Reasons for Joseph Smith's Polygamy:

To Bring Needed Trials and Challenges?

Another practical theory advanced by some apologists observes that plural marriage brought trials to the Latter-day and such trials provided the participants opportunities for spiritual growth. Joseph Smith taught of the value of tribulations: “Ye cannot behold with your natural eyes, for the present time, the design of your God concerning those things which shall come hereafter, and the glory which shall follow after much tribulation. For after much tribulation come the blessings. Wherefore the day cometh that ye shall be crowned with much glory; the hour is not yet, but is nigh at hand” (D&C 58:3-4).

Concerning polygamy, Brigham Young explained in 1855: “I foresaw, when Joseph first made known this doctrine, that it would be a trial, and a source of great care and anxiety to the brethren, and what of that? We are to gird up our loins and fulfill this, just as we would any other duty.[1] Plural wife Helen Mar Kimball Whitney explained:

I did not try to conceal the fact of its having been a trial, but confessed that it had been one of the severest of my life; but that it had also proven one of the greatest of blessings. I could truly say it had done the most towards making me a Saint and a free woman, in every sense of the word; and I knew many others who could say the same, and to whom it had proven one of the greatest boons--a "blessing in disguise."[2]

Another of Joseph Smith’s plural wives, Lucy Walker, recalled:

I will say [that polygamy] is a grand school. You learn self control, self denial; it brings out the nobler traits of our fallen natures, and teaches us to study and subdue self, while we become acquainted with the peculiar characteristics of each other. There is a grand opportunity to improve ourselves, and the lessons learned in a few years, are worth the experience of a lifetime, for this reason, that you are better prepared to make a home happy. You can easily avoid many unpleasant features of domestic life that through inexperience you otherwise are unprepared to meet.[3]

Eliza R. Snow wrote: “I bear my testimony that plural celestial marriage is a pure and holy principle, not only tending to individual purity and elevation of character, but also instrumental in producing a more perfect type of manhood mentally and physically.”[4] Plural wife Martha Cragun Cox (1852-1932) penned: “I knew the principle of plural marriage to be correct – to be the highest, holiest order of marriage. I knew too, that I might fail to live the holy life required and lose the blessings offered. If I had not learned before to go to the Lord with my burden, I surely learned to go to him now… I found relief only in prayer when the Holy Spirit gave me inspiration.”[5]

Harold Bloom observed: “I can accept the notion that the Prophet Joseph sought to follow the Jewish pattern, in which a religion becomes a people. Marked by the glory and stigma of plural marriage, the Mormons of 1850 through 1890 indeed became a peculiar people, a nation apart.”[6] Non-LDS historian Jan Shipps wrote similarly: ‘What plural marriage did was make people commit to the church. It drew them in and made them commit. It had a purpose of creating a movement, of creating a tradition… Religious traditions come into existence through pain and exhilaration at the same time.”[7]

Despite the truthfulness of many of these observations, it does not appear that Joseph Smith ever declared an association between the practice of plural marriage and the beneficial trials it would generate. Whether he would have listed it as a reason for restoring plural marriage is unknown.

[1] Brigham Young, July 14, 1855, Journal of Discourses, 3:265.

[2] Helen Mar Kimball Whitney, Why We Practice Plural Marriage, Salt Lake City: Juvenile Instructor Office, 1884, 23-24, see also page 8.

[3] Lucy Walker statement, quoted in Lyman Omer Littlefield, Reminiscences of Latter-day Saints: Giving an Account of Much Individual Suffering Endured for Religious Conscience, Logan, Utah: Utah Journal Co, 1888, 50-51.

[4] Maureen Ursenbach Beecher, ed., The Personal Writings of Eliza Roxcy Snow, Logan Utah: USU press, 2000, 17.

[5] Kenneth W. Godfrey, Audrey M. Godfrey, and Jill Mulvay Derr. Women's Voices: An Untold History of the Latter-day Saints, 1830-1900. Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Company, 1982, 278.

[6] Harold Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992, 106.

[7] Quoted in Heidi S. Swinton, American Prophet: The Story of Joseph Smith, Salt Lake City: Shadow Mountain, 1999, 140.