I was once assigned to this guy in Poland. Soon after his baptism, his friends gave him a newspaper and showed an article about Joseph Smith. I was familiar with the text (I have co-authored many news reports in my career), so I was excited to see his reaction when he gets hit by the revelation that the Prophet had wives besides Emma. He was shocked indeed. I immediately through another punch by tempting him that polygamy is never acceptable. I told him that the only reason a man marries more than one woman is to satisfy his sex drive. He heard it and was troubled by it. Sweet! I almost started celebrating another success, but then he started remembering how his prayer was answered. The evening when God told him that He had sent Joseph and called him to be his prophet. But a testimony works the best when it is supported by intellect. One of his friends in the Church reminded him that some ancient prophets also practiced plural marriage. This comforted him enough. Imagine how disappointed I was when the Polish dude decided to put the topic of polygamy aside and focus on the basic principles of the gospel instead.
I had to wait 4 more years before he decided to return to the subject. He was a student at BYU at that time, fascinated with Church history. His professor approved the topic he proposed for his paper – something about women who witnessed the introduction of the principle of “Celestial marriage”. He spent long hours in the special collections section of the BYU library reading letters and diaries of those faithful women. He still doesn’t know for sure why the Lord commanded the Saints to practice plural marriage, but he learned two things:
1. Those women really believed it was given by direct revelation. First, to the Prophet Joseph Smith and then to each of them individually. In some cases - by heavenly messengers.
2. The practice did make the women happy. Not all of them, of course. Monogamous relationships don’t always make women happy, either. But many spent the rest of their lives defending Plurality of Wives and preaching the principle to others.
So, yeah, that didn’t work. Sadly, the guy wasn’t special in any way. Millions of others refused to listen to my appeals to their decency, my arguments that polygamy isn’t fair, it makes the genders unequal, etc. I count on their lack of imagination, on their natural tendency to consider only one conclusion – the most negative one, of course. I try to make them forget that God’s ways are not man’s ways. It is impossible for a human to fully comprehend how God thinks, how He feels. A man cannot fully understand the attitude of a divine Being. I try to catch them off guard, when they don’t study the scriptures, don’t occupy their minds with the Plan of Salvation. If they don’t regularly refresh their knowledge and testimony, they are likely to forget that their goal is to become like Heavenly Father. Consequently, when the Saints are exalted, they will not think and feel the same way they do now. Why then worry about how a sister who was a plural wife in 1850s will feel as an exalted being in the Celestial Kingdom? This is something impossible to comprehend right now, because humans are not exalted beings.
Abraham’s wife, Sarah, before she finished her second estate, was not very happy about her husband’s relationship with Hagar. She felt jealous. That’s understandable. But we can safely assume she is not jealous anymore. We know she is now an exalted being, a goddess. She is experiencing the fullness of joy even though she shares her husband with at least one other woman.
So, all that worry by today’s women about the eternal unhappiness which awaits plural wives is hasty. Speculating about thoughts and feelings of an eternal being by a being who lives in time is as pointless as a crawling larva trying to imagine what it is like to fly like a butterfly. And if they read the accounts of faithful plural wives from the 19th century Deseret, they would know at least this: that many women did like polygamy. Utah feminists organized anti-government protests defending their right to practice polygamy. And no, they were not brainwashed. They were some of the finest and brightest people in America.
Polygamy is one of those aspects of The Church of Jesus Christ’s history I like to work with, because it takes some imagination and faith to accept something so difficult to understand. Actually, the practice of plural marriage is impossible to understand for a monogamist, just as marriage is impossible to understand for a single person. The only advantage a single who tries to understand what it is like to have a family over a 21st century monogamist trying to understand polygamy is that he can visit his parents and see the blessings of being married. He doesn’t even have to visit them. He spent almost two decades watching his parents loving each other, working together, enjoying countless of happy moments, etc. And he still has very little idea what it is like to be a husband, wife, dad or mom. As long as time travel is impossible, people can’t go back and watch brother Brigham or brother Taylor interacting with their wives or the women living in the same household interacting with each other.
So, I take advantage of that. I take people from reading the scriptures or listening to general conferences and encourage them to speculate about an aspect of Church history which is impossible for them to understand. And I often use the internet to remind them about the inaccessible past. Tragically (for me), it doesn’t always work. Paradoxically, they often lose their concern after using the same internet the right way, to study critically, not believing all the speculations they read. They persistently digg deeper and deeper, until they find more facts which shed greater light on the matter.
Fortunately for me - many things have not been recorded. If Nauvoo and later Salt Lake City had millions of cameras and microphones installed on streets, in living rooms and offices or other places where the leaders of the Church ever spoke, and if those devices were sensitive enough to detect thoughts, emotions and revelations, only then we could know what really happened and how (and we would still not be able to know what it was like to live back then). Historians deal with incomplete information. They have to do a lot of guