IF YOU NEED MORE EVIDENCE that polygamy culture is alive and well in the contemporary sphere of the LDS, look no further than your gospel library app, specifically at the new picture story published in the Doctrine and Covenants Stories for Children, titled “Plural Marriage: Faith to Obey a Law from the Lord Even When It’s Hard.” (Find it here.***) It provides a carefully curated cartoon version of early Mormon polygamy, stretching from its beginnings with Joseph Smith to its mythologized ending with Wilford Woodruff’s Manifesto, all in just eight panels. To say much is omitted is an understatement. However, its purpose isn’t to teach history but to use well-washed nuggets of fact to tightly define faith as obedience to God through obedience to priesthood authority. That may be the intent, but it seems destined to undermine the mental health (aka the emotional and spiritual well-being) of the children of devout Latter-day Saints, including those in the most secure of homes, by destabilizing their concept of marital boundaries. 

I wasn’t raised in the LDS church. I decided to join at 14 and was baptized upon receiving parental consent as I neared 17. Back then, talk of the Second Coming prevailed, just as it is starting to again. But in the 1970s, leaders emphasized the perilous times which would predate it–the wars and rumors of war, the natural disasters, and, of course, the march of the faithful back to Zion (Independence, Missouri) across terrain burned clean, most likely, we worried, by a nuclear bomb. To Missouri, Jesus would come, and there we would go. Even as a teenager, I was terrified of this “great and dreadful day of the Lord.” I internalized teachings surrounding the Second Coming in ways that provided me no comfort in the idea of Christ’s return. 

Forty-five years later, I can see how darkly that colored my worldview. I’ve heard other older adults say that, as children, they feared a wide spectrum of turbulent events prophesied to precede the Second Coming–everything from fearing they’d be burned alive to fearing their parents would leave their beloved pets behind on the march to Zion. Yet they confess they never shared those concerns with their parents. My point is, children absorb information from their parents, teachers, and leaders in ways we may not expect or want, ways they may not tell us, because children assume the message they internalize is the message parents intend to communicate.  If I, at 14, quietly feared the Second Coming, small children seem just as likely to quietly fear disruption of family life if polygamy is presented to them as a commandment that could return, especially if the story is read to them by their mother or father.

I have some hard questions for parents. Mom, if you read the story to your children, what message might they internalize about you and your place in the family? And Dad, if you read the story to them, what message might they internalize about your commitment to their mother? To them? Furthermore, children may ask internal questions parents never hear: What if Daddy has a favorite wife and it isn’t Mommy? Will Mommy like the new wife? Will the new wife like me? What if I don’t like them? What if the new wife is mean? And on and on go the troubling uncertainties for our most innocent members. 

We know that just the idea of divorce quietly stresses children, including those in stable families. It’s a fantasy to suppose that introducing the possibility of polygamy wouldn’t stress LDS children. It stresses those of us with mature minds, even though, as adults, we have some control over our destinies. It is naïve to think LDS children could escape being negatively impacted by learning from their parents that their faith would require them to disrupt their children’s known world “even when it’s hard” on their children. Kids will wonder if their parents care about them.

Of course, the last panel of the cartoon “Plural Marriage” reads:

In 1890, the Lord told Wilford Woodruff, the President of the Church, that men should not marry more than one wife anymore. The leaders of the Church shared this commandment with the Saints. This is still the Lord’s commandment today—a man should be married to only one wife.

I’ll set aside the reality that this paragraph is far from transparent and focus on that tiny, five-lettered word “still,” which means, in this context, “up to and including the present moment” (Oxford Dictionary). It contains no guarantee that monogamous marriage will continue to be the commandment of God, especially because the subtitle of the story calls plural marriage a “law.” In LDS theology, a law has more weight than a commandment, being eternal, but most young children won’t know this. In time, however, they will learn. 

But parents know it. They remember Pres. Oaks’ recent General Conference talk about “temporary commandments,” which, in hindsight, may be connected to the release of this cartoon story. Parents know the law of plural marriage continues to be practiced in LDS temples each time a widower is sealed to a second woman, forming for himself an eternal plural union as Presidents Nelson and Oaks have modeled. The earthly commandment may currently be monogamous marriage, but the eternal law remains one man and many wives. This is far from transparent and, when kids learn this, out the window goes the careful inoculation and in sneaks a sense that faithful church members, including parents, deceived them with the one man/one woman rhetoric. Why set kids up for that moment of distrust? Most LDS faith crises begin the moment trust is lost.

Kids aren’t stupid. This final paragraph won’t eradicate their concerns that their entire family could face upheaval if the prophet were to announce the return of plural marriage, considering that message is embedded in the plot. Countless LDS women suffer quietly every day under the threatening cloud of plural marriage because LDS polygamy culture is a culture in which faith is caged by obedience to male priesthood authority. The children of the most devout will take away from this story that their LDS parents would put them on the outs with society, if not the law, and subdivide the family if a man they don’t know told them God requires it. And children will sense the emotional harm it will do their mothers, in particular. It may alienate them from their fathers, or distance them from both parents in order to protect their emotional selves. 

My predictions feel obvious. What is less obvious, however, is the degree to which active LDS women feel destabilized in their marriages because they realize plural marriage could return. Prior to marrying, many women make it clear to their fiancés that plural marriage would be a deal breaker. Many proclaim and/or reiterate this well into their marriages when children arrive and the threat feels more intense. Even more telling, many LDS women swallow their boundaries, hoping God will bless them in their submission. This dangerous idea has its roots in our toxic polygamy culture and would not exist without the planted fear that disobedience will make one unworthy of God’s highest reward and deem a woman worthy of destruction (D&C 132). Every LDS woman–whether she admits it or not–is emotionally scarred by our polygamy culture. And every LDS marriage is weakened, to one degree or another, by an LDS wife’s knowledge that the shape of her eternal marriage is ultimately out of her control. Our history is replete with stories of men breaking their marital promises of fidelity in the name of God, and, astonishingly, some of our scripture and authorized, correlated content celebrate it.

I understand that, within Mormonism’s polygamous off-shoots, there are women who champion plural marriage. I’m not going to challenge them on their lived experiences, but it’s my opinion that, should plural marriage be “restored” in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, women would live an experience more closely aligned with the experiences of the church’s earliest plural wives than with that of contemporary women who grew up in social systems enculturated for polygamous families. Regardless, this post isn’t intended to do anything but consider how contemporary LDS children and women experience life while knowing plural marriage threatens the stability of their family structures.

Obedience culture is polygamy culture. The doctrine of the LDS church grooms all of its members, but especially women and children, to act against our God-given instinct to protect ourselves. Grooming is behavior that establishes a relationship of trust between an authority figure and a child (or another adult) and desensitizes them in ways that could facilitate harm being perpetrated against them. We usually think of grooming as an act done by a perpetrator of a sex offense, and, of course, perpetrators are known to hide within the church system. However, in LDS Mormonism, grooming also occurs when a church leader or parent who is not a perpetrator presents obedience to authority as the loftiest of goals, thereby weakening needful boundaries and preparing the innocent for predation by someone else.

The bishop grooms a teen for sex offenses by discussing sensitive, sexual topics behind closed doors, thus normalizing conversations about masturbation, orgasm, and position, etc. This increases the likelihood the teen will be taken advantage of by a predator who is also perceived as having authority over them, which includes every male, age 11 and up, once ordained. The same is true of any church leader or teacher, at any level, who persists in preaching that the Holy Spirit (or even the light of Christ, our conscience) would never tell us something contrary to whatever the current teaching is of the sitting president/prophet of the Church. The cartoon story in question also grooms children through an “approved” source, likely with the unintended collusion of parents or primary teachers. Polygamy culture insists we override our instinct for self-preservation and well-being because we should have the “faith to obey a law from the Lord even when it’s hard.” This, while, at the same time, we confess prophetic fallibility in order to make the unacceptable statements of the past carry no weight today. Church leaders have used this tactic throughout our history and will continue to do so in the future.

This cartoon “history” of plural marriage isn’t inoculation against a troublesome element of LDS history. It’s a toxic injection of a definition of faith that teaches children to ignore their self-interest and safety in the face of authority and destabilizes their sense of security within the family. It is vital we respect the feelings of ill-ease that our polygamous past instills, especially in LDS females, young and old. We must refuse to inflict on children the same psychological damage and work to reduce the risk of physical harm that our polygamy culture inherently generates.

The children of the LDS church deserve better; they deserve an end to polygamy culture and its pernicious insistence members override our emotional needs and spiritual gifts under the guise that obedience to patriarchal authority equates to obedience to God. Our faith must center on the messages of Jesus, not the reinterpretation of them by fallible human beings. We all have the same gift of the Holy Ghost, which stands as the divine equalizer of lowly saint and celebrated apostle. Don’t let anyone limit your use of this divine gift or the use of your conscience.

Remember, remember, no one stands between us and the divine, not unless we invite them to. When you read “Plural Marriage: Faith to Obey a Law from the Lord Even When It’s Hard,” you’ll most likely recognize the destabilizing threat that it is to your children’s psyches. Then, please, recognize how the threat of polygamy is already destabilizing our homes through the burden of fear it places on women. We’d be a stronger church with stronger families if we banished plural marriage from our doctrine. If the church leaders wanted to inoculate children against the worst of our history, it’d treat 19th century polygamy as a cautionary tale from which we learned that the plural marriages of the past more often than not hurt the stability and mental health of our people, be they men, women, or children. 

In 1869, Zina Diantha Huntington, who was married to Henry Jacobs at the time she was sealed as a plural wife to Joseph Smith and who later became a plural wife of Brigham Young recorded the attitude of her polygamous culture when she penned:

It is the duty of a first wife to regard her husband not with a selfish devotion… she must regard her husband with indifference, and with no other feeling than that of reverence, for love we regard as a false sentiment; a feeling which should have no existence in polygamy…

And on that unsettling note, I will end.

***In February of 2025, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints responded to criticism leveled against its publication of “Plural Marriage: Faith to Obey a Law from the Lord Even When It’s Hard.” The title is now “Plural Marriage: A Commandment for a time” and features the heavily modified and shortened narrative. I will add screenshots of the original below.

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TO HEAR FURTHER DISCUSSION OF THIS BLOG POST, CLICK HERE, and you’ll be taken to The Mormon Newscast podcast epidsode titled “Merry Smithmas!” Scroll to timestamp 31:54 if interested specifically in a response to this post, or start at 23:44 to also hear a discussion featuring the original images and storyline.

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen… (Hebrews 11:1)

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The revised cartoon “Plural Marriage: A Commandment for a Time” looks like this [2/2025]: