see in the LDS Church, but that some of the fundamentalist sects have had, and it gave rise to the term the lost boys. If you have polygamy now, even though, uh, well, even if it's just a 2-to-1, that means that there are going to be a lot of men in the community who aren't going to have a wife because all of the women are taken up in plural marriages. And the fact was that for some of these communities, some of the young men, even boys, would be literally cast out of the community because there was no place for them. It's another tragedy.

Uh, no, I, I was living down in St. George when, uh, there was a big push, uh, with regard to calling attention to these Lost Boys. So the people essentially— Warren Jeffs was just sort of stepping in and saying, your wife is mine now, and saying to other men, I'm reassigning your wives to somebody else because you're not righteous enough. And very often they were reassigned to him. But the whole Lost Boys phenomena came, came, came on with the fact that, you know, young teenage boys Uh, there just weren't enough women to go around. And so they were just kind of run out of town on a rail because particularly the young and attractive women, these old creepy leaders wanted them for themselves. I mean, the math doesn't add up in mortality either. Uh, you mentioned something else though, in your roadmap, you talk about this is a change and I. And I want you to sort of elaborate on this if you can. You say the church has already taken a step in that direction by allowing women to be sealed to more than one man, albeit only one living man at a time, and then saying, we'll leave it up to the Lord to work it out with you in the next life. I wasn't aware that they had made that change. Is that now— women can now be sealed to more than one man?

That was my understanding, and what you're really doing is just kicking the can down the road. Now, I'm not sure that that's very comforting to the children because they're saying, well, what is the deal here? Are you asking me to wait until after I die to find out who my father is going to be in the next existence? I don't think it really solves the issue, although perhaps for the women, it at least does kick that can down the road and tell them you don't have to make that decision now.

And that doesn't— do you think that helps anything?

I doubt it. I don't have the data to address that. You need to have Carol Lynn on and she can probably put numbers to it.

Ian, let's make a note of that. I would love to get Carolyn Pearson on here. I would absolutely. I think she, she has so much moral clarity on this issue. I mean, she's investigated it, I think, more than anybody else, and The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy is a truly haunting book, right? Yes. Do you know if she's gotten any, Greg, if she's gotten any pushback for that book?

There has never been any church discipline. Because of that book. Carolyn has managed to navigate life in such a way as to avoid that. It's quite remarkable, but she's been very careful along the way too, while not abandoning her courage to take on difficult issues.

In your, in the Roadmap, Greg, you talk about the, uh, um, impact of polygamy on family dynamics, uh, not just in this life, but in the next life. You know, you talk about, um, we don't know the details of what that's going to look like in the next life. Um, what's your, uh, research tell you about the impact of polygamy on family relationships and dynamics? I'm thinking of times when and you have to help me from historical, there were conversations when polygamy was being introduced and being practiced during the restoration of the church. I recall from some document I've read or somewhere, uh, some source that there was a connection or a, a, um, motive behind polygamy amongst other motives that in order to advance, accelerate eternal life and to solidify and cement eternal life, that young girls and women, single at the time, and daughters of certain, uh, individuals who were members of the church or interested in joining the church, that the promise of eternal life for the daughter's parents and the daughter, et cetera, that if you're going to be part of the church and belong to the church and accept all the covenants, that you had to embrace polygamy, and that there were promises and blessings, uh, to families and to join families, join prominent families, influential families, um, during the restoration of the church at the time when the church was, uh, was new and, and growing, and to connect powerful families together through the practice of polygamy and put pressure, it appears at least, on young girls and women to, uh, accept the principle of and practice of polygamy. And that in so doing, that they would be sealed with their parents and that their parents would have eternal life if they, if these women practiced and accepted the practice and principle of polygamy. Uh, what have you, what's your research tell you about those conversations? Did they happen? Do you have any details about them? And what was that relationship between polygamy and binding, uh, families together to Joseph Smith and being associated with the bigger Joseph Smith family at the time? Could you speak to that?

