How did Joseph Smith practice plural marriage, and how should it be understood?
Common ground
Historians across the main scholarly interpretations, and the Church’s Gospel Topics essay
first published in 2014, hold that Joseph Smith was sealed to many women in Nauvoo. The essay
estimates between 30 and 40 women over his lifetime, including women already married and Helen Mar
Kimball, who was sealed several months before her fifteenth birthday; participants kept the practice largely confidential. Emma Smith knew of and consented to some of the marriages but not all, and Church leaders publicly denied the practice during Smith’s lifetime.
The dispute
The disputes concern which unions included sexual relations, what
the fragmentary records can establish about particular marriages, and how to understand the
relationships among religious teachings, family connections, personal motives, the experiences of the women involved, and whether the women, their families, and Emma Smith could consent freely given the promises and pressures some later described.
Hales argues that Smith entered both conjugal marriages and sealings that applied only to the next life, and that the evidence does not establish simultaneous sexual relationships with a woman and her civil husband. He interprets plural marriage within Smith’s understanding of a commanded restoration, including eternal marriage and access to exaltation.
He believed plural marriage had been restored to
the earth and was a valid—even commanded—practice in the eyes of
God.
Marriages for time and eternity
Plural sealings generally established marriages during this life as well as the next, with sexual relations probable in many cases, including some involving already-married women.
history · religious studies · Founder, Signature Books
George D. Smith argues that the Nauvoo documentary record describes plural marriages with relationships during this life, even when wives lived in separate households. His demographic account places Joseph Smith’s marriages within the spread of a secret marital system and the dissent that followed it.
Compton argues that Smith’s plural marriages generally included marital relationships in this life, and that sexual relations were probably included in many sealings to already-married women. He distinguishes probabilities from direct evidence and leaves individual cases open, including Helen Mar Kimball’s, while reconstructing the women’s religious commitments and the costs of their marriages.
Stapley argues that Smith’s Nauvoo sealing rituals made eternal family relationships the structure of heaven itself. His account places plural marriage within this larger ritual system and traces the changes in sealing practice after Smith’s death.
history · religious studies · Gouverneur Morris Professor Emeritus of History, Columbia University
Bushman proposes that Smith’s plural marriages sought an enduring network of wives, children, and extended family. He interprets the marriages within Smith’s aspiration to build eternal kinship.
history · religious studies · Professor of Medicine, University of Utah and Intermountain Medical Center
Brown proposes that plural marriage formed part of Smith’s adoption theology, in which salvation meant joining an enduring family of God. He reads marital sealing as a way of building a network of belonging that reached beyond biological families, rather than treating sexuality as the whole explanation.
history · religious studies · Executive Director, Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, Brigham Young University
Fluhman interprets Helen Mar Kimball’s sealing as a link between the Kimball and Smith families within Nauvoo’s vision of an extended eternal family. He discusses the pressure Helen recalled and her later religious interpretation of the marriage, while holding that the surviving record does not settle whether it was consummated.
Brodie argues that Smith’s desire to move beyond exclusive monogamous marriage helped shape his developing theology. Her account links personal motives with the construction of a religious system that made plural marriage meaningful and permissible to him.
In their coauthored book, Laura and Brian Hales interpret Smith’s plural marriage as a religious commandment whose implementation was difficult and imperfectly documented. They distinguish the instruction to establish the practice from the decisions made while carrying it out.
history · religious studies · sociology · Professor Emeritus, School of History and Sociology, Georgia Institute of Technology
Foster interprets Mormon plural marriage alongside Shaker celibacy and Oneida complex marriage as experiments in religious and social revitalization. His comparative approach asks why participants adopted these systems and how they worked in terms of the participants’ own goals.
Merina Smith argues that the secret introduction of plural marriage developed alongside a public religious narrative that made acceptance of the practice intelligible to participants. She examines how teachings about salvation changed together with the practice, rather than treating an already complete theology as its sole cause.