I’VE BEEN CHIN DEEP IN Utah era polygamy again, this time scouring the plural marriage defenses written by Orson Pratt and his contemporaries. I’ve long been intrigued by how polygamy continues to shape the traditions and values of the mainstream LDS church, and I’ve written before about what I call polygamy culture. I admit, though, that when I coined the term years ago, I hadn’t yet comprehended the depth of the problems. I’m still working it through and am now in the process of writing a book to satisfy this need of mine to put then and now together in a meaningful way. As I study, I can’t stop thinking about Pres. Russell M. Nelson’s Oct. 2023 General Conference address, “Think Celestial!.” In it, Pres. Nelson forwards ideas that Pratt used to defend and promote polygamy. In other words, justifications for polygamy persist in current prophetic teaching. I find that disturbing but not surprising, considering the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints still believes in eternal marriage for eternal increase. But its side effect seems to be that Church leadership continues to view women as helpmeets for men with priesthood rather than as their equals. Let’s start with what Pres. Nelson said and then trace it backward along a Church history timeline to its origin with Orson Pratt, who, to be clear, was called by Brigham Young to be the Church’s official voice for plural marriage.
As his title suggests, Pres. Nelson urged us to “think celestial” every day as a help toward qualifying for the Celestial Kingdom. He states:
[Y]our choices today will determine three things: where you will live throughout all eternity, the kind of body with which you will be resurrected, and those with whom you will live forever…
[I]f we unwisely choose to live telestial laws now, we are choosing to be resurrected with a telestial body….
The power to create life is the one privilege of godhood that Heavenly Father allows his mortal children to exercise. (emphasis in the original)
“Think Celestial!”
Taken together, I gather from these statements that the resurrected celestial body differs from the resurrected telestial because it will have “the privilege of godhood,” which he defines as procreative power. This lines up with Mormonism’s Literal Offspring Theology, or the idea that all humans were first born as spirit children to a Heavenly Father and a heavenly mother. But church leaders have, for decades, backed away from the notion that spirit children are conceived in the same way mortals are conceived, an idea we find present in Pratt’s plural marriage defenses (which I’ll provide below). Yet, what Pres. Nelson preaches is consistent with Pratt’s teaching. Furthermore, his General Conference address revived online chatter about “the ol’ TK Smoothie,” a rather burlesque reference to a teaching of Joseph Fielding Smith, who served as an apostle for 60 years (1910-1970) and church president for two (1970-1972). I’ll leave the explanation of TK Smoothie to your imagination (but TK replaces either telestial or terrestrial kingdom) , and, instead, offer you Joseph Fielding Smith’s own words:
PROCREATION LIMITED TO CELESTIAL BODIES. Some will gain celestial bodies with all the powers of exaltation and eternal increase. These bodies will shine like the sun as our Savior’s does, as described by John. Those who enter the terrestrial kingdom will have terrestrial bodies, and they will not shine like the sun, but they will be more glorious than the body’s of those who receive telestial glory.
In both of these kingdoms, there will be changes in the body and limitations. They will not have the power of increase, neither the power to live as husbands and wives, for this will be denied them and they cannot increase…
Doctrines of Salvation, Vol. 2, pg 396
Some of the functions in the celestial body will not appear in the terrestrial body, neither in the telestial body, and the power of procreation will be removed. (emphasis mine)
The meaning seems clearer: Joseph Fielding Smith believed, like Pratt, that, if one doesn’t make the celestial kingdom, one is resurrected without functioning sex organs. Those sex organs are, indeed, used by God to impregnate a heavenly mother with spirit children. Pres. Nelson is less direct, but his words echo the idea.
Many may feel disinclined to entertain the idea that the physical use of genitalia in celestial increase was ever taught as part of the plan. After all, neither Pres. Nelson nor Joseph Fielding Smith said something as blatant as “Heavenly Father will have sex with his wife to create spirit children.” But Orson Pratt was less shy despite his placement in the Victorian era.
