Note: This is a three-part blog series that explores the unique ramifications polygamy culture has upon queer Latter-day Saints written by Nathan Kitchen exclusively for Life Outside The Book of Mormon Belt. To learn more about the experiences in the queer/Latter-day Saint intersection, be sure to pick up his memoir: The Boughs of Love—Navigating the Queer Latter-day Saint Experience During an Ongoing Restoration published by BCC Press.

GUEST POST: The 19th-century, patriarchal form of Mormon polygamy has died an Earthly death. Consequentially, its implementation in heaven was frozen in the same configuration. No one in power today seems to have the appetite to flesh out, let alone update, the theology of how polygamy is practiced in the heavens for several reasons. First, because the social and sexual ethics of 19^th century polygamy are so incredibly upsetting to most 21st-century Latter-day Saint women (and men) who find its practice foreign and utterly stomach-churning.

Polygamy is No Joke

The theology of early church polygamy is a Mormon problem and can only be solved by Mormons. It became an even bigger problem when it was disallowed on earth but still allowed in heaven. This one weird quirk allows a Mormon man to unilaterally open his relationship once his first wife dies and marry another eternal companion into the mix. The first wife cannot give consent about sharing her husband with another woman—she is dead. It doesn’t matter that the wives are currently not on the same timeline. Eventually they will be. It’s a “first wife” problem, sharing her life’s love with another woman for eternity who she is most likely meeting for the first time. This situation is beyond awkward; it is immoral.

Polygamy also has a “second wife” (and subsequent wives) problem. In October’s 2019 general conference, President Dallin H. Oaks shared a letter from a distressed woman contemplating a temple marriage to a man whose eternal companion had died. She asked if she would be able “to have her own house in the next life” or if she would have to “live with her husband and his first wife.” President Oaks quipped, “I just told her to trust the Lord.”[1] The audience erupted in laughter. Why the laughter? Do we think this is a joke? For those who have not been religiously groomed in their everyday life to the practice of polygamy, having to face such a personally immoral arrangement in the heavens of sharing a husband and house with another woman is traumatic. It is a problem that deserves a 21^st century theological answer, not laughter.

The glaring absence of consent and control is magnified even further because not only does marriage survive in heaven, but also sex and procreation. It complicates the ethics of the heavens tremendously to share a husband sexually when women lack the power of control and consent that is systematically baked into 19th-century polygamy. Mormon women today cannot know for sure how their eternal marriage will be configured after death. This is a cruel loose end in the theology of a trickster God.

Polygamy May Stink on Earth, but it is Power in Heaven

Another reason why the Church won’t revisit polygamy beyond a “trust in the Lord” attitude is that it is just as problematic for the modern church as it was for the early church. The modern church is not going to touch polygamy with a 10-foot pole other than acknowledge its historical presence and remind everyone that its practice is a matter of history. (Note: It may be history, but it could be your future!) To now publicly work out the theology of heavenly polygamy to encompass today’s ethics of women’s control and consent is a minefield. The Church is not about to remind everyone that Mormons still practice spiritual polygamy. It worked too hard to shed its stench of polygamy to now lose even an ounce of the considerable social and political capital it gained by doing so.

Additionally, in Latter-day Saint theology, power on earth and in heaven is arranged in the patriarchal order. Reworking marriage and family in the heavens for a better, more ethical polygamy that accounts for women’s equality in control and consent would have a ripple effect throughout the entire ecclesiastical system on earth, fundamentally altering how power is understood and structured. Such an upset tips the balance of power away from the Church, the kind of tipping that Pope Innocent III sought to prevent when he inserted the Catholic Church into marriage and family. He knew that in the ruling of kingdoms and peoples, it is the minutia of family that moves us.

Enter the Queer Community

The less obvious answer as to why the Church won’t seriously address polygamy with 21st-century Latter-day Saints is that revisiting and revising the ethics of queer marriage requires queer thinking. Once the Church scrubbed polygamy from its psyche, relegating it to an afterlife practice, it lost its ability to think queer.

Queer people are experts on, well, being queer. For millennia, queer people have had to work out how to safely have queer relationships outside of societal norms, all while flying under the radar, being barred from legitimizing any of it with church or state because it was queer. By the time of the gay liberation movement, the queer community was fed up with being harassed and hidden. It not only became unashamedly visible, but the movement ignited a queer intellectual revolution, cultivating a sense of its own considerable cultural heritage and legacy.[2] This process included proposing legitimate alternatives to the nuclear family and spurred the community’s ongoing examination, discussion, and ethics concerning queer relationships—including the practice of ethical non-monogamy (ENM). ENM encompasses a plethora of non-monogamous relationships, including polygamy. It eliminates hierarchy and power over others in the relationship, equally distributing control, connection, and consent for all partners involved—the antithesis of the Church’s 19th-century practice of polygamy. It should come as no surprise that queerness has ethical and moral answers for queer relationships, including the Church’s own queer marriage of polygamy.

