The 1890 Manifesto marked the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ official abandonment of plural marriage, but it did not settle the question of whether the practice remained divinely required. In the book’s account, the change became a lasting point of rupture: institutional policy moved away from plural marriage, while Mormon fundamentalists continued to treat it as a sacred commandment and resisted the authority behind its abandonment.

Background and Doctrinal Stakes

Plural marriage had been practiced secretly by Joseph Smith and a limited circle of followers before he formally codified the commandment on July 12, 1843. The revelation remained concealed and was not acknowledged until 1852, eight years after Joseph Smith’s death. By then, it had become a defining religious principle, not simply a private marital practice: its defenders understood obedience to it as fidelity to divine revelation.

The history of concealment and later public acknowledgment formed the backdrop to the 1890 reversal. For Dan Lafferty, the change meant that the modern Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had strayed from its earliest teachings. He came to believe that Wilford Woodruff had been pressured by the federal government to abandon plural marriage, and that the church’s resulting course was a fundamental betrayal rather than a valid doctrinal development.

Competing Claims of Authority

The dispute reached beyond marriage to the question of which law should prevail. In Deseret, Brigham Young’s leaders had asserted that divine law took precedence over civil law and built a local legal system that could protect church authority when the two conflicted. The Utah Territorial Legislature expanded the jurisdiction of local probate courts, which were controlled by Brigham Young; Mormon bishops commonly served as judges, and church members made up most juries. This arrangement gave institutional form to the claim that religious authority could govern matters that federal officials believed belonged under federal jurisdiction.

Dan Lafferty carried a related suspicion of government into his own arguments. He maintained that government requirements such as licenses, taxes, and Social Security numbers gave the state improper control over individual lives. He joined a literalist reading of religious texts to a similarly absolute view of early American political documents, treating both as sources of binding authority. In that framework, abandoning plural marriage under pressure from the government could appear not merely as a policy shift but as submission to an illegitimate power.

Resistance and Continuity

The official abandonment did not erase the religious commitment of those who rejected the change. In 1886, John Taylor had called trusted followers together after receiving a revelation affirming plural marriage. He placed them under a covenant to defend the principle and authorized a group of them to perform plural marriages and ordain others to do so. That meeting shows how a claim of continuing divine authority could be preserved outside the later institutional position, helping create a basis for fundamentalist resistance to the 1890 settlement.

The conflict also persisted in later arguments over privacy and religious liberty. Polygamists described their household practices as constitutionally protected beliefs and claimed that the government had no right to intervene in their homes. Yet plural marriage was illegal across the United States and in Canada, leaving adherents caught between their religious understanding of obligation and the demands of civil law.

Significance

The 1890 Manifesto is therefore presented as an institutional turning point whose authority remained contested. For the mainstream church, official abandonment separated present practice from an earlier doctrine. For fundamentalists such as Dan Lafferty, the same decision confirmed that church leaders could yield to secular pressure and depart from what he regarded as immutable commandments. The resulting divide exposes the central conflict running through the book: religious communities may claim divine authority, but their claims operate within legal systems that also assert jurisdiction over marriage, family life, and public conduct.