How We Teach Polygamy is Contributing to Modern-day Sex Abuse

The LDS church is becoming more forthright with its history of polygamy. Going away are the hand wavy stories about it being primarily for widows who lost their husbands crossing the plains (because somehow God couldn’t think up a church welfare program to feed and clothe the single moms that didn’t require them to also have sex with their priesthood leaders). This past week the church released a new section on their website called “Plural Marriage: Faith to obey a law from the Lord, even when it’s hard” for kids, a rather whitewashed version of history complete with cartoon images, as if this was all a fun children’s story instead of systematic and institutionalized sexual abuse of women and girls.

To anyone who has previously gone down the rabbit hole of polygamy, this particular retelling will sound a bit absurd. If you don’t have the energy to read the whole cartoon story right now, I’ll summarize it for you.

It (basically) says: “Joseph Smith was reading the Bible and didn’t understand why some prophets had multiple wives, so unlike the many other barbaric biblical practices of rape, incest, genocide and slavery, he decided to ask God if he was supposed to do it, too.

It was really hard for Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. They didn’t want to collect women into their eternal harems via a loophole in the law of chastity that commanded them to sleep with dozens of women and girls other than their legally and lawfully wedded wife, but they reluctantly obeyed.

Joseph was sometimes commanded by God to command other men to give him their own wives, but the prophet’s heart was moved with compassion for his brethren when he saw the pain polygamy caused these men. Concerned for them, he would permit them to give him one of their teenage daughters instead.”

Actually, I quit. You get the idea! If you want to read it go to the church website for the official version – it’s very short. The main gist is that early church leaders didn’t come up with the idea, they were super reluctant to do it, and also…let’s not talk about any details.

Below are some clips from the story. It’s genuinely wild how much is left out.

This type of explanation for predatory behavior works literally nowhere else, and when you hear it in a slightly different context it is absolutely horrifying. For example: 

Serial killer Ted Bundy was reading his scriptures one day when he noticed how many men of God were called to murder people. Nephi reluctantly killed Laban, Ammon had to violently cut off the arms of men and watch them bleed to death in complete agony, and Noah watched all of his friends drown in terrifying watery deaths. Why did God want his prophets to be so comfortable with gruesome death?

Ted decided to pray and ask God about this question. 

God told him it was right and necessary that those prophets killed people, and asked Ted if he would be willing to do the same. Ted didn’t want to kill anyone, but he trusted in God and killed dozens of women anyway. 

People didn’t always understand that it was God who had called him to be a killer, and they persecuted him. When he was arrested, faithful members of his branch wrote him comforting letters as he suffered in jail.

(Psst – did you know that Ted was baptized into the LDS church during his killing years, and people in his branch turned out to support him when he was arrested? This is an actual card his branch members sent to him to encourage him when he was taken into custody. Just because faithful members support a person in jail doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be in that jail! (From the Netflix documentary “Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes”.) Anyway, continuing on…)

Ted was martyred by those who didn’t understand his calling and hated him.

Ted didn’t want to hurt all of those women, but he was obedient and did what God told him to do – even though it was hard for him.” (Notice how uncomfortable this type of explanation sounds when used for literally anything else.)

Worst of all, guess who takes advantage of the church’s unwillingness to call out the sex abuse of women and girls by its early prophets? Modern day sexual predators in the church!

I unfortunately once associated closely with a convicted sex predator as a student at BYU almost 25 years ago. He was a recent convert in my freshman ward who’d joined the church after his Mormon high school teacher taught him about obscure early church history – including polygamy. My ward (full of inexperienced teenagers) mostly saw him as kind of quirky and embraced him as a new convert with a non-supportive family. I felt bad for him and his difficult childhood, and even accompanied him as his moral support when he paid a surprise visit to his father who had abandoned him as a child. He was already an expert at grooming and manipulation by the time he left to serve his mission. I eventually cut him out of my life but still feel the scars of my own association with him almost 25 years later.

Around the age of 28 he was married, graduated from BYU, living in another state and about to finish law school when he was arrested in Utah County (where I lived). One day a free newspaper arrived in my mailbox and as I tossed it onto my kitchen table his mugshot stared up at me from the front page, taking me by surprise. He’d been arrested after flying to Springville to meet a 15 year old girl for sex. He’d begun communication with her when she was 14 and had been out to Utah to visit her before, but this was the time he was caught.

She was a Mormon girl in Utah, and he was an older married man in Illinois. How did he convince her it was okay? By telling her that Joseph Smith also married 14 and 15 year old girls! He’d convinced her he loved her and promised to marry her in the temple someday. My heart shattered for that girl (who is a woman in her late twenties now). She was a child dealing with an adult psychopath who used her youth, religious beliefs, and the abhorrent history of Mormon church leaders to manipulate her into fulfilling his predatory sexual desires. 

This man was convicted of sex abuse and went to prison for years. I looked him up on the internet and found him with a big smile in his current sex offender registry photo, as if it was a dating profile image. I resisted the urge to chuck my phone across the room when I saw his face. He does not seem to be ashamed of what he did at all. And why should he? He was just following the prophet, after all. 

This man is not the only one to be drawn to the church because of its teachings about polygamy or who has used it to victimize women and girls. There are countless news stories of seminary teachers abusing girls in their classrooms, bishops and young women in their ward, and even a mission president who convinced several sister missionaries they were called to be his plural wives. My friend Kristy Money is a psychologist who worked in the prison system rehabilitating sex offenders. She’s written op-eds in the Salt Lake Tribune on the topic of polygamy and sex abuse, such as “LDS history of polygamy still used to victimize women” and “LDS Church should make clear Smith was wrong to take 14-year-old wife” because of what she experienced professionally. 

Why are modern church leaders so reluctant to disavow something as obviously wrong as adult married men secretly courting underage girls? Why is the safety of young girls a sacrifice they’re willing to make to protect the reputations of men who have been dead for 150 years? Unfortunately, the only answer I can come up with is the obvious: if they admit their predecessors were wrong about polygamy, they’ll finally have to admit that they can be wrong about things, too.

***Our blog content is always free to read, but not to host. Help us keep our content up for many years to come by donating to our annual fundraiser!***