The Mormon Doctrine of Plural Marriage

The Mormon Doctrine of Plural Marriage is the religious teaching that a man may be married to more than one woman under divine authority. In the account presented here, it is at once a doctrine, a contested claim to revelation, and a system that redistributed authority within households. Joseph Smith developed and practiced the doctrine privately before recording its canonical justification in 1843; the revelation’s restrictions on women and its conflict with civil law helped make plural marriage one of the most consequential and divisive issues in Mormon history.

Origins and private practice

Joseph Smith’s later teachings about plural marriage emerged within a church that was changing rapidly. By the mid-1840s, the revelations associated with Joseph Smith had substantially altered the religion first organized in Palmyra. The 1843 revelation on plural marriage, later canonized as Section 132 of The Doctrine and Covenants, gave formal scriptural standing to what it called a new and everlasting covenant. Its implications extended well beyond private marriage: the book describes the revelation as a force that nearly divided the church, contributed to the crisis surrounding Joseph Smith’s authority, and continued to reverberate in American society.

The doctrine was not made public all at once. The book recounts Joseph Smith’s private plural marriages beginning in the 1830s, first in Ohio and Missouri and later with greater frequency in Nauvoo. He concealed these relationships from non-Mormons and from most members of his own church, while telling a small inner circle that plural marriage was a true principle whose time for practice had not yet arrived. The account interprets this distinction as a delay in public disclosure rather than a delay in private practice.

The 1842 Nauvoo publication of The Peace Maker formed part of this gradual approach. The pamphlet argued for plural marriage and appeared through the church printing office, with Joseph Smith named on its title page. Its authorship remains disputed: the book says that most scholars attribute it to Udney Hay Jacob, a real person, rather than to Joseph Smith. It also reports that scholars generally consider Joseph Smith responsible for its conception and publication, or at least for endorsing it. According to the account attributed to John D. Lee, the pamphlet was intended to test public reaction and prepare church members for the doctrine. Instead, it provoked an uproar, after which Joseph Smith publicly disavowed knowledge of its publication and denounced polygamy, despite his existing secret practice.

The revelation and its unequal terms

Joseph Smith formally recorded the revelation on July 12, 1843. The circumstances described in the book make its domestic purpose central to its meaning. Emma Smith opposed her husband’s plural marriages, and Joseph Smith’s brother Hyrum Smith believed that a written revelation might persuade her to accept them. Hyrum Smith delivered the resulting ten-page document to Emma Smith, but she rejected it. The text repeatedly addressed her directly, requiring her to remain with Joseph Smith and warning of divine punishment if she did not obey. Its language thus placed a specific marital conflict inside a claim of universal divine command.

The revelation’s central permission was asymmetrical. It justified a man who already had a wife taking additional virgins as wives, declaring that the new wives were given to him and that he did not thereby commit adultery. It also treated those women as belonging to the husband and assigned their marriages a purpose of multiplying and replenishing the earth. The corresponding restriction fell on the women: a wife who had been espoused under the law and then joined with another man was condemned. The book’s account therefore presents the revelation not simply as approval of multiple marriages, but as a rule that gave men expanded marital authority while imposing severe limits on women’s choices.

The text situates this teaching among other innovations associated with Nauvoo. Joseph Smith also introduced vicarious baptism for the dead and the temple endowment ceremony, and taught that God had once been a man and that men could become gods. The plural-marriage revelation was distinctive in that it remained secret after its recording and was not acknowledged until 1852, eight years after Joseph Smith’s death. That interval between private revelation and public announcement helps explain why the doctrine could function both as a hidden practice and as a later public test of religious loyalty.

The book also connects the doctrine to the changing household practices of Joseph Smith himself. From 1840 to 1844, it says, he married about forty women, including teenagers. Helen Mar Kimball and Lucy Walker were among the young women whose marriages the account describes as having been presented to them as commands from God. These examples illustrate how the language of revelation could shape the terms on which a marriage was proposed, and how religious authority could restrict the practical space for refusal. The account does not treat those marriages as isolated episodes: they form part of the concealed practice that preceded the church’s public acknowledgment of plural marriage.

