Plural marriage

Plural marriage is the religious principle that marriage may unite one man with multiple wives, and in the history recounted here it is much more than a contested family arrangement: it becomes a measure of prophetic authority, fidelity to scripture, and resistance to government power. Joseph Smith’s revelation on the subject was canonized as Section 132 of The Doctrine and Covenants. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints later renounced the practice under federal pressure, but Mormon Fundamentalists continued to treat it as a sacred obligation. Its survival as scripture, even after official abandonment, kept the dispute open.

Doctrine and prophetic authority

The practice belonged to the earliest history of Mormonism, not merely to the later fundamentalist communities that maintained it. Joseph Smith took plural wives during the 1830s in Ohio and Missouri and married more frequently in Nauvoo in the early 1840s. The book describes him concealing those marriages from non-Mormons and from most of his own followers. In 1832, he told an inner circle that he had asked God about the principle and had been told it was true, though the time had not yet come for its practice to be acknowledged publicly. The distinction between practice and public disclosure was central: the doctrine existed before the institution openly admitted it.

On July 12, 1843, Joseph Smith formally codified the commandment in a revelation that presented plural marriage as sacred and consequential for salvation. Section 132 taught that a man needed at least three wives to attain the fullness of exaltation, and warned that those to whom the law had been revealed must obey it. The text thus made marriage a matter of covenant and religious duty, not simply personal preference. It also gave later adherents a canonical basis for arguing that the practice could not be discarded without spiritual cost.

The revelation was kept secret and was not acknowledged until 1852, eight years after Joseph Smith’s death. The sacred principle was shared more openly with ordinary members during the 1846 departure from Nauvoo: at Sugar Creek, Iowa, nine miles beyond the Mississippi River, leaders disclosed it to the emigrants gathered in a snowbound camp. Brigham Young had made an earlier public admission before the Utah Territorial Legislature on February 4, 1851. On August 29, 1852, at an assembly in Salt Lake City, he announced Joseph Smith’s revelation on celestial marriage to a wider audience. By 1855, the practice was being openly urged among the faithful, with warnings that rejecting it brought damnation. Although plural marriage was practiced by a minority, it had become an ideal many in Deseret were expected to respect or aspire to.

Law, concealment, and official abandonment

The religious claim that God’s law took precedence over human law shaped the conflict with the United States. Brigham Young’s administration organized a legal system in Deseret designed to favor the religious principle when it collided with federal authority. Because Utah remained a territory, federal courts were supposed to hold legal power. The Mormon-dominated Utah Territorial Legislature expanded local probate courts, which Brigham controlled; their judges were often Mormon bishops, and their juries were largely made up of church members who followed instructions from church leaders. This arrangement made the conflict more than a question of belief: competing authorities claimed the power to govern conduct and determine which law prevailed.

Federal pressure eventually changed official policy. After a sequence of judicial and legislative challenges, the Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887 disincorporated the Church and transferred to the federal government property worth more than $50,000. In 1890, Church leaders publicly claimed to have relinquished plural marriage. At the same time, they quietly sent Mormons to establish polygamous colonies in Mexico and Canada, and some senior Church authorities continued to marry plural wives and perform plural marriages well into the twentieth century. The difference between public renunciation and continued private practice complicated any claim that the doctrine had simply vanished.

The disagreement persisted because the 1890 declaration did not remove Section 132 from Mormon scripture. Dedicated Saints argued that Wilford Woodruff’s Manifesto had suspended practice only under exceptional circumstances, rather than revoked Joseph Smith’s revelation. In their reading, the text remained authoritative even when institutional policy no longer permitted its observance. The same canonical continuity that had once made plural marriage a commandment therefore supplied later dissenters with grounds to reject the Church’s settlement.

Fundamentalist practice and competing claims

Mormon Fundamentalists regard the Church’s abandonment of plural marriage as a capitulation to the United States and a betrayal of one of the religion’s central doctrines. They present themselves as guardians of the original faith, while describing the modern Church as having gone astray. Their appeals frequently center on Section 132. They also invoke Section 85 of The Doctrine and Covenants, which promises that a one mighty and strong figure will come to set the house of God in order. Many fundamentalists believe that such a figure is already among them and will lead the Church back to the right path, restoring Joseph Smith’s teaching.

This claim to religious continuity is rooted in shared history as well as disagreement. Mormons and Mormon Fundamentalists recognize the same holy texts and sacred past, and both regard Joseph Smith as a prophet central to God’s plan. Both understand themselves as God’s chosen people. The dispute is consequently not over whether Joseph Smith mattered, but over what fidelity to his teachings requires. For fundamentalists, abandoning plural marriage for acceptance in mainstream America sacrificed a divine obligation; for the contemporary Church, the public renunciation marks a different institutional course.

In Colorado City, Arizona, the principle is embedded in community life and in a system of religious authority. Most residents are Mormon Fundamentalists, living there in part to practice plural marriage without interference from government officials or the Church. Under Rulon Jeffs, the community’s marriages were arranged through religious authority: he had an estimated seventy-five wives and at least sixty-five children, and his preaching emphasized submission and obedience. A man would typically legally marry only his first wife because polygamy was illegal in Utah and Arizona; additional wives were spiritually married by Rulon Jeffs but remained unmarried in the eyes of the state. This arrangement also enabled large families to qualify for public assistance. The community’s leaders could regard government as hostile while the community received more than $6 million annually in public funds.

The principle could also leave family relationships subject to the priesthood’s claim of authority. Under United Effort Plan dogma, wives and children were treated as belonging to the priesthood rather than exclusively to husbands or parents. When DeLoy Bateman missed a weekly priesthood meeting, Rulon Jeffs sent someone to his home within twenty-four hours to take away his wives and children, decreeing that they should be assigned to another man. The episode shows how a doctrine defended as a religious duty could operate alongside a broader claim over marriage, parenthood, and family membership.

Kinship, consequences, and persistence

The family arrangements described in Bountiful, British Columbia, illustrate how plural marriage could produce overlapping relationships that conventional terms do not neatly resolve. At fourteen, Debbie felt impressed by the Lord to marry Ray Blackmore, a community leader. Prophet LeRoy Johnson approved the match, and the following year married her to the ailing fifty-seven-year-old Blackmore. As his sixth wife, Debbie became stepmother to his thirty-one children, most older than she was. Because Blackmore was also the father of Debbie’s stepmother, the marriage made Debbie her stepmother’s stepmother, and thus her own step-grandmother.

Another of Blackmore’s wives, Alaire, had been adopted by him at birth. At eighteen she married her adoptive father, becoming both Debbie’s cowife and stepdaughter. After Blackmore died, Alaire was married to Debbie’s father; when Winston later assumed power, she was taken from Debbie’s father and married to Winston, her adoptive brother. These relationships are presented not as exceptions easily separated from the principle, but as examples of the complicated kinship patterns that polygamist communities could normalize.

The doctrine’s future remains a point of argument rather than a resolved return to practice. One prediction in the book holds that the Church might one day have enough political and financial power to sanction polygamy again, on the grounds that Joseph Smith’s complete vision cannot otherwise be fulfilled. The countervailing assessment is that the Church has gained too much from abandoning the practice to restore it deliberately, and has moved toward the norms of mainstream America. Yet fundamentalist commitment also persists without universal practice: David and Pamela Coronado believe in plural marriage, though they had considered it with other women and had not entered into such marriages. The enduring tension lies between a principle that remains in scripture, an institution that officially abandoned it, and believers who continue to regard that abandonment as a failure of religious fidelity.