How Nineteenth Century Mormons Understood Polygamy

6 min readSep 27, 2015

In 1852, Brigham Young decided to acknowledge Mormon polygamy in public for the first time. He did so by having Orson Pratt explain in General Conference why polygamy was God’s preferred matrimonial structure.

Orson Pratt’s original argument

Pratt covered a lot of ground, setting polygamy in the middle of the entire plan of salvation. But his justifications of polygamy set the tone for Mormon apologists until the 1890 Manifesto ended public endorsement of the practice. (Presumably these justifications are not entirely original to Pratt, since by then Mormon leaders had over a decade since polygamy’s introduction to explain it to themselves. But the only public pre-1852 defense of polygamy went over poorly and the Church quickly distanced itself from it.)

Pratt made the following arguments:

“There is only about one-fifth of the population of the globe, that believe in the one-wife system; the other four-fifths believe in the doctrine of a plurality of wives.”
“We read that those who do the works of Abraham, are to be blessed with the blessing of Abraham… Sarah gave to Abraham, Hagar.”
“Whoredom, adultery, and fornication, have cursed the nations of the earth for many generations… How is this to be prevented? for we have got a fallen nature to grapple with. It is to be prevented in the way the Lord devised in ancient times; that is, by giving to His faithful servants a plurality of wives.”
Polygamy would allow more noble spirits to be born to righteous Mormons.

Orson Spencer elaborates

In 1853, Orson Spencer — who had been elected Mayor of Nauvoo following the death of Joseph Smith, and who subsequently served as president of the British Mission — wrote a letter to a Baptist minister in which he undertook to prove the Biblical superiority of polygamy. His sixteen dense pages of prooftexting primarily depended on the Abrahamic precedent. This was republished by the Church as a pamphlet to promote polygamy, and was considered so seminal that it was included in the Salt Lake Temple capstone.

Many of Spencer’s points made it into popular understanding that still echoes today, particularly that “females are not generally as wicked as males,” because “[a woman] does her duty in submitting to [man’s] will” and therefore men bear primary responsibility for wickedness. Thus, “more women than men will probably be saved, [and] hence some men must have more than one.”

Spencer also acknowledged that even with more righteous women than men, it was likely that some men will not find a partner under a polygamous system. This was entirely fair, Spencer contended, because “rewards are given to good men, and penalties to bad,” including rewards of women. “[M]en who have faith to forsake their rebellious and unbelieving wives” will be rewarded “an hundred fold with wives in this world, and eternal lives in the next.”

Belinda Pratt ties monogamy to the Apostasy

The following year, Belinda Pratt — plural wife of Orson’s brother Parley, who was also an apostle — wrote to her friend Lydia Kimball. Like Orson Spencer’s, Belinda Pratt’s letter was published as a pro-polygamy publication. (A transcript is also available here.)

Belinda’s letter is better constructed, more tightly argued, and shorter than Spencer’s. No doubt Church officials were also sensitive to the advantages of having a woman defend the system that was widely (and for the most part correctly) perceived as oppressing her sex.

Belinda covered similar ground as her brother-in-law, with some additions:

Sex during pregnancy is dangerous. “[Sexual relations] should not be merely for pleasure, or wanton desires, but mainly for the purpose of procreation…. During the formation and growth of embryo man, her heart should be pure, her thoughts and affections chaste, her mind calm, her passions without excitement.”
Menstrual sex violates Old Testament rules of ritual cleanliness. “You can read, in the law of God, in your Bible, the times and circumstances under which a woman should remain apart from her husband, during which times she is considered unclean; and should her husband come to her bed under such circumstances, he would commit a gross sin both against the laws of nature, and the wise provisions of God’s law, as revealed in his word.”
But men can’t be expected to control their urges, so “Polygamy… leads directly to the chastity of women” because men always have a fertile wife available when the others are pregnant or menstruating.
Men can have children throughout their lives because they are better than women. Limiting that potential to a single woman before menopause would be unfair. “Nature has constituted the female differently from the male… mature age, and an approaching change of worlds [render] it necessary for her to cease to be fruitful, and give her to rest awhile… Not so with man. He has no such draw back upon his strength. It is his to move in a wider sphere. If God shall count him worthy of an hundred fold in this life, of wives and children, and houses and lands and kindreds, he may even aspire to Patriarchal sovereignty, to empire; to be the prince or head of a tribe, or tribes; and like Abraham of old, be able to send forth for the defense of his country, hundreds and thousands of his own warriors, born in his own house.”
“In the Patriarchal order of family government, the wife is bound to the law of her husband. She honors him, ‘calls him lord,’ even as Sarah obeyed and honored Abraham. She lives for him, and to increase his glory, his greatness, his kingdom, or family.”

Additional rationales

Church leaders continued to come up with justifications for plural marriage in the face of mounting skepticism from the rest of the United States. A representative but far from exhaustive list:

Apostle George Q. Cannon said that “under the system of Patriarchal Marriage, the offspring, besides being equally as bright and brighter intellectually, are much more healthy and strong.”
Apostle Heber C. Kimball taught that polygamous marriages granted health to the men who practiced it too. “I have noticed that a man who has but one wife, and is inclined to that doctrine, soon begins to wither and dry up, while a man who goes into plurality looks fresh, young, and sprightly. Why is this? Because God loves that man, and because he honors his word.”
By contrast, monogamy was a source of feebleness and even caused the fall of Rome. Cannon again: “the shortest-lived nations of which we have record have been monogamic. Rome, with her arts, sciences and warlike instincts, was once the mistress of the world; but her glory faded. She was a monogamic nation, and the numerous evils attending that system early laid the foundation for that ruin which eventually overtook her.”
Orson Pratt argued that “God the Father had a plurality of wives,” and thus polygamy was an emulation of Him.
Brigham Young and others taught that polygamy was not only compatible with exaltation but necessary: “The only men who become Gods, even the Sons of God, are those who enter into polygamy.” (One of many possible selections from his talk on The Beneficial Effects of Polygamy.)

Wrestling with polygamy

Mormons today struggle with the legacy of polygamy and have come up with many theories to explain it. A successful modern defense of polygamy will need to deal not only with the facts of polygamy as practiced, but also with the problem that the theological justifications for it, as taught by Church leadership and repeated by ordinary members, are so wildly at odds with post-Manifesto doctrine. If the Church could repudiate polygamy entirely, that would solve the problem, but institutionally this is unthinkable.

We began with Apostle Orson Pratt introducing polygamy to the public in 1852; let us close with his words from another sermon thirty-two years later:

A person might as well say, “I believe in Mormonism, and in the revelations given through Joseph Smith, but I am not a polygamist, and do not believe in polygamy.” What an absurdity! If one portion of the doctrines of the Church is true, the whole of them are true. If the doctrine of polygamy, as revealed to the Latter-day Saints, is not true, I would not give a fig for all your other revelations that came through Joseph Smith the Prophet; I would renounce the whole of them, because it is utterly impossible, according to the revelations that are contained in these books, to believe a part of them to be divine — from God — and part of them to be from the devil; that is foolishness in the extreme.
Now I want to prophesy a little… Sisters, you begin to say before your husbands, or husbands you begin to say before your wives, “I do not believe in the principle of polygamy, and I intend to instruct my children against it.” Oppose it in this way, and teach your children to do the same, and if you do not become as dark as midnight there is no truth in Mormonism.