Family, authority, and community practice

Plural marriage also carried consequences beyond the relationship between a husband and his wives. In fundamentalist communities described in the book, senior religious leaders could exercise authority over marriage and family membership. Rulon Jeffs, the leader of the Colorado City community, had an estimated seventy-five wives and at least sixty-five children; some of his wives were married to him as teenagers while he was in his eighties. His sermons emphasized submission and obedience. This example shows how the doctrine could exist within a wider system in which the prophet’s religious authority reached into decisions about spouses, children, and household belonging.

The book describes that reach as more than a matter of teaching. In one account, after DeLoy Bateman left the religious community and stopped attending its weekly priesthood meeting, Rulon Jeffs sent someone to claim Bateman’s wives and children for another man. The underlying UEP belief held that wives and children belonged to the priesthood rather than to their husbands or parents, and could be reassigned. Bateman’s wives refused to leave him, and most of their children also left the faith. The episode makes visible a conflict between the doctrine’s institutional enforcement and the decisions of individual family members: the religious leader asserted authority over the household, but the wives’ refusal altered the result.

Other examples in the book show how plural marriage could rearrange kinship across generations. In Bountiful, Debbie Palmer was married as a teenager to Ray Blackmore, who was in his late fifties and already had five wives and thirty-one children. Because Blackmore was also the father of Palmer’s stepmother, the marriage made Palmer her stepmother’s stepmother. The book further recounts the case of Alaire Blackmore, who became a wife of her adoptive father, then a cowife and stepdaughter within Palmer’s household, and later was married to other men in the same extended family network. These relationships are not presented as incidental complications: they show how marriage assignments and family authority could produce overlapping roles that conventional kinship terms could barely describe.

Civil law and competing authority

The doctrine repeatedly brought religious authority into conflict with state law. In Utah and Arizona, plural marriage was illegal. In the Colorado City community, men commonly entered a legal marriage with one wife while treating additional wives as spiritually married under the authority of Rulon Jeffs. The arrangement left those women unmarried in the eyes of the state and, according to the book, also helped large households qualify for public assistance. The community could regard governments as hostile to its religious order while still receiving substantial public funds and services.

An earlier version of this conflict took institutional form in Deseret. Brigham Young argued that civil authorities had no right to interfere with plural marriage and held that God’s law took precedence over human law. The Utah Territorial Legislature, dominated by Mormons, expanded the authority of local probate courts controlled by Brigham Young. Many judges were Mormon bishops, while juries were composed largely of church members who followed instructions from church leaders. The book describes this system as a way to ensure that, when church and federal authority clashed, the local legal order favored religious law. Federal officials objected to the arrangement and characterized it as theocratic rule.

That conflict also shaped the defense of plural marriage as religious liberty. Fundamentalists cited constitutional protections and argued that private household practices were not the government’s concern. The opposing claim was that religious conviction did not remove the obligation to obey laws criminalizing plural marriage. The book emphasizes the tension rather than reducing it to a simple clash between belief and unbelief: plural-marriage communities sought protection from state intervention, while the state’s laws and the experiences of people leaving those communities raised questions about consent, family power, and public responsibility.

Abandonment, revival, and legacy

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints publicly announced plural marriage in 1852, but later moved away from the practice under pressure from the United States government. The 1890 Manifesto marked the church’s official turn from plural marriage. In the book’s account, this transition did not settle the doctrine’s meaning for all members. Mormon fundamentalists understood the retreat as a departure from earlier commandments, while the mainstream church’s abandonment of plural marriage helped it pursue acceptance within American society.

Dan Lafferty’s response illustrates how the doctrine could be recovered through historical texts. In the early 1980s, after finding The Peace Maker in the library of Brigham Young University, he became convinced that Joseph Smith had written it. He adopted plural marriage as a divine principle, though the book notes that his conclusion about authorship was probably mistaken. His reading of the pamphlet and other early Mormon writings led him to regard the modern church as having abandoned true commandments. For him, early religious texts carried an authority that could outweigh later church practice and civil regulation.

The doctrine’s legacy therefore lies not only in whether plural marriage was practiced at a particular time. It also lies in competing claims about who may interpret revelation, whether religious authority can govern family relationships, and how divine law should relate to civil law. The book traces a continuous dispute from Joseph Smith’s secret marriages and the 1843 revelation, through the public announcement and subsequent retreat of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, to fundamentalist communities that continued to treat plural marriage as binding. Across those settings, the doctrine joined theology to household structure and political power, making private marriage a public contest over authority.