Laws Against Plural Marriage

Laws Against Plural Marriage are presented as more than a prohibition on a particular marital arrangement: they expose the struggle between civil jurisdiction and religious authority. The book traces that struggle from federal attempts to dismantle the Utah theocracy to modern prosecutions in Colorado City, where religious marriages, state recognition, family power, and the right to practice religion continue to collide.

Federal Pressure and the Church’s Reversal

Plural marriage was a central religious doctrine for Joseph Smith’s church, and it remained in force under Brigham Young. The federal government’s campaign against it did not begin with a single successful intervention. The 1857 Utah War was intended in part to dismantle Young’s government and eradicate polygamy, but it neither removed him from power nor ended the practice. The failure of that campaign left the dispute unresolved and helped set the stage for a succession of judicial and legislative challenges.

The pressure culminated in the Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887, which disincorporated the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and transferred to the federal government church property valued above $50,000. Faced with these measures, church leaders ultimately renounced plural marriage. Their public position in 1890, however, did not immediately end the practice: leaders quietly sent groups to establish polygamous colonies in Mexico and Canada, and some senior authorities continued to take plural wives and perform marriages secretly into the twentieth century.

The later policy change was more extensive than a public declaration. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints moved toward accommodation with American political institutions, rejected plural marriage, and began urging government agencies to prosecute those who practiced it. In the book’s account, this break with the old doctrine helped the church gain acceptance as a conventional American faith. Mormon Fundamentalists interpret the same change as a capitulation: they regard themselves as preserving a principle the mainstream church abandoned for political survival.

Competing Claims of Legal Authority

The conflict is rooted in competing accounts of who has the right to govern. In the earlier Mormon settlement at Nauvoo, a special charter granted the city unusually broad sovereign powers. Joseph Smith became its political and religious head and commanded the Nauvoo Legion. This example is not itself an anti-polygamy law, but it establishes a recurring context in the book: Mormon leaders sought local authority that could place community governance alongside, and sometimes in tension with, state and federal power.

Brigham Young made the conflict explicit in Utah. He maintained that divine law took precedence when it contradicted the laws of the United States. The Utah Territorial Legislature, dominated by Mormons, expanded the reach of probate courts controlled by Young, shifting authority away from federal courts. Many probate judges were Mormon bishops, and church members formed most of the juries. Federal officials described the resulting system as theocratic rule; church leaders, by contrast, defended their religious and legal order against outside interference. The anti-polygamy laws therefore operated amid a wider contest over which courts and authorities could define and enforce legitimate conduct.

A related distrust of state power appears in Dan Lafferty’s arguments to his brothers. He used scripture to challenge government requirements including licenses, taxes, and Social Security numbers, treating them as improper claims of control over individual life. His objections were broader than plural marriage, but they show how resistance to government authority could become part of a religious-political outlook. The book places such convictions beside the historical dispute over whether religious obligation could override civil law.

Religious Marriages and State Recognition

In Utah and Arizona, plural marriage is illegal. In Colorado City, men commonly avoid prosecution by legally marrying only their first wife. Later wives are recognized as spiritually married within the community but remain unmarried in the eyes of the state. The distinction leaves religious status and civil status out of alignment: a family may treat its relationships as marriages even when public institutions do not.

That arrangement also has a material consequence. Because subsequent wives are legally single mothers, large households can qualify for welfare and other public assistance. The book notes the contrast between this reliance on government support and the community’s view of the governments of Arizona, Utah, and the United States as hostile forces. The legal boundary thus shapes not only the formal status of relationships but also how families interact with public benefits.

Religious authorities could claim extensive power within the family even where the state did not recognize every marriage. Under United Effort Plan doctrine, wives and children were treated as belonging to the priesthood rather than to a husband or parent. When DeLoy Bateman left the community’s religious order, Rulon Jeffs sent someone to claim DeLoy’s wives and children for another man. Both wives refused to leave, and most of the children also became apostates. The episode shows a parallel system of authority over family relationships: state law determined which marriages counted legally, while priesthood authority claimed power over spouses and children within the community.

Prosecution, Testimony, and Uneven Enforcement

The difficulty of enforcing the prohibition becomes especially clear in Colorado City, where police officers were expected to uphold laws that the community’s leadership opposed. The town’s polygamous police chief defended the practice as a private religious matter. That claim was tested when Ruth Stubbs left Colorado City with her children and publicly alleged that her husband, Rodney Holm, had abused her and that polygamy itself was harmful.

Ruth had left school after the sixth grade. At sixteen, she was told by Rulon Jeffs and Warren Jeffs that she would marry Holm, a police officer twice her age; she had wanted to marry someone closer to her own age. She left him at nineteen, pregnant with a third child. The account makes the law’s stakes concrete: the issue was not only whether the state should recognize a plural marriage, but whether religious direction and community expectations could leave a young woman with meaningful control over her own marriage.

In October 2002, Utah’s attorney general charged Holm with felony bigamy and three counts of unlawful sex. The prosecution then encountered a major obstacle. Ruth disappeared after submitting a signed handwritten note saying she did not want Holm jailed, and she refused to testify against him. Without her testimony, the case was weakened. Her disappearance illustrates how difficult prosecution could become when a case depended on testimony from someone whose family and religious community remained closely connected to the accused and to the local authorities.

Significance

Across these examples, Laws Against Plural Marriage have consequences that reach beyond the statute books. Federal penalties helped change the public policy of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but they did not eliminate religious plural marriage. In fundamentalist communities, state recognition remained limited while religious authorities continued to assign marriages and assert control over family life. Prosecutions, in turn, depended on local enforcement and on witnesses willing and able to participate.

The book also shows why the conflict resists a simple division between religious liberty and law enforcement. Fundamentalists describe prosecution as interference with protected belief, while accounts such as Ruth Stubbs’s foreground the individual consequences of marriages directed by religious authorities. The law becomes the arena in which these claims meet: a public rule against plural marriage, a religious order that continues to sanction it, and people whose legal status and choices are shaped by both.