Yeah, that, that pendulum swung in two directions. We don't talk about the second one very much. The first is what you described. That women would be promised eternal rewards in return for their consent to enter into polygamous marriage. The other direction of the pendulum was that this got to be a bit of a contest for the men, where they started to get carried away with it and to feel that their— the greatness of their kingdom in the next life would be proportionate to the number of wives and children they had. And so you had the sealing, particularly to church leaders, of dozens, if not hundreds of women, many of whom they never would even have met, because the thought was this will enhance their glory in the hereafter, which to me is a repulsive thought. Allied with that, what was, was what was called the law of adoption. Initially, the ordinances of salvation, the sealing one in particular, only went in one direction. It was church members and their offspring. It was not their ancestry. So you could not be sealed to your deceased parents unless they had been church members. What you could do was to be adopted into the family of current or past church members, now deceased, thereby, according to that doctrine, assuring yourself of being part of their righteous kingdom in the hereafter. And that even got out of hand because you had men who felt more is better, and so they would adopt, in some cases, children who were older than themselves to be in their eternal family. That didn't come to a halt until the early 1890s with the dedication of the Salt Lake Temple. The church president, Wilford Woodruff, got up in general conference and said, you know, we've been doing this adoption thing for a long time. The voice of the Lord has come to me and said, no. You, you aren't sealed to a non-relative, you're sealed to your parents and they, their parents, and in a continual chain. But those two thoughts are closely allied, that the more wives you have, the greater your glory in the hereafter, and the more children you have adopted to you, the greater your glory. And it, in some cases, it's, it just spun out of control. I see no sense at all to that, and I see a very, very dark side to it. Yeah.

Well, so when you start talking about the law of adoption, my mind goes to an essay that was written by my brother-in-law, a man by the name of Nathan Olman. He's a professor of, um, law at the College of William and Mary, and he wrote an essay called A Welding Link of Some Kind. Where he talked about the fact that the law of adoption, as it was practiced for a very long time— I mean, we now think of sealings as being, okay, we have always thought, okay, we're going to bind ourselves to our ancestors. But under the law of adoption, it was, we are going to seal ourselves to great church leaders. We're going to bind ourselves to Joseph Smith and to Brigham Young and going back. And it wasn't— I think it was Wilford Woodruff that finally changed it. But Nate talks about the idea of, look, the bewildering nature of sealing ordinances and the way that they've been practiced in sort of contradictory ways opens the door in his mind for same-sex temple sealings. And the idea of, okay, if we recognize— I'm just going to read quickly from his conclusion. As he says, my hope in presenting these ideas is that they might provide a possible path forward for the church that resolves the destructive conflict within our current practices and teachings around same-sex marriage. I long for a way in which gay and lesbian Latter-day Saints can live within the kind of faithful, covenanted, and committed companionship that the church rightly holds out as this life. Same-sex marriage sealings could unfold such lives into the church and bless them with the power that comes through temple ordinances. At the same time, I take very seriously the need for continuity and loyalty to the Restoration. The ideas presented here seek to engage respectfully with the theology of heterosexual exaltation without endorsing the theology of eternal homosexuality. There needn't be consensus on that issue in order to blame same-sex temple sealings. It is enough to say that all sealings contribute to the great welding link. And we do not know the details of the eternities. This is something we do in other contexts. And he goes on to talk about the same kinds of things that you've talked about, Greg, with regard to, you know, we just don't really know. Against the background of the history of sealing practices, it is not true that one needs a precise account of a sealing's meaning in the hereafter. To be able to perform a marriage sealing. We already perform— regularly perform sealings in the temple whose final eternal significance we do not purport to precisely understand. Indeed, the meaning and scope of marriage sealings has changed over the course of the Restoration. And this also calls to mind a conversation I remember having with my Uncle Howard— Howard Anderson. Greg, who you were acquainted with, and he was the LA Temple Stake President. And he used to talk about, oh, this is great because, you know, my— well, just stepping back by way of background, my mother's sister, who was also Howard Anderson's sister-in-law, was divorced. And Howard said, I always tell divorced women that their sealing is not gone. Their sealing is still active. And so when they get to the next life, they can say, okay, well, I get to pick one of those stripling warriors over there. And isn't that great? Because it's the sealing that matters. And he says, you're not sealed to your spouse. You are sealed with your spouse, and that sealing blessing is individual. And I was like, okay, well, that sounds really nice, Uncle Howard, but then what's to prevent me from finding a woman that I don't really know and saying, look, I don't want to be married to you, but since the sealing blessing is individual, why don't we just go to the temple and get sealed with each other so we'll each have that sealing blessing? And then we can pick out the eternal spouse we want in the next life. And Howard kind of hemmed and hawed and didn't have an answer for that. I mean, it all seems to come back to this idea that we just don't know, is what I was trying to say. Yeah.

