Polygamy & Polyandry

Joseph Smith’s Polygamy — Context and Evidence

The CES Letter presents plural marriage as a scandal the Church buried and was finally forced to confess. The documentary record — most of it published long before Jeremy Runnells wrote — tells a harder, more honest, and far less tidy story.

The Fork Jeremy Chose

On this issue two roads were open to any careful writer, and both were available to Jeremy in 2013. The simplistic path treats a list — thirty-some wives, some with living husbands, one only fourteen, one sealing before a certain temple date — as a self-evident indictment that needs no historical reconstruction. On this reading the numbers are the argument. Count them, place them next to a single verse of Doctrine and Covenants 132, and let the modern reader’s revulsion do the rest. It also requires the claim that all of this was hidden until the Church “admitted” it in the 2014 Gospel Topics essays.

The nuanced, historically grounded path asks what these sealings actually were, in a period when the sealing theology was still unfolding and much of the record was never written down. It distinguishes eternity-only sealings from marriages, and 1840s covenant categories from a modern civil-marriage template. And it notices that the facts Jeremy calls a revelation were sitting in Andrew Jenson’s 1887 published list, in the sworn 1892 Temple Lot testimony, in Fawn Brodie (1945), in Todd Compton’s In Sacred Loneliness (1997), and in Richard Bushman’s Rough Stone Rolling (2005) — every one of them in print before the CES Letter existed. Jeremy read Compton and Bushman; their books are in his footnotes. He knew the nuanced reconstruction existed — and presented the list instead. That is the fork.

“Thirty-Four Wives, Hidden Until 2014”

The CES Letter’s Argument

Joseph Smith was married to at least 34 women — a fact the Church kept quiet and only acknowledged when it published its 2014 Gospel Topics essays.

Take the number first: roughly 30 to 40 sealings is the scholarly range, and it is not in dispute among faithful historians. Brian Hales identifies about 35; Compton listed 33. The figure is not a hostile discovery — it is the settled work of Latter-day Saint scholarship. So this page does not quarrel with the count.

The word doing the real work in Jeremy’s sentence is admits. It implies the Church concealed the facts until 2014 forced them out. That is the claim that collapses on contact with the record. Andrew Jenson published a list of Joseph’s plural wives in the widely circulated Latter-day Saint Historical Record in 1887. Testimony naming the wives was entered under oath in the 1892 Temple Lot case. B. H. Roberts, an official Church historian, wrote about it in the early twentieth century. The number and the difficult particulars were in Brodie (1945), Bachman (1975), and Compton (1997) — the last two by faithful Latter-day Saint scholars. The 2014 Gospel Topics essay on plural marriage in Kirtland and Nauvoo did not break this story; it gathered a century of already-public scholarship into one place and put the Church’s name on it.

Notice the timing Jeremy needs and does not have. His letter first circulated in the spring of 2013; the essay he cites appeared in October 2014, over a year later. The disclosure argument therefore cannot rest on the essays at all — it must rest on the pre-2013 published record, which shows an eighty-year trail of open scholarship, not a vault. A church running a cover-up does not print the wives’ names in a widely circulated Latter-day Saint Historical Record in 1887. The fuller account is on Polygamy — What Actually Happened.

“Marriages That Violated D&C 132”

The CES Letter’s Argument

Joseph married roughly 11 women who already had living husbands — polyandry — in tension with section 132’s ‘virgin’ language, and without the first-wife consent the revelation requires.

This is the strongest form of the objection, so let us state it at full strength. Section 132 speaks of a man espousing “a virgin” with the first wife’s consent (verses 61–63). Yet somewhere between 8 and 14 of Joseph’s sealings were to women with living, legal husbands, and the record of Emma’s consent is genuinely complicated and contested. On the surface the practice and the revelation do not obviously line up. Jeremy stops there. The honest reading does not.

First, the “virgin” clause of verse 61 governs one procedure — how a man takes an additional wife in mortality. It is not a global filter voiding every other kind of sealing. The revelation as a whole concerns the sealing power binding families across eternity, and it grounds itself in Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who “have entered into their exaltation . . . because they did none other things than that which they were commanded” (D&C 132:37). Reading verse 61 as the whole law is exactly the flattening the simplistic path requires.

Second, the polyandry is not what the modern word implies — and here an honest page has to state the disagreement plainly rather than paper over it. The two historians in Jeremy’s own footnotes read Joseph’s plural marriages, taken as a whole, as generally including conjugal relations: Bushman notes that nothing in the record indicates sexual relations were uniformly left out, and Compton concluded there was no decisive evidence that a given sealing was purely ceremonial. That is a fair account of one side, and it should be granted. But the question the polyandry objection actually turns on is narrower: not whether Joseph’s marriages in general were conjugal, but whether the sealings to women who already had living husbands were. On that specific subset the evidence points the other way. Brian Hales’s three-volume study — the most exhaustive documentary treatment of these particular cases — finds no persuasive evidence of sexual relations in the sealings to already-married women, and the DNA testing of the candidate children has excluded every tested descendant from Joseph’s line (Compton’s one listed “possible” child, Josephine Lyon, was matched to her legal father Windsor Lyon, not to Joseph). The reasonable reading of the already-married sealings, then — even granting Compton and Bushman their broader point about the marriages to single women — is that they were eternity-only: covenant links for the world to come. That is a distinction the flat word “polyandry” is built to erase. The full reconstruction — who these women were, why the youngest and the already-married were sealed, and what the sources do and do not show — is laid out on Polyandry and the Youngest Wives.

