Polygamy & Polyandry

Polyandry and the Youngest Wives — Reading the Record Honestly

The CES Letter presents plural sealings to already-married women, and a sealing to a fourteen-year-old, as self-evident proof of moral depravity. There is a harder, more honest reading of the same documents — and it is the one Jeremy declined to make.

This is the most emotionally charged single objection in the entire CES Letter, and it deserves to be met at full strength — not its cartoon version. So let us state Jeremy’s case as forcefully as it can honestly be stated, and then follow the evidence where it actually leads. Readers who want the full timeline of what Joseph practiced and when should begin with our overview page on Joseph Smith’s polygamy — context and evidence.

The Fork Jeremy Chose

Every one of these facts is real. Joseph was sealed to roughly a dozen women who were civilly married to living men. He was sealed to Helen Mar Kimball when she was fourteen and he was thirty-seven. Some later reminiscences describe an angel with a drawn sword and promises of exaltation. None of that is invented, and a faithful answer that pretends otherwise is worthless.

The fork appears at the word “married.” The nineteenth-century record uses a single word — sealed — for two utterly different things: a time-and-eternity marriage (a conjugal union for this life and the next) and an eternity-only sealing (a covenant binding two people in the world to come, with no change whatever to the woman’s mortal marriage, home, or bed). Jeremy took the branch where every sealing collapses into the modern word “married,” then loaded that word with its most sexual, most predatory connotation and let the reader supply the horror.

The other branch — the one taken by the actual specialists in this material, believing and skeptical alike — keeps the two categories distinct and asks, case by case, which kind of sealing the documents describe. Those specialists do not agree on the tally: Todd Compton, in In Sacred Loneliness (1997), reads several of the polyandrous sealings as conjugal, while Brian Hales reads most of them as eternity-only. But every one of them insists on the very distinction Jeremy erased, and every one of them does the case-by-case work he skipped — reading affidavits, separating eternity-only covenants from conjugal marriages, and weighing the women’s own decades of testimony. Jeremy had access to all of it and chose the branch that required none of that work. That is the fork: not truth versus lie, but the flat reading versus the documented one — and the documented one is more mixed, and less lurid, than the flat one needs it to be.

The Claim: Eleven Women Already Married

The CES Letter’s Argument

Joseph Smith was sealed to some eleven women who were already married to living husbands — including Marinda Hyde, whose husband, Apostle Orson Hyde, was away on a mission to dedicate Palestine — which the Letter presents as adulterous polyandry.

The word “polyandry” is doing enormous work in that sentence. In its ordinary meaning it describes a woman living sexually with two husbands at once. Jeremy uses it, then walks away, trusting the reader to picture Joseph bedding other men’s wives behind their backs. But that picture has to be argued, not assumed — and when Brian Hales assembled every surviving document for these women in his three-volume Joseph Smith’s Polygamy (2013), the assumed picture did not survive contact with the sources.

For the great majority of these women the evidence points to eternity-only sealings. This is a category the modern reader has no slot for, so it is easy to erase — which is exactly what the flat reading does. An eternity-only sealing changed nothing in mortality: the woman continued to live with her civil husband, kept his home, bore his children, and shared no conjugal life with Joseph. What it claimed to secure was a bond in the resurrection, grounded in the newly restored sealing power that Latter-day Saints believe knits families together beyond death. You do not have to accept the theology to see that it is not adultery, and not wife-stealing. It is a claim about eternity, not about anyone’s bedroom.

The Marinda Hyde example, which Jeremy chooses precisely because it sounds worst, quietly refutes his own framing. The Letter leans on the detail that Orson Hyde was away dedicating Palestine, but the date of Marinda’s sealing is itself disputed in the sources — some evidence points to April 1842, other evidence to May 1843, after Orson had returned — so the “husband conveniently absent” picture is not even secure. And the deeper point holds either way: if Joseph had wronged Orson Hyde, we would expect the record to show it. Instead Orson Hyde returned from Palestine, remained a devoted Apostle for the rest of his life, embraced plural marriage himself, and left not one word suggesting he believed his wife had been taken from him. A husband robbed does not behave that way. The flat reading has no explanation for Orson Hyde; the eternity-only reading explains him effortlessly.

The Strongest Form of the Objection

Here is where an honest defense has to stop congratulating itself. The eternity-only category answers most cases, but not automatically all of them, and Jeremy’s argument is strongest exactly where he never actually presses it. The forceful version of the polyandry objection has two strands, and neither is “a dozen sealings” recited in bulk. The first is documentary: a few of these women left statements that some historians read as conjugal. Mary Elizabeth Rollins Lightner stated that she was sealed to Joseph for time and eternity and defended that sealing publicly for decades, and Todd Compton reads her case as a conjugal, time-and-eternity plural marriage. Zina Huntington — civilly married to the living Henry Jacobs when she was sealed to Joseph — described her own bond in language that, on Compton’s reading of her later statements, no eternity-only gloss easily absorbs. The second strand is genetic: did any of these unions produce a child? If one did, the eternity-only reading fails for that case, and the sexual charge lands.

Take the documentary strand first, because it is the one an honest defense cannot wave away. For a small number of these women — Lightner among them — the case for a conjugal, time-and-eternity plural marriage is genuinely stronger than for the rest, and careful historians, Compton among them, read those cases that way. This is a live disagreement even among faithful scholars: Brian Hales, by contrast, reads Lightner as an eternity-only sealing and finds no clear evidence of a sexual relationship. The honest reader should note that the specialists divide here rather than pretend a consensus that does not exist. That reading costs the faithful account far less than Jeremy’s argument needs it to. It does not deliver his headline picture of a prophet quietly bedding other men’s wives behind their backs: these women spoke of their sealings not as concealed affairs but as sacred covenants they entered deliberately and defended for decades, and even on the most conjugal reading of every ambiguous case the number falls far short of the wholesale “eleven adulterous unions” the flat reading conjures. Jeremy’s charge was not “a few of these were real plural marriages” — a claim the faithful reading can absorb as inspired plural marriage rather than betrayal — it was depravity across the board, and that is what the record will not sustain.

The genetic strand is where a single case forced the question fully into the open. Sylvia Sessions was civilly married to Windsor Lyon — who had for a time been cut off from the Church — and was also sealed to Joseph. On her deathbed in 1882 she told her daughter Josephine that Josephine was the daughter of the Prophet — a statement that, taken at face value, implies Sylvia herself believed a conjugal relationship with Joseph had existed. For more than a century that testimony stood as the one concrete, potentially decisive piece of evidence for a sexual polyandrous union that bore a child. This is the argument Jeremy should have built his whole section around. He did not — and the reason is instructive.

In 2016 the question stopped being a matter of competing affidavits and became a matter of DNA. A team led by geneticist Ugo Perego reconstructed the relevant autosomal DNA from dozens of living descendants of both families — nearly 600,000 genetic markers. Perego first presented the findings in 2016, and the peer-reviewed result was published in 2019. Josephine Lyon was not descended from Joseph Smith. The genetic signal pointed unambiguously to Windsor Lyon, her mother’s civil husband. What the DNA settles is precise and limited but real: on the single point science can actually adjudicate — whether this particular union produced a child of Joseph’s — the answer is no. Sylvia’s deathbed words tell us what Sylvia believed; the genetics tell us who fathered the child. The one candidate for sexual polyandry that could be tested against hard evidence, rather than argued from affidavits, was excluded.

That does not close every question, and it is important to say exactly what it does and does not do. The DNA excludes Joseph as Josephine’s father; it does not by itself prove that nothing conjugal ever passed between Joseph and Sylvia — Sylvia’s own deathbed words suggest she believed otherwise — and no comparable test exists for the other sealings, several of which remain genuinely ambiguous in the sources. An honest defender says so plainly. What the test does is take the single strongest documentary claim of a polyandrous union bearing a child of the Prophet’s and knock its foundation out: the one case built around an actual child turns out not to be Joseph’s child at all. That is less than a blanket vindication and a great deal more than nothing — and it is precisely the test Jeremy left unexplored. For the fuller treatment of consent and agency in these marriages, see the analysis of whether consent was real.

The Claim: Helen Mar Kimball Was 14

The CES Letter’s Argument

Joseph Smith, at thirty-seven, married fourteen-year-old Helen Mar Kimball — an age gap the Letter presents as self-evidently predatory.

This is the sentence engineered to end the conversation, and it works — a modern reader hears “fourteen” and “thirty-seven” and needs nothing further. Which is precisely why the surrounding facts, every one of them omitted, matter so much. The number is true. The story the number is meant to tell is not the story the record tells.

The sealing was for eternity only. Helen herself is our best witness, and she is unambiguous: the ordinance bound her to Joseph in the world to come. She did not live with him and there is no evidence of a conjugal relationship. She went on to marry Horace Whitney, with whom she built a family and shared the rest of her life. Jeremy’s sentence lets the reader assume a sexual marriage; the woman at the center of it says the opposite, and she says it in her own hand.

The framing is anachronistic. Under the common law inherited across the early United States, the marriageable age for a young woman was strikingly low by our standards, and marriage in the mid-teens — while not the norm — was legally unremarkable in 1843. Reading twenty-first-century categories of consent back onto frontier Illinois does not expose a hidden crime; it simply mistakes the past for the present. That is a failure of history, not a discovery about Joseph.

Helen refused to be anyone’s victim. This is the fact the flat reading cannot absorb. Helen Mar Kimball Whitney did not spend her life recovering from a trauma — she spent it as one of plural marriage’s most articulate public defenders, writing the 1884 tract Why We Practice Plural Marriage and filling journals in its defense. She was candid that at fourteen she did not grasp what the sealing would cost her socially, and she wrote of that initial reluctance honestly. But a woman who devotes her adult voice to defending the very covenant Jeremy calls her abuse is not a silent victim being spoken for. She is a witness testifying against his reading — and he does not quote her, because her testimony would dismantle the sentence he built.

The Claim: Threats of Divine Punishment

The CES Letter’s Argument

Joseph coerced women into plural marriage — invoking accounts of an angel with a drawn sword and promising that accepting the covenant would ensure their eternal salvation and exaltation.

The angel-with-a-drawn-sword accounts are real, and the Church’s own published essay includes them. Latter-day Saints have nothing to hide here. But notice the direction the sword points: in every version of the account, the angel confronts Joseph, commanding a reluctant prophet to obey a law he plainly did not want — not the women. Jeremy reverses the vector, turning a constraint laid on Joseph into a weapon Joseph aimed at others. The sources describe a man pressed by heaven to do a hard thing, which is close to the opposite of a manipulator inventing leverage.

And the women were not raw material for coercion. Eliza R. Snow — poet, theologian, general president of the Relief Society — was among the sharpest minds in the nineteenth-century Church. Zina Huntington. Mary Elizabeth Rollins Lightner. These were literate, spiritually serious women who spoke and wrote about their own experience for decades and were entirely capable of naming abuse had they suffered it. What they left instead is a record of deliberate, costly religious conviction. You are free to think them mistaken; you are not free, on this evidence, to think them passive.

As for “ensuring salvation and exaltation” — that language is not special pleading peculiar to polygamy. Restoration theology attaches eternal consequence to every covenant: baptism, the temple endowment, sealing. Isolating that phrase and treating it as uniquely coercive when applied to plural marriage misrepresents the entire covenant framework in which nineteenth-century Saints lived. It is the ordinary grammar of the faith, not a con.

D&C 132 and the Law of Sarah

The revelation on eternal marriage, now Doctrine and Covenants 132, sets a condition often called the law of Sarah: a man is to obtain the consent of his first wife (verse 61). The record shows this consent was not always secured, and faithful historians, Hales among them, state that openly rather than hiding it.

But watch what that fact actually implies. A law he did not in every case fully satisfy is a law that constrained him — and men do not fabricate constraints on themselves. If Joseph had simply invented a doctrine to license his desires, he would have written an easier one: no consent required, no restrictions, no difficult passages like verses 64–65 about a first wife who refuses. Instead the revelation hedges plural marriage with conditions that repeatedly cut against convenience. The very gap Jeremy points to — law given, its conditions not in every case fully met — is the signature of a man administering a divine commandment he found weighty, not a schemer drafting his own permission slip.

This Was Never Hidden From History

A common companion claim — that the Church buried these facts until forced to admit them — does not survive a look at the dates. Every hard particular here was in the published historical record long before the CES Letter appeared. Andrew Jenson printed lists of Joseph’s plural wives in 1887; sworn testimony about the sealings was entered in the federal Temple Lot case in the 1890s; and Todd Compton’s In Sacred Loneliness, cataloguing every wife including the polyandrous sealings and Helen Mar’s age, was published in 1997 — a full generation before Jeremy wrote. The material was never the secret; the flat reading of it is the innovation. For how Joseph’s public denials fit this same record, see our page on Joseph Smith’s denials.

Verdict

What is resolved. The word “polyandry,” used flatly, does not describe most of what the documents show — the majority of these sealings were eternity-only covenants that left the women’s mortal marriages untouched. The one case with a concrete, testable claim of a child born from a polyandrous union, Josephine Lyon, was excluded by peer-reviewed DNA analysis. Helen Mar Kimball’s sealing was eternity-only by her own testimony, and she became a lifelong defender of the very covenant Jeremy casts as her abuse. The angel-with-sword accounts constrain Joseph rather than arm him, and the law of Sarah is a self-imposed limit, not a self-serving license. On the checkable points, the faithful reading is the better-supported one.

What remains genuinely, and only mildly, open. A few polyandrous sealings are thinly documented, and for them we lack the DNA-level certainty we now have for Josephine Lyon; honest historians hold those cases lightly rather than forcing them to a conclusion. The nineteenth-century practice of plural marriage remains, for most modern Latter-day Saints, spiritually difficult — something we understand as an inspired accommodation given for a season and administered by mortal hands. Difficulty, though, is not the same as depravity. The fork Jeremy reached was a choice between the flat reading and the documented one. He took the flat reading. The record rewards the other branch.

Further Study

Key sources: Todd Compton, In Sacred Loneliness (1997); Brian C. Hales, Joseph Smith’s Polygamy, 3 vols. (2013); Helen Mar Kimball Whitney, Why We Practice Plural Marriage (1884); Ugo A. Perego et al., peer-reviewed DNA study of Josephine Lyon’s paternity (2016/2019).