When I was interviewing my grandmother, simply because I had the impulse to do that for all four of my grandparents, she talked about her mother. And the difficult marriage she had had, and she said to my grandmother, I want your promise that you will never have that man sealed to me. Uh, I don't think that that's an uncommon occurrence. So what does that do to the idea of an unbroken chain of parent to child if you have somebody in their who was horrible in this life, are they suddenly going to change in the next life and everything's cozy? Um, that's a real problem. Yeah. And we don't address that problem.

Can I, can I just jump in there? That is one of the most significant things I've ever heard in my life. Um, I guess this is the bit where I make myself a bit vulnerable here, but that's okay. Um, my father, uh, was pretty absent. Uh, he completely rejected our family, left, and we were a single-parent family for as long as I can remember. I have no, very, almost no memories of having a father around. And even after years when I found him, he denied even he was my father. It was a long history. I won't go into the details. Many, many years of me trying to connect with him and constant rejection and denials of who he was. In the end, something happened and he acknowledged who he was and we haven't got time to, or even need to get into that right now. But I really don't know how I feel about him and, and his, the pain and suffering that he caused my mother and other family members is pretty horrendous. And I really don't want to be sealed to him. And this came up quite a bit, Jim, on the mission, where there were people that, and we spoke to President Banks about this, I know I did, our mission president, when we taught the principle that you can be with your family forever. Well, the scripture, is that scripture, isn't there, in the Book of Mormon that hits me, that you've been born of goodly parents? Well, no, we haven't all been born of goodly parents. That's just a dream that, you know, a crazy notion that we're all born of goodly parents. The reality often is not. And then when we started talking about these things on the mission, and people would say, well, I don't want to be sealed to so-and-so. And, you know, all this genealogy, family history, I don't want to be sealed to those people. Uh, yet that's the eternal principle. The default is that the work will be done whether you like it or not, whether you're alive or not. The work will be done through the genealogical family history process. Where whoever you're related to down the line in the, in the family tree, you will be, that the work will be performed and that you will be sealed to those people that you don't wanna be sealed to in the next life. And the church, again, another example of confusion, frustration, and President Banks kind of wrestled over this. He even had to speak to Jack Gosland, uh, Jim, at Ward 10, who was the Area Seventy who you met. And where even Preston Banks didn't have answers to certain questions. They'd have to get back to you on that stuff. It's so complicated. You know, families and family dynamics in this life and the next life are not black and white. They're not straightforward. There's hurt and pain, and people, including myself, don't want to be sealed to certain people. I can't— do they suddenly change in the next life? I don't know. Maybe I'm not humble enough. Maybe I'm not forgiving enough. Maybe I will think differently and feel differently the next slide, but there are people out there who have these real pain and concern, and I just don't think the church is addressing that adequately. So I think it's such an important point, Greg, that you raised.

Well, we're coming up near the end of this. I mean, we can dive into the next The next section of the roadmap is gerontocracy.

I just have one more question, Jim. Sorry to interrupt. I, I know we're coming to the end, but I've got one more question for Greg, if I may, on the polygamy thing. Um, if I may, uh, Greg, in your research, what's your view on how much, uh, the, the issue of sex. Motivated the policy, specifically where men or some men were driven by the interest and desire to have as much sex as they could with as many women as they can. We've not addressed that in this. It's not in your roadmap. I've read the roadmap. I can't see it in there, but how much was the desire, the need for men of the church at the time to want to have sex with as many women as they can and to legitimize that, um, sexual behavior and activity. Do you have a view on that? Do you have an opinion on that?

Uh, my opinion is we don't have enough data to make a judgment about the motivation of most of these men. Sex in the 19th century was not discussed. I don't know that people even knew the name or the meaning of the word libido. You can see that some of them were sexually active because some of them had 50, 60 children. One of the men I interviewed a couple of years ago, now living in St. George, was one of the patriarchs in the FLDS movement, and he, I think he had 64 children. 5, 6 wives. That was unusual even in the 19th century, but it was not unique. Was the motivation an overactive libido, or was it something perhaps a little more honorable? Um, it's probably part of column A and part of column B. We just don't know because the subject was not discussed openly, nor have I seen written records that really delve into it. Sorry, I can't give you a better answer, but I don't think the data are there.

