Plural marriage doctrine

Plural marriage doctrine made marriage more than a private relationship: it became a measure of obedience to religious authority and a fault line between divine command and civil law. Its history in the book moves from secrecy to public proclamation, from institutional retreat to renewed fundamentalist commitment, while its practical consequences reach into household status, children’s lives, and competing claims to jurisdiction.

Origins and Scriptural Authority

Joseph Smith’s 1843 revelation on plural marriage supplied the doctrine’s central scriptural warrant. During the 1846 exodus from Nauvoo, the practice was disclosed to ordinary emigrants at the snowbound camp at Sugar Creek, Iowa; previously, only a small number among the departing Saints knew that their leaders were practicing it. Brigham Young and his counselors nevertheless continued to deny the practice publicly, including after the community settled in the Great Salt Lake Valley.

The doctrine’s authority was subsequently made explicit. On February 4, 1851, as governor of Utah Territory, Brigham publicly acknowledged that he had multiple wives. On August 29, 1852, at a churchwide assembly in Salt Lake City, he announced the practice to a wider audience and presented it as a teaching that would eventually be accepted beyond the community. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints did not require every member to enter a plural marriage, but by the mid-1850s the ideal was widely promoted among Utah Saints, and Brigham warned that rejecting it carried spiritual consequences.

Public Practice and Political Conflict

Public disclosure brought a sharp contrast between the community’s internal acceptance and its reception elsewhere. Converts in France and England reacted with dismay, and the flow of European converts to Utah slowed; one missionary reported that 1,776 British Saints left the church in the six months after the 1852 announcement. Within Utah, meanwhile, the doctrine became part of a broader claim that religious obligations should not yield to the laws of non-Mormon governments.

Brigham defended plural marriage as a protected religious practice and argued that divine law took precedence over human law. Utah remained a territory, where federal courts were supposed to hold legal authority, but the Mormon-dominated territorial legislature expanded the jurisdiction of local probate courts controlled by Brigham. Many probate judges were Mormon bishops, and their juries were largely composed of church members. The resulting system placed religious authority and territorial justice in close alignment, allowing church leaders to shape how conflicts between the two legal orders were handled.

That contest also appeared at the level of individual belief. Dan Lafferty’s self-directed study led him to regard government demands such as licensing and taxation as illegitimate intrusions. He came to believe that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had abandoned its proper course when it ended official plural marriage under pressure from the federal government. His position reflects how the doctrine could function not only as a rule about marriage but also as a standard for judging institutional legitimacy and the reach of civil authority.

Household Structure and Consequences

In communities practicing plural marriage, spiritual marriage and civil status did not necessarily coincide. Because polygamy was illegal in Utah and Arizona, men commonly entered a legal marriage with only one wife; additional wives were spiritually married but remained unmarried in the eyes of the state. The book notes that this arrangement could also make large families eligible for public assistance. Colorado City’s polygamous community received substantial government support even as its members regarded state and federal governments as hostile to their religious order.

The doctrine’s family structures could generate relationships difficult to describe through ordinary kinship terms. Debbie Palmer was fourteen when she felt called to marry Ray Blackmore, then a community leader. A year later, Prophet LeRoy Johnson married her to Blackmore, who was fifty-seven and already had five wives and thirty-one children. Debbie became a stepmother to children older than herself; because Blackmore was also the father of her stepmother, she became her stepmother’s stepmother as well. Another of Blackmore’s wives, Alaire, had been adopted by him at birth. She later became Debbie’s cowife and stepdaughter, and after Blackmore’s death was successively married to Debbie’s father and to Winston Blackmore, her adoptive brother. These cases show how plural marriage could reorder kinship as well as enlarge a household.

Among the FLDS, the scale of a leader’s household could also embody his authority. Rulon Jeffs was estimated to have married about seventy-five women and fathered at least sixty-five children. The account states that several of his wives married him when they were fourteen or fifteen, while he was in his eighties. Such examples situate the doctrine within a system in which religious leaders had far-reaching influence over marriage and family arrangements.

Disavowal, Continuity, and Belonging

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ 1890 Manifesto did not end plural marriage immediately. For the following two decades, senior leaders privately encouraged its continuation, and church leaders secretly performed plural marriages. In 1910, the Salt Lake Tribune published the names of about two hundred Saints who had taken plural wives after the Manifesto, including six members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. The disclosure provoked anger among non-Mormons and prominent Mormons alike; by the 1920s, most Saints and their leaders opposed the practice and supported prosecutions for cohabitation.

Mormon Fundamentalists rejected that institutional settlement. They maintained that Section 132 of the Doctrine and Covenants remained scripture and that the Manifesto suspended plural marriage under temporary circumstances rather than revoking the revelation. They also drew inspiration from a revelation attributed to John Taylor in 1886, which stated that the commandment remained in force unless revoked by God or his authority. In this reading, continuing the practice was fidelity to an enduring commandment; abandoning it was a departure from the faith’s most sacred principles.

The doctrine therefore marked a shifting boundary between faithful member, institutional dissenter, and religious outsider. In the fundamentalist communities described in the book, leaving the group could bring a direct struggle over family belonging: under United Effort Plan doctrine, wives and children were treated as belonging to the priesthood and could be reassigned. When DeLoy Bateman left the community’s religious order, both of his wives refused to leave with him, despite the order to transfer them to another man. Their decision made visible a tension within the doctrine’s lived consequences: religious authority claimed power over family ties, but individual spouses could still refuse its demands. The enduring dispute is thus not simply whether plural marriage is permitted, but who has the authority to define the command, enforce it, or reject it.