In 1852, Brigham Young tapped Orson Pratt to announce the truth of Mormon polygamy to the world at a special missionary conference. At that conference, Pratt was called as a missionary to the eastern states with the specific task of advocating plural marriage. He spent 1853 and part of 1854 writing and publishing The Seer, twenty monthly defenses of Mormon polygamy, based on his biblical interpretations and his logic. In it, Pratt preaches that the celestial world is a perfected mirror image of the temporal (or fallen) world. He believes both worlds are composed of the same elements. However, the elements of the fallen world are organized imperfectly, guaranteeing death and destruction, while the elements of the celestial world are perfectly organized to endure forever. Hence, the fallen world allows us a glimpse of the celestial. From this, Pratt reasons that the way humans multiply must be the way celestial beings (the Gods) multiply. In his second installation of The Seer, he wrote:
When a fallen world, it is inhabited by fallen beings; when a redeemed world, it is inhabited by celestial beings, redeemed from the grave, and glorified and made like unto the God who created and redeemed them, whose sons they are, and henceforth they are Gods, ordained to do the works appertaining to Gods; and as their father God has done before them, so will they do. Heaven, then, is a redeemed glorified world, inhabited by the Gods, and by their sons and daughters, who are the fruits of their own loins (emphasis mine).
Vol. 1. No. 2, pg 23
And if that isn’t explicit enough, he added this, just a few lines down:
These Gods, being redeemed from the grave with their wives, are immortal and eternal, and will die no more. But they and their wives will be supremely happy. All the endearing ties of conjugal love which existed in their bosoms, when terrestrial and fallen beings, are now greatly increased and perfected which serve to swell their souls with feelings of rapturous delight and unbonded love towards each other… (emphasis mine)
Vol. 1. No. 2, pg 23-24
Orson Pratt believed that a perfected and resurrected man can rightly be called a God, that He and his wives retained the anatomy required for procreation, and that, together, they conceived spirits in the celestial world in the same way mortals conceive their children in the fallen world. This is how they made sense of Joseph Smith’s efforts to “restore” Old Testament-style plural marriage. Polygamy needed divine justification–and that justification has been passed down from Pratt to Joseph Fielding Smith to Pres. Nelsen, even if Pratt’s direct language has been softened along the way.
To add historical context, let’s draw some lines connecting the resurrection theology of Pres. Nelson to Joseph Fielding Smith (with his father, Joseph F. Smith tossed in for good measure) and then back to Orson Pratt.
Russell M. Nelson was a 46-year-old stake president in Salt Lake City when Joseph Fielding Smith was sustained in 1970 as the LDS church president and prophet. Interestingly, years earlier, Nelson had served as a counselor to a bishop who was Joseph Fielding Smith’s son-in-law. Russell Nelson was set apart by the apostle himself. It’s reasonable to conclude that this personal connection with Joseph Fielding Smith would leave quite an impression on Nelson, investing the rising, leadership star with deep interest in the apostle’s theology. Nelson seems to have been paying close attention.
Where did Joseph Fielding Smith (born July 19, 1876) obtain his resurrection theology? Answering this is like plucking low-hanging fruit. After all, he grew up a child of plural marriage in a time when anti-polygamy legislation threatened the identity of every polygamous family in the Utah territory. Orson Pratt’s defenses of plural marriage were deeply rooted in the territory’s psyche. Pratt and his father (Joseph F. Smith) were not only friends, but they served in the Quorum of the Twelve together. When Joseph Fielding was two, Pratt and Joseph F. Smith were companions on a month-long, fact-finding mission to the Eastern states, a hot-bed of anti-polygamy sentiment. This guaranteed (as if there could be doubt) that Joseph Fielding Smith’s father and the great defender of plural marriage would’ve reasoned together over the arguments Pratt consistently forwarded.
Keep in mind that Joseph Fielding Smith was 6 when the Edmunds Act of 1882 was enacted and 11 when the Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887 added additional teeth to the previous law. He was 14 in 1890 when outside pressure compelled Wilford Woodruff to present the Manifesto to the body of the church for canonization through common consent. He was 30 in 1906 when his father (by then the church president and prophet) was charged with and fined for “unlawful cohabitation” after not abandoning his plural wives. Joseph Fielding Smith’s lineage and his religion were one and the same. It’s no wonder that, after being called by his father into the Quorum of the Twelve (1910), his resurrection theology echoed Pratt’s plural marriage defenses. When he became church president in 1970, those teachings probably seemed as the voice of God to the upwardly mobile Russsell M. Nelson.