Well, that, that kind of highlights an overarching problem with polygamy in that, you know, when I remember when I read Rough Stone Rolling I came away thinking, okay, if you want to believe that Joseph Smith was an absolute scoundrel, the data does not prevent you from believing that. But at the same time, it does not demand that you believe that. The data in terms of how we understood how Joseph practiced polygamy is so sparse that that the people who make the case that he didn't practice polygamy at all can make something of a credible case. I don't think it's a persuasive case, but it's not a ridiculous case. And there are people like Brian Hales, for instance, who has become sort of the de facto beloved authority on polygamy as far as the church is concerned. Uh, you know, he talks about the whole problem of polyandry, which really throws people for a loop because polyandry is specifically forbidden by Section 132. The idea of, uh, a woman being married to multiple men. And Joseph Smith married a number of, of women who were already married and still remain married to those men, uh, while they were alive. And there are a couple of them where it's very clear that it's a sort of an eternity-only sealing, where he married men who said, I don't believe in your religion, I don't care what you want to do after this life, and if you want to be sealed to Joseph Smith and stay my wife, that's fine. I think there's actually only one case where that's— where it's that clear. But Brian Hales comes away and says Joseph Smith did not have sexual relations with any of those women. They weren't, they weren't marriages, they were only sealings. And most of these sealings were non-sexual. And you can make that case. Again, I think it's a little more persuasive in the case that Joseph wasn't a polygamist at all. But if you want to make the case that Joseph Smith was a sexual predator, you've got— the data does not prevent you from making that case either. We just don't have enough information about polygamy's origins, enough to be able to do that. Although we do have a great deal of information about how Brigham Young practiced it, how it was practiced in Utah, and there are certainly problematic elements of that. But, you know, your point that, you know, we don't know how much of this was, I want to have a lot of sex with a lot of women, We just, not only do we not know about how polygamy is going to unfold in the next life, we really don't have a whole lot of data about how it unfolded in this life. I mean, would you consider that an accurate characterization, Greg, or am I just—

Well, I would like to interject here a story of the most noble example I have ever known of plural marriage, and it comes from my association with people who were part of the FLDS community in the Short Creek Valley of Utah, Arizona. Uh, the irony is that in the 1940s, my grandfather, who was the Washington County Sheriff, arrested Fred Jessop, who was a polygamist. I, I know this because I saw the arrest card that the county later gave to our family. The more I learned about Fred Jessop, the more in awe of him I stood. Fred was never able to sire children. He had what started out as a modest house in Hilldale, which is on the Utah side of the Utah-Arizona border. And he was the bishop. They only had one. He was, in essence, the equivalent of our presiding bishop. But he began to take as plural wives women who had been widowed or elderly women who had never married because, in part, there were no elder care facilities in the entire community. So in one direction, his house kept expanding because he would build more rooms to house these women who were on one level his plural wives, but I doubt that he ever had sex with any of them. In the other direction, one of his wives who was a midwife kept expanding a medical clinic. So you have this house that looks like a rabbit warren that just goes forever in both directions. But there was an example of a man who, I think for very noble reasons, kept taking plural wives, not because it enhanced his own glory, but because he saw that this was a way to provide these women with some security, with a home, with a real family.

Yeah. How would you characterize, uh, love to get both of your opinion, the relationship between Joseph and is it 14 or 15-year-old Fanny Alger? What was that relationship? He had that relationship behind Emma's back. Oliver Cowdery, I think, described it as a dirty, sordid affair. But did Joseph describe or characterize that as a some kind of eternal, spiritual, polygamous, plural relationship? Uh, was it an affair? Was it not? How would you characterize that relationship?

That was 1835, so it was 7 years before Section 124. I was doing research on my priesthood book in the Huntington Library in California. They possess the original Oliver Cowdery letter book, and they let me look at the original, and that's where I first read that account by Oliver Cowdery. I think it was that nasty, filthy affair with Fanny Alger. I don't think Cowdery was making that up. Uh, I don't know how else you can characterize that. That they were found in the barn together in a compromising position. I'm surprised that Emma was able to hold it together then and later. And I think the only way she eventually was able to do that was through outright denial.

I could imagine— can you imagine what Emma went through? No. I just, I can't even begin to imagine what that poor woman went through. We know that he did things in the night behind the back, and it's just, it's just so wrong and so immoral. The pain and suffering that that woman went through is just extraordinary.

Well, it raises the issue that we as a church still have not really faced off against, and that is, will we ever get to the point where we can have the discussion about the humanity of our leaders rather than trying to hide the ball? Yeah. Are we willing to say, look, if the data are reliable, then we have to deal with the data? Or as Helen Whitney said, you got to own the data. You can't keep hiding them. We're not to that point yet. I wish we could, because if we had a healthier, reality-based understanding of Joseph Smith, that works to our benefit moving forward as well. To me, it doesn't invalidate the divinity that we see within this organization. It makes it more accessible and more understandable to me because among other things, it says, hey, there's room for you on the Mensch too.

