Mormon Plural Marriage

Mormon Plural Marriage is presented as both a religious doctrine and a contested system of power: a practice justified through revelation, preserved through secrecy, and carried into conflict with civil law and family autonomy. From Joseph Smith’s private marriages in the 1830s to later fundamentalist communities, the book follows how claims of divine authority shaped who could marry, who controlled a household, and what could happen when someone refused that authority.

Doctrine and Its Claims

In the account’s early history, Mormon belief took shape around direct revelation and a stark distinction between the true church and its spiritual opposition. The Book of Mormon describes two churches, one belonging to the Lamb of God and the other to the devil. That binary helps explain the weight placed on commandments understood as divine: a religious rule could be treated not as one custom among others, but as a test of allegiance and truth.

Arguments for plural marriage made that claim explicit. One polemical defense, discussed in the book, blamed laws against polygamy for an array of family and social crimes, while asserting that marriage regulated by God’s law could not produce such harms. The argument made the practice appear not merely permissible but morally protective. Its force depended on accepting the authority of revelation and rejecting the legitimacy of the civil laws that prohibited it.

The doctrine also sat within a wider nineteenth-century conflict over belonging and authority. Mormon settlers in Jackson County, Missouri, claimed a divinely appointed right to gather in Zion; their political cohesion and separation from non-Mormon neighbors intensified local hostility. This was not a dispute about plural marriage alone, but it illustrates the wider setting in which religious claims to a chosen community could compete with the claims of surrounding society.

Joseph Smith, Secrecy, and Codification

The book traces Joseph Smith’s plural marriages back to the 1830s and describes his efforts to keep them from public view. In Nauvoo, the practice continued as the church developed new teachings and rituals. A pamphlet called The Peace Maker, printed by Joseph’s press in 1842, became part of the effort to introduce the subject. Dan Lafferty later believed Joseph had written it under the name Udney Hay Jacob; most scholars cited in the book instead identify Jacob as its author, while allowing that Joseph likely approved the pamphlet’s conception and publication.

The pamphlet provoked an uproar. Joseph disavowed responsibility for its publication, even as the book describes him as having secretly practiced plural marriage for years. The episode reveals the strain between preparing followers to accept a doctrine and concealing its actual practice. Public denunciation and private conduct did not align, and the disavowal bought no lasting resolution of the underlying question.

On July 12, 1843, Joseph formally recorded a revelation identifying plural marriage as a sacred covenant. Unlike several other Nauvoo teachings, this revelation remained secret and was not acknowledged until 1852, eight years after his death. The book presents the revelation as a turning point with repercussions extending well beyond Nauvoo: it nearly fractured the church and formed part of the conflict that preceded Joseph’s death at the hands of a mob.

The revelation emerged amid wider theological change. By the mid-1840s, Joseph had recorded 133 commandments in The Doctrine and Covenants. Nauvoo teachings also included proxy baptism for the dead, temple endowment rituals, and the idea that God had once been a man and that human beings could become gods. Plural marriage was distinctive in its consequences, but it belonged to a period in which followers watched religious authority continually define new obligations and possibilities.

Religious Authority and Civil Law

Plural marriage exposed a direct contest between divine law and state law. In Deseret, Brigham Young argued that God’s laws took precedence over those made by non-Mormons. The legal arrangements he oversaw gave that belief institutional force: the Utah Territorial Legislature expanded local probate courts, which were controlled by Brigham, while many judges were Mormon bishops and juries were largely made up of church members. In practice, church influence shaped the local courts that adjudicated disputes, allowing a religious community to assert its own account of legitimate marriage and authority against federal jurisdiction.

The conflict continued in later fundamentalist communities. In Colorado City, Arizona, plural marriage was illegal in both Arizona and Utah. To avoid prosecution, a man typically entered a civil marriage with only his first wife; subsequent wives were regarded as spiritually married within the community but remained unmarried in the eyes of the state. That difference had practical effects: families could qualify for public assistance as single-parent households even as community leaders condemned the governments providing it. The book notes that the community received more than six million dollars a year in public funds.

For adherents, the state’s intrusion into the household was itself a religious-freedom issue. Colorado City’s police chief defended the privacy of what occurred in residents’ homes and asked whether they had the right to practice their religion. Yet police officers were also sworn to uphold the law. The conflict became concrete when Ruth Stubbs, a plural wife of one of the officers, left the community with her children and publicly alleged abuse. Her account made visible the gap between a community’s claim that marriage was a protected religious practice and the state’s duty to enforce laws against polygamy and respond to family harm.

Households, Kinship, and Control

Within the Colorado City community, Rulon Jeffs’s religious authority extended into marriage and parenthood. The book estimates that he married about seventy-five women and fathered at least sixty-five children. Some wives entered marriages at fourteen or fifteen while he was in his eighties. His sermons emphasized obedience, presenting submission as a route to faith. The numbers and age differences make clear that plural marriage was not simply an abstract doctrine: it organized intimate households under the authority of a prophet whose decisions followers were expected to obey.

The account of Debbie Palmer in Bountiful, British Columbia, shows how plural marriage could produce family relationships difficult to describe through ordinary kinship terms. At fourteen, Debbie believed she had received a prompting to marry community leader Ray Blackmore. A year later, the prophet LeRoy Johnson married her to Blackmore, then fifty-seven. She became his sixth wife and a stepmother to thirty-one children, most older than she was. Because Blackmore was also the father of her stepmother, Debbie became her stepmother’s stepmother and, in the book’s description, her own step-grandmother.

Another household illustrates how these relationships could shift with the leadership of a community. Alaire Blackmore had been adopted by Ray Blackmore at birth. At eighteen, she married him and became both Debbie’s stepdaughter and co-wife. After Ray’s death, she married Debbie’s father; when Winston Blackmore took power, she was transferred from that household into marriage with Winston, her adoptive brother. Such relationships show how marriage, adoption, succession, and control over women’s lives could become entangled rather than remain distinct.

The United Effort Plan’s doctrine, as described in the book, further challenged the idea that wives and children belonged to individual families. When DeLoy Bateman decided to leave the Work, Rulon Jeffs sent someone to claim his wives and children for the priesthood and ordered that they be given to another man. Both wives refused to leave DeLoy. All of his children except the three oldest were classified as apostates along with them. Their refusal exposed a limit to the leader’s authority: even within a system that treated family membership as subject to priesthood control, the people affected could resist the order.

Persistence, Dispute, and Significance

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints officially moved away from plural marriage under government pressure, but the doctrine did not disappear. Dan Lafferty’s interpretation of church history shows how the question remained available for renewed religious struggle. He came to believe that the church had gone astray around 1890, when Wilford Woodruff ended the doctrine under pressure from the federal government. For Dan, the modern church’s rejection of plural marriage represented a betrayal of earlier commandments; this was his conviction, not a neutral account of the church’s history.

The book’s examples connect that historical dispute to later lives. For Joseph Smith, secrecy and eventual codification made plural marriage a source of both religious innovation and institutional rupture. Under Brigham Young, it became part of a larger struggle over which courts and laws would govern a community. In fundamentalist settings, it structured complex households and reinforced a prophet’s claim over marriage and family. For those who left or resisted, the same system could become the ground on which loyalty to a leader, a spouse, children, and the civil order came into conflict.

Mormon Plural Marriage therefore functions in the book as more than a record of marital arrangements. It is a recurring test of religious authority: whether revelation can override public law, whether a leader’s jurisdiction extends into family life, and whether a community’s spiritual account of marriage can coexist with the rights and choices of the people who live within it.