Until I heard Pres. Nelson’s “Think Celestial!” talk, I thought Joseph Fielding Smith’s and Orson Pratt’s resurrection theology had vanished, but it seems to cling to Pres. Nelson’s eternal view like a piece of 180-year-old Glad Wrap (if such a thing existed), not exactly fully attached but not exactly falling to the side either. This isn’t surprising when we consider that only 43 years separate Pratt’s 1881 death from Nelson’s 1924 birth, but it is astonishing when we consider the social, political, and scientific advances (particularly regarding women) made between the appearance of The Seer, by Pratt, a mathematician and scientist, and “Think Celestial!,” by Russell M. Nelson, M.D.
Theology should also advance, especially in a church that claims continuing revelation. It’s difficult, as a woman, to realize church leadership can’t see that maintaining a culture shaped by eternal plural marriage is demeaning to its women and limiting its own growth opportunities. It’s hard not to suspect leaders rather enjoy the idea of eternally submissive women providing them conjugal bliss. I wish Pres. Nelson hadn’t brought the conversation back to how, exactly, celestial bodies manage eternal increase, but he did and here we are. There’s no doubt in my mind he was forwarding the teaching of Joseph Fielding Smith, who in turn, forwarded the teaching of Orson Pratt (and by extension, Brigham Young). The timeline supports this.
Mormonism has always been a weirdly sexual religion, and the disdain it has received for that is warranted. I won’t (today) approach how clear Pratt makes it that early Mormonism had no concept of a Mother God. Instead, the mothers of heaven were a string of wives who served their Husband-God procreatively. These are conversations that church leadership doesn’t want us to have, and I’m barely scratching the surface. Polygamy culture needs to be brought out from its hiding place and replaced with a culture that better represents the divine love and respect the Savior has for women. We are, after all, more than our bodies, temporal or divine.
~~~
Be still, and know that I am God… (Psalm 46:10)
Be sure to like and follow Life Outside the Book of Mormon Belt on Facebook by clicking here.
Life Outside The Book of Mormon Belt 
The doctrine will change when women stop bowing their heads and saying yes…maybe.
LikeLike
If your are right what does that mean for those of us that haven’t had the opportunity to marry and have children? Should I just run out and break the law of chastity now so I don’t miss my chance?
LikeLike
I didn’t intend to make any claims about rightness or wrongness of this doctrinal perspective but just to draw the connection between each man’s resurrection theology, though I do acknowledge that the kind of theology Pratt offered limits that hurt a number of us. And I’m surely not suggesting anyone violate the law of chastity. I find the theology of the existence of a Heavenly Mother to be beautiful and I hope for her to exist, for there to be a Divine Feminine. The defenses Pratt makes for plural marriage are very much rooted in his use of logic and I do find his premises to be flawed. For instance, Pratt couldn’t conceive of women as beings without the need of men to complete us. Women were submissives, he literally calls women the property of men. I’d like to see LDS Mormonism develop a theology that recognizes the complete, divine potential of women, a theology that sees us as more than an eternal uterus. Motherhood is such blessing, but so is womanhood. I long for a day when LDS women can universally feel like they’re complete beings if mortal motherhood isn’t something they are able to experience. What this all looks like in the next world is something we will come to understand in good time. For now, I send you all the good wishes in the world.
LikeLike
Really interesting details of the chain of thinking continuing from father to son and leaders.
I think your conclusion is spot on, it reiterates polygamous thinking, which since they currently have more than one sealed wife, would be front and center stage to their world. Certainly Wendy would like pontification from him.
Conjugal duties/responsibilities were reiterated, hierarchy reminded, and strong use of fear to warrant compliance from members to get in line before it’s “too late.”
I am so exhausted by my TBM family members who use this talk to stoke anxieties about where each family member’s testimony and actions line up. You said what needed pointing out, and I wish that more clear and direct language was used by RMN so it might sink in a little better that this is NOT the loving talk you think it is.
LikeLike
I won’t dispute the influence of JFS on Russell Nelson, but the fact that Nelson left out the explicit linkage of celestial bodies with procreative powers leaves room for interpretations that do not involve TK smoothies. My preferred interpretation is that all resurrected beings will have procreative powers, but that those with telestial bodies will produce children with telestial bodies and so forth.