Yeah, I concur with that. I know we're coming up to the end and Jim, you may have another question here, but if I may, and I'll be very brief here, I've been reading Alex Beam's American Crucifixion and in his book, he's very clear that the policy, principle, practice of polygamy as it was introduced by Joseph Smith was a major factor in the demise and destruction of Joseph Smith at Carthage Jail. It is one of the most significant, uh, drivers, motivators behind the destruction of Joseph Smith. Yet in Fair Mormon, the church goes to great lengths actually to deny that. We haven't got time to get into it right now, but Unfair Mormon, it talks about, that the decision to change polygamy was not anything other than, you know, the persecution or threat of prosecution from the government at the time. And that polygamy was not a factor in the demise of Joseph Smith, where Alex Beam's research contradicts that. Do you think, Greg, that that was a major factor in the demise of Joseph Smith?

The proximate cause, as I understand it, was that the one issue of the Nauvoo Expositor, a newspaper, was so threatening to Smith that he ordered the press destroyed. And it was that act that enraged the mob. But why did he want the press destroyed? Because they were exposing the practice of plural marriage. Right. So I think you're spot on, Ian.

Right. Well, I think the concluding thought here is the one Greg was elucidating with regard to, will we ever confront the humanity and the failings of our leaders. I mean, when I was editing the Inconvenient Faith episode on polygamy, you know, the accusation over the whole series is that it's just way too apologetic, that we come up with too many positive answers, that we weren't really giving the critics their due. But with regard to polygamy, I could not find any kind of summation or apologetic argument that was, is particularly satisfying. And that sort of just led to the idea of you have to accept the reality of fallible leaders, and not fallible in just the sense that they can, you know, we make fun of Elder Stevenson when he introduced Dallin H. Oaks as Dallas H. Oaks. Ha ha ha, he made a mistake. We're talking fallibility of Joseph Smith being in the barn with Fanny Alger. Although again, the whole Fanny Alger episode, the data is so sparse, we really don't know what happened. We know that Oliver was upset by it. We know that Emma was upset by it. Uh, Michelle Brady Stone insists that it was not sexual, it was just the beginning of the flirting that went too far, or blah blah. I mean, we just don't know a lot of this stuff., but we have to be able to accept the reality that our leaders were capable of making some kind of egregious error like this, of doing something this wrong. Not just an error like I turned left when I should have turned right, but an error like I had an affair with the housemaid. You know, I mean, I, I remember reading about Fannie Alger for the first time in Rough Stone Rolling and going, Now wait a minute, doesn't this cross the line? Isn't this too far? Am I— can I accept that Joseph Smith is a prophet and that he also did this? I mean, those are the kinds of questions that, that not only do we not have the answers to them, we haven't even asked the questions.

I mean, well, in our curriculum, we gloss over the imperfections that are crystal clear in the Old Testament. Mm-hmm. King David, probably the best example, but not the only one. Uh, and if you consider that what we have now in our modern Bible is what survived generations of redactors, of editors whose inclination was to try to spiffy up the story and make the whole thing look better. The fact that those things survived says a lot. And yet we don't allow ourselves to have those discussions in a church setting about Old Testament figures who clearly were flawed, in some cases fatally flawed. I think it's because of the fear that, gee, what cuts backward cuts forward too. Well, yeah, it does. So let's grow up and deal with it.

I think that's a great way to end this. Let's grow up and deal with it. Any other parting thoughts, Ian?

No, that's a fantastic way to end this. Nothing to add to that last comment at all. I agree. All right.

Well, thank you again, Greg. We would love to have you back. The next, the next conversation is about gerontocracy. Another easy one. Another easy one. Another easy one. But we very much appreciate you being here to help us make sense of this. And Ian, of course, appreciate very much your contributions to this discussion and to your unique experiences that I think give an important context and backdrop to all of this. And we want to thank everybody for for listening and for watching. Hopefully we've started doing live streams on Wednesday evenings, and Greg, at some point we may try to tempt you into coming on live. So we just let that percolate for a bit and you could come back to us later.

I'll have to learn how to use makeup.

Oh, there you go. Well, You use it as well as we do at this point. So, which is to say we don't use it at all, but we'll see what happens. But anyway, thank you all very much for listening, and we look forward to visiting with you in our next episode of Inside Out. Thank you, Greg, and thank you, Ian.

You're welcome. Thank you, Jim.

Thank you, Greg.