Plural Marriage

The practice began privately and stayed private for more than a decade. The revelation setting out the doctrine, recorded in 1843 and now printed as section 132 of the Doctrine and Covenants, presents plural marriage as part of a larger teaching about marriage sealed for eternity, and defends it by appeal to Abraham, Jacob, David and Solomon, on the reasoning that a restoration of all things includes what the patriarchs were commanded to do.

The church's own published essays state that Joseph Smith was sealed to between thirty and forty women during the Nauvoo period, that some were already married to other living men, and that the youngest was fourteen. Those essays also record that the practice was taught to a small circle and denied in public, that this caused deep distress to Emma Smith, and that the sources leave a number of questions unresolved. The atlas reports what the custodian has published about its own history rather than characterising it.

Public teaching began in Utah. Orson Pratt announced the doctrine at a special conference in 1852 at the direction of Brigham Young, and for the next four decades plural marriage was preached openly, defended in print, and practised by a minority of Latter-day Saint families, with estimates of participation varying by place and period. It was bound up with the wider doctrine of celestial marriage and with an understanding of exaltation as a family condition, which is why it could not simply be dropped as a policy.

The federal response escalated over three decades. Congress made bigamy in the territories a crime in 1862, the Supreme Court upheld that law against a free exercise defence in the Reynolds case, and the Edmunds Act of 1882 disqualified plural husbands from voting, from juries and from office. The Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887 went further and dissolved the church as a corporation, seizing its property. By 1890 the church faced the loss of its temples.

Wilford Woodruff issued the Manifesto in September 1890, advising members to contract no marriage forbidden by the law of the land, and it was accepted by the church in conference. It was a short document and it did not end the practice at once: new plural marriages continued to be performed by some authorities, particularly outside the United States, and the resulting controversy contributed to the Senate hearings on whether Reed Smoot could take his seat. Joseph F. Smith issued a second manifesto in 1904 with explicit penalties, after which the church excommunicated those who continued.

The church today excommunicates members who enter plural marriage. Groups that rejected the Manifesto separated and continue the practice, of which the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is the largest and best known, and there are others with no organisational relation to it. The term celestial marriage remains in ordinary Latter-day Saint use for a marriage sealed in the temple for eternity, which is now always between one man and one woman.