1890 Manifesto

The 1890 Manifesto marks a decisive change in the official position of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on plural marriage, but not a clean break between religious doctrine, institutional policy, and practice. The book portrays the renunciation as shaped by federal pressure and followed by years of covert sanction from senior leaders. That gap between public policy and private authorization became part of the history from which Mormon Fundamentalism drew strength.

Before the Manifesto: Competing Laws

The Manifesto belongs to a longer conflict over which authority could govern religious life. In Nauvoo, Joseph Smith presided over a theocratic city with unusual powers granted by Illinois; the city’s charter and its militia helped place church authority alongside, and sometimes in tension with, civil government. Later, in Deseret, Brigham Young treated plural marriage as a religious practice protected from outside interference, while insisting that divine law took precedence over human law.

That principle was reinforced by a local legal structure in Utah Territory. The Utah Territorial Legislature expanded the jurisdiction of probate courts controlled by Brigham Young; many judges were Mormon bishops, and juries were largely composed of church members. In the book’s account, this arrangement was designed to make the church’s legal order prevail when it conflicted with federal authority. Federal officials objected to the resulting concentration of power, while some eventually left the territory amid harassment and fears for their safety. The 1890 renunciation thus came against a background in which plural marriage was more than a household arrangement: it had become a test of religious jurisdiction and political authority.

Official Renunciation and Its Limits

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints officially renounced plural marriage in 1890. The evidence presented here does not reproduce the Manifesto’s text or specify its provisions; it does establish the significance of the public change and the discrepancy that followed it. Historian D. Michael Quinn argued that the highest church leaders continued to sanction plural marriage covertly for many years after the official renunciation. In his analysis, this history of concealed authorization was not incidental: it helped drive some Latter-day Saints toward fundamentalism.

The difference between formal policy and religious practice remained visible in communities that continued plural marriage. In Colorado City, men generally entered a legal marriage with one wife while other wives were regarded as spiritually married; those women consequently remained unmarried in the eyes of the state. The arrangement both preserved religious marriages and had practical consequences for family eligibility for public assistance. Sam Roundy, the community’s police chief, defended the privacy of polygamous households and their claim to religious freedom, even as plural marriage remained a crime in every U.S. state and Canada. These examples illustrate the wider conflict surrounding the Manifesto’s legacy, not provisions stated in the Manifesto itself.

Dissent and the Fundamentalist Legacy

The official renunciation also became a point of division within the broader religious tradition. Dan Lafferty concluded from his study of Mormon history that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had gone astray around 1890, when Wilford Woodruff ended the doctrine of plural marriage under pressure from the federal government. He came to regard the modern church as fraudulent and adopted a fundamentalist position without first joining an established fundamentalist organization. His response shows how the 1890 change could be interpreted not as a necessary institutional adjustment but as evidence that the church had abandoned its original order.

Quinn offered a different but related account of how the legacy worked. He maintained that leaders’ private continuation of a practice officially renounced weakened trust: members who later learned of the discrepancy could be pushed toward the very fundamentalism church authorities sought to restrain. The book therefore presents the Manifesto’s aftermath as shaped both by doctrinal dissent and by the consequences of incomplete institutional transparency.

Forecasts and Institutional Change

The possibility of a future return to plural marriage appears in the book as a contested prediction, not an established outcome. Harold Bloom forecast that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints might someday regain sufficient political and financial power to sanction the practice again, arguing that Joseph Smith’s full religious vision could not otherwise be fulfilled. The book immediately qualifies that forecast: the modern church had gained substantially by abandoning plural marriage and was increasingly shaped by business and public relations rather than by theologians and prophetic figures. Its annual revenue was estimated at more than six billion dollars, and it had become Utah’s largest employer.

The Manifesto’s significance therefore lies both in the official policy change and in the unresolved history attached to it. It did not erase the earlier claim that divine law outranked civil law, nor did it prevent continued plural marriage among fundamentalist communities. Instead, the divide between public renunciation and covert sanction supplied a lasting source of dispute over authority, religious freedom, and what fidelity to the church’s founding tradition required.