The queer community has worked out the ethics of polygamy, while the LDS Church refuses to tend to this issue. But the Church will not accept queer solutions in theology because it will not embrace its own queerness in polygamy, only ignore it. Once a part of America’s queer marriage and family counterculture in the 1860s and 70s, the Church spent almost a century escaping its identity to become the respectable model of the American one-man/one-woman marriage and nuclear family culture. It was not about to let the counterculture of the 1960s and 70s—of which the gay liberation movement was a part—question its arrival to mainstream cultural acceptability, even though it had a queer skeleton in its closet: its own legitimate alternative to the nuclear family—still alive and kicking in its theology and doctrine—polygamy.

Is the Church’s Earthly Practice of Polygamy Coming Back?

Because queer marriage in the form of polygamy is still enshrined in the doctrine of the Church, a fear commonly expressed in Latter-day Saint circles is that a prophet will reinstate the practice.  This is not going to happen, and you can thank the queer community for that—not because of anything we have done, but simply because of our existence. The Church emerged from its days of polygamy completely 100% averse to the practice of anything queer, not just queer marriage. To release the polygamy ghost back among the Saints unleashes a modern-day identity problem for the Church: Since queer people practice queer marriage, if straight people practice queer marriage, does that make them queer people?

When polygamy was the only bird in the queer marriage nest, the Church proudly embraced it. However, the growing visibility of queer people complicated queerness for the Church, and once legal same-sex marriage started hatching, the Church developed an extreme phobia against the other queer marriage chicks in the nest and started violently pushing them out—remember Hawaii to Obergefell to the November 2015 exclusion policy? Over the course of its history, the Church went from embracing queer marriage to being afraid of its own ghost. Harboring its own internal queerphobia, it is extremely content to keep polygamy up in the attic of heaven untouched, even if it must occasionally hear the dragging chains and moaning down here on earth.

When I was president of Affirmation, the Equality Act, adding LGBTQ people to existing civil rights laws, was before Congress. The Church Communication Department sent me a text that it was releasing a public statement against the Equality Act. A few days later, I met with our contacts at headquarters. I shared that the early church’s zeal to defend its religious practice of polygamy from government intrusion was now being vigorously channeled into defending its religious practice of discriminating against its own LGBTQ population from government intrusion. I argued that it takes institutional courage to accept LGBTQ equality while still working to abandon prejudice. “It is time to take a more inclusive, equitable view of what it means when we say, ‘All are alike unto God’.”[3] Rather than engage, their only answer was, “I certainly hope you are not suggesting we go back to practicing polygamy again.”

And therein lies the crux of the harm that the ghost of polygamy poses for queer Latter-day Saints: The Church may not be currently practicing polygamy but it is currently practicing polygamy on us.

~~Nathan Kitchen

Nathan Kitchen (he/him) served as president of Affirmation: LGBTQ Mormons, Families & Friends from 2019 through 2022. Nathan is a returned missionary, a dentist by trade, a sought-after public speaker, and the author of Boughs of Love. He lives in Arizona with his husband, Matthew. In his free time, Nathan likes to travel, read, and hold his five grandbabies.

Be sure to like and follow Life Outside the Book of Mormon Belt on Facebook by clicking here and on Instagram here.

---

[1] Oaks, Dallin H. “Trust in the Lord.” Liahona 43, no. 11, November 2019. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2019/10/17oaks?lang=eng

[2] Downs, Jim. “The Radical Roots of Gay Liberation Are Being Overlooked—Red-Hot Gay Marriage: Gay Liberation Didn’t Begin with Marches and Political Rallies, but with a Revolution in Thought.” Edited by Sam Haselby. Aeon, April 19, 2016. Accessed July 29, 2024. https://aeon.co/essays/the-radical-roots-of-gay-liberation-are-being-overlooked.%5B3%5D Kitchen, Nathan. “Nathan Kitchen: Time for the LDS Church to Accept LGBTQ Equality.” The Salt Lake Tribune, March 2, 2021. https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/commentary/2021/03/02/nathan-kitchen-time-lds/.