Mormon Church Policy of Ending Plural Marriage

The Mormon Church Policy of Ending Plural Marriage is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ decision to cease practicing plural marriage, a change Dan Lafferty locates around 1890. The book presents the policy not as the end of plural marriage among all Mormon-derived communities, but as a contested institutional break: for the mainstream church it was a departure from an earlier practice, while fundamentalists treated that departure as evidence that the church had yielded to secular power.

The institutional break

Dan Lafferty’s account makes the year 1890 a dividing line. Through his study of historical Mormon documents, he concluded that the church had gone astray when Wilford Woodruff, then its president and prophet, was pressured by the government in Washington, D.C., to abandon plural marriage. Dan therefore regarded the modern church not as a faithful continuation of its founding tradition but as an elaborate fraud. This is his interpretation of the change, rather than a neutral account of the policy’s causes.

The policy’s significance in the book depends on the earlier place of plural marriage in Mormon teaching. Joseph Smith and Brigham Young had taught doctrines that Dan understood as divine commandments, and he treated the writings associated with early Mormonism as binding scripture. The institutional abandonment of plural marriage thus became, for him, a test of whether religious authority remained answerable to revelation or had submitted to outside demands.

Competing claims to authority

The disagreement is part of a wider conflict over which rules govern religious life. Brigham Young held that God’s law took precedence over human law, particularly when the two clashed over plural marriage. In Deseret, Mormon leaders established a legal system designed to ensure that divine law would prevail in such conflicts. The Utah Territorial Legislature expanded the authority of probate courts controlled by Brigham; many judges were Mormon bishops, and church influence shaped the juries and their decisions. Federal officials saw this arrangement as an encroachment on federal jurisdiction and described the territory as a theocratic dictatorship.

That history gives the cessation policy a double meaning. It was a change in church practice, but it also exposed the unresolved question of whether a religious community could claim authority to maintain a practice prohibited by civil law. The book sets this historical conflict beside later fundamentalist claims that government has no right to intervene in private religious conduct. Sam Roundy, the polygamous police chief of Colorado City, defended the community’s right to practice its religion; the account also emphasizes that plural marriage was a crime in every U.S. state and in Canada. The competing claims were not merely theological: they concerned who could make rules and enforce them.

Fundamentalist continuation

For Dan, the church’s retreat from plural marriage did not invalidate the practice; it showed that the church had abandoned it. Other fundamentalists likewise continued to regard plural marriage as a religious principle, even though it was illegal in Utah and Arizona. Their arrangements distinguished civil marriage from religious marriage: typically a man legally married only his first wife, while additional wives were spiritually married and remained unmarried in the eyes of the state. That structure also enabled large families to qualify for public assistance.

The continuing practice appears in the book through the household of Rulon Jeffs, an FLDS prophet who had an estimated seventy-five wives and at least sixty-five children. His authority over marriage extended beyond private consent: the narrative describes wives and children as subject to priesthood claims, and says that after DeLoy Bateman stopped attending priesthood meetings, Rulon sent someone to take DeLoy’s wives and children and assign them to another man. The example is not a continuation of the mainstream church’s policy; it shows how a fundamentalist community organized family life under a different religious authority.

Disputed legacy

The policy is consequently a boundary between the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and Mormon fundamentalism, but not a clean division between belief and unbelief. Fundamentalists invoked the same early leaders whose authority the mainstream church also inherited, while accusing it of discarding their teachings. In a separate revelation, Onias condemned contemporary church leaders for enforcing the government’s criminalization of plural marriage, treating that enforcement as a betrayal of doctrines revealed to Joseph Smith. His denunciation also opposed the church’s 1978 decision to admit Black men to the priesthood, reflecting the broader range of claims through which he judged the church to have departed from its past.

The policy’s narrative force lies in what it leaves unsettled. Ending plural marriage within the mainstream church did not reconcile religious command with civil law, nor did it end plural marriage in fundamentalist communities. Instead, it sharpened the question at the center of the book’s account: when religious and legal authorities prescribe incompatible rules, which authority will believers recognize, and what costs will families and communities bear for that choice?