Third, on first-wife consent: the revelation anticipates the very difficulty Jeremy raises. It provides the “law of Sarah,” and states that when the first wife will not administer the law, the Lord “will destroy her . . . and he is exempt from the law of Sarah” (D&C 132:64–65). Whatever one makes of that provision, it means the text itself contemplates imperfect and contested consent. A law that legislates for its own hard cases is not a law being “violated” every time a hard case appears — it is a law operating in the human circumstances it was written for.

There is a deeper flaw in the logic itself. Even where a particular sealing looks hard to reconcile at this distance, the argument “this case is difficult, therefore the revelation was never real” proves far too much. Joseph was administering a newly restored principle in real time, with the sealing theology still unfolding and much of the ordinary record-keeping of a settled institution not yet in place. Scripture is candid that God works through mortal servants laboring under partial light — “now we see through a glass, darkly” (1 Corinthians 13:12) — and that the treasure of the gospel is carried in “earthen vessels” (2 Corinthians 4:7). That a prophet administers an emerging commandment amid incomplete revelation and difficult human circumstance is evidence about how restoration actually unfolds, not about whether the revelation was real.

“It Predated Any Sealing Authority” — Fanny Alger

The CES Letter’s Argument

The Fanny Alger relationship (c. 1833) came before the sealing authority was restored, making it “adultery” without divine sanction.

The argument depends on a date the sources will not pin down. The Elijah appearance in the Kirtland Temple — the event Latter-day Saints associate with the restoration of the sealing keys — is dated April 3, 1836 (D&C 110). The Fanny Alger relationship is variously placed from 1833 to 1836; the earliest datings are inferences, not documented events. Jeremy selects the earliest possible date to manufacture the gap. Choose the timing the way a historian would — by weighing the conflicting late reminiscences rather than picking the most damaging one — and the neat “before/after” boundary dissolves.

More fundamentally, the objection assumes authority arrived in a single instant, like a light switch. The Restoration did not work that way. Priesthood, keys, and sealing understanding came in stages — John the Baptist, then Peter, James, and John, then the successive keys at Kirtland — and a prophet may act under an authority he has begun to receive but not yet fully articulated. That is the theology of The Sealing Power itself. Whether the Alger sealing is best read as an early plural marriage under emerging authority, and why Oliver Cowdery’s later bitterness reads as it does, is treated in Joseph Smith and Fanny Alger.

The Youngest Wife, Handled Honestly

The hardest single fact, and the one a doubting Latter-day Saint deserves treated squarely, is Helen Mar Kimball, sealed to Joseph at fourteen. It should not be minimized, and the simplistic path is not wrong to feel its weight — only wrong about what the sources show. The sealing appears to have been dynastic, a covenant linking the Kimball and Smith families, and there is no credible evidence of a conjugal relationship. The strongest form of the objection has to be stated too: Helen later recalled that she had at first supposed the sealing would be “but a ceremony” linking her family to the prophet’s, and that she came to feel the weight of a step she had not fully grasped as a girl. That candor is part of the record and should not be waved away — but it cuts against the caricature rather than for it, because Helen made those statements while, as an adult who had come to understand the covenant, she wrote repeatedly and publicly in defense of plural marriage and of Joseph. Marriage at that age, while jarring to modern sensibilities, was within the legal and cultural range of the 1840s. None of this makes it comfortable; all of it makes the honest reconstruction different from the one-line accusation. The documentation is set out on Polyandry and the Youngest Wives.

Why the Secrecy — and the Public Denials

The CES Letter reads Joseph’s guardedness — and his carefully worded public denials — as proof of bad faith. The Nauvoo context reads differently. Governor Boggs had issued Missouri’s Extermination Order in October 1838; Joseph had sat months in Liberty Jail; the Saints had been driven from a state by sanctioned violence. In Illinois plural marriage was illegal, and open confirmation would have meant prosecution, mob action, and the destruction of Nauvoo. Guarding a sacred and dangerous practice under those conditions is not the same act as fraud. How the public statements were framed — and why they are narrower than they first appear — is examined on Joseph Smith’s Denials and, more fully, on Why Joseph Smith Denied Plural Marriage Publicly.

The Assumption Underneath It All

Every version of this objection rests on an unstated premise: that plural marriage is self-evidently immoral, so its mere presence disqualifies. That is a modern Western assumption, not a biblical one. Abraham, Jacob, David, and Solomon practiced it; the Law of Moses regulated rather than forbade it (Deuteronomy 21:15–17). In Latter-day Saint theology the practice is licit only when commanded and otherwise forbidden — exactly what the Book of Mormon states: “For if I will . . . raise up seed unto me, I will command my people; otherwise they shall hearken unto these things” (Jacob 2:30). Once that premise is examined instead of assumed, the real question is not whether plural marriage can be a divine command but whether Joseph’s calling was genuine — which the wife-list cannot answer. The doctrinal frame is developed on Polygamy.

Verdict

Resolved. The “hidden until 2014” charge fails on the calendar and the record: the wife-list was public in 1887, sworn in 1892, and in mainstream print for decades before the CES Letter. The “violations” charge misreads one procedural clause as the whole law and reads the sealings to already-married women as modern conjugal “polyandry” when the documentary and DNA evidence on those specific cases points to eternity-only bonds. The “before authority” charge depends on choosing the earliest disputed date and treating a staged restoration as an instant one. And the whole argument silently assumes what the Bible does not grant — that plural marriage is inherently disqualifying. At each fork Jeremy took the flatter reading when a better-documented one sat in his own footnotes.

Genuinely, and only mildly, open. Precise dates for a few early sealings remain uncertain, and reasonable historians still weigh the reminiscent sources differently. The interior experience of the women, and of Emma, is beyond full recovery. These are the ordinary open edges of nineteenth-century history — the kind every serious biography carries — not a concealed scandal. What is not open is the choice of road: the honest, nuanced reconstruction was available in 2013, and it is the one the evidence rewards.

Further Study