LikeLike
Yes, he definitely left out explicit language. Wisely, I’d add. The position Pratt advocated made anti-LDS, evangelical film, “The Godmakers” if I remember right; Pratt’s conjugal eternal increase idea is a massive fail as a missionary tool, which is ironic considering Pratt used his logic *as a missionary tool. Personally, I see zero sense in the idea that resurrected beings would need physical bodies to create spirit bodies. Pratt’s logic has gaping holes and so many false premises, leaving wide open the hope for a new and improved theology that doesn’t leave women eternally in a prone position, popping out spirit babies. Those gaps could allow for a Heavenly Mother theology, rather than a heavenly mothers theology in which women never acheive the perfection men can.
I’m not sure we can say that Mormonism has doctrine, not if we use its own claim that doctrine never changes. Our doctrine (what is taught by those holding positions of priesthood authority) has all changed. I think that’s a good thing.
I’m curious about your idea that telestial bodies would procreate telestial spirits (and I assume terrestrial would terrestrial spirits). What happens to these lesser spirit children in your view? Its an idea I’ve never heard expressed.
LikeLike
To be clear, I am suggesting that telestial parents would procreate physical telestial children (with analogous outcomes in the other kingdoms). I think the term “spirit” as used in the scriptures covers a bunch of loosely-related concepts, only one of which involves sex. What “spirit creation” means depends of which of those concepts you are talking about. In the case involving sex, I see “spirit creation” as generating the software (DNA and such) that runs on the hardware (the physical body). I don’t believe that the “spirit creation” that resulted in what we call the pre-existence involved any kind of physical sex.
As for what happens to those children, I assume they would be integrated into telestial/terrestrial society just like their parents. (I have buckets of other speculation about the afterlife that I have tried to explain on other bloggernacle threads, but I will spare you that in this one.)
LikeLike
Very interesting reading, thanks for the obvious effort and time you put into researching this Lisa!
President Nelson’s talk didn’t resonate with me either. I honestly have difficulty listening to anyone talk with authority about the specifics of how things will be in eternity — especially from those who seem clueless about other things. This is the same man who not that long ago expressed:
“But to think that man evolved from one species to another is, to me, incomprehensible. Man has always been man. Dogs have always been dogs. Monkeys have always been monkeys. It’s just the way genetics works.”
Well, Calculus might also seem incomprehensible to someone who doesn’t first gain some competency with basic arithmetic and algebra. Yes, he’s an accomplished surgeon, but he also went to Medical school before we knew about DNA and genetics. <shrug>
Polygamy has been — and continues to be — a vile stain on the Church, and needs to be called out as such, and fully excised (and apologised for), or it will continue to be a stumbling block for the saints to progress, IMO. I also realize that will not likely happen in my lifetime, given that to do so would be a damning admission that would tarnish the prophetic reputations of most of our church leaders down the line. Honesty and Integrity seem to be such rare commodities these days…
I’m currently reading (audible) Fiona and Terryl Givens book “All Things New”, and it shines some refreshing light on the subject of human — and scriptural — fallacy. 4 chapters in, I highly recommend it (and Fiona’s angelic voice makes the audible version even better).
LikeLike
Ah, the infamous quotation about dogs and monkeys! If he’d said that in 1952, he might get a pass. But that’s something he said in 2007. In 2007, I had zero science related degrees (continues today, lol) and I knew then that that is not how genetics works. He would’ve been about 83 then, so maybe brain health? But if he had that problem then… I hate to beat up on the man for remaining rooted in outdated religious ideas. Its where he’s comfortable. But that doesn’t help the church deal with contemporary problems. Like dissatisfied women who are taking the front and back doors out, along with a few unlocked church windows.
And if the truth be told, I don’t care if people want to give polygamy a whirl in this life, provided its a fully consentual thing between adults. Go for it! But I do care when the only theology I’m offered still gets a huge hunk of its identity from its previous and future (eternal) practice of it. I care that the prejudices against women that thrived in our 19th century partriarchal church continues to limit women today. Let’s try a new foundation for Mormon theology. Please.
Thanks for reading and commenting.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I went through the temple in 1971 and the idea was obvious that women would not attain the same level as men, at least if you were paying attention. Men were to become Gods. Women were to become Celestial wives. We would be queens unto our husband and priestesses unto our husbands. While men were directly under God, women were under their husbands. They would be Gods, and we would be goddesses, with a little “g”. Our husband was our “Lord” taking us through the veil into the next life, just as we women brought spirits through the veil into this one. He would resurrect all of his wives….well, at least the ones he wanted by calling us by our “new name.” Why men get their wives’ names and women get only their own. It totally made sense when you studied Brigham quotes, about how women did not need to be righteous, only be wanted by their husband. And if they had babies, their husband would want the woman in order to have her children as his eternal increase. So, yes, that is exactly what Pres. Nelson means. Even Bruce R. McConkie disputed the idea that women became Gods. No, we as women do not inherit “all that the Lord hath” in our own name as children of God. We as women only share our husband’s inheritance. There is a difference between being a child of God and being a daughter in law of God and it was my first trip threw the temple on my wedding day that I realized I was not a child of God, but a daughter in law. I was only related through marriage. Or maybe women are children of a lesser god. I had no inheritance and relied on the men in my life to care for me. Like God is trapped forever in the 1500s where women got a dowry, if their father was rich, but nothing if their father was poor. or, like in the days before some man whose name I can’t remember, Zep something or other argued to Moses that because they had no brothers to care for them after their father died, that they should get to divide their father’s inheritance. Because here we are in the 2000s believing that unmarried women get nothing and anything given to women upon marriage is not given to them, but given to their husbands, and EVERYTHING goes to the sons.
yeah, I can’t believe in a God like that either. God isn’t a sexist jerk.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Some folks might balk at what you’ve written about only being God’s daughter-in-law. But Pratt (and I’ll stick with just talking about his work for now because its fresher than BY) did suggest this. Sealings were to create an eternal succession of male Gods. Eternal priesthood was, in part, about this succession. Nowhere does Pratt suggest the servants of God can be anything but LDS (male) priesthood holders. Now I know Pratt swam in the patriarchal waters of the 19th century, but there’s just something next-level when it becomes a theology in which women can never be anything but servants to men and property. In mainstream Christianity, there are male angels and female angels, all in the same choir. Early Mormonism believed only perfected men had the potential to become as God is. Women, as you know, were below that.
It becomes polygamy culture.
LikeLike
I have used the wording elsewhere, and people do scream. But the major objection is using the term, “daughter in law” rather than that God wouldn’t be that sexist. They seem to accept that God could really be that sexist. We are taught so strongly that we are all children of God, that to even joke about being a daughter in law offends people. Besides, that would imply another God to be the father, which is paganism.
Back in Pratt’s days, nobody had a problem with God being sexist because that was how society saw things and the wife couldn’t own anything in her name anyway. So, any inheritance she got from her father was really given to her husband. But today, children legally inherit equally unless the will says otherwise and the wife can have property that remains in her name. in Pratt’s day wife herself was property.
But, I do plead guilty to putting the idea in the way that would jolt people into thinking about it, because feminists have been saying the church is sexist my whole life and nobody pays any attention if you say that. And besides, it was exactly how the temple made me feel. Like God didn’t know me, let alone love me as much as He loved my husband. So, when people argue, I just tell them they have no right to tell me how I *should* have felt when I tell them how I *did* feel.
LikeLike
I agree with Nibley–that marriage will be different in the next life. And that’s not to say that the difference will merely be a shift from monogamy to polygamy as the norm. IMO, the difference is rooted in the idea that marriage in this sphere is similar to marriage in the next life primarily in a typological sense. Meaning that there might be as much difference between the two as there is between a mountain and a temple–though the two are a reflection of each other as a single type.
I think it’s also important to remember that procreation will not finally be premised upon erotic love. While I’m open to the idea that some form of eros may continue I’m of the opinion that it will be bridled by the love of God. Indeed, I’d go so far as to say that perhaps the transference of “seed” from the man to the woman in the eternal world might be the conveyance of intelligence(s) between the two on the wings of the love of God “which sheddeth itself abroad in the hearts of men” and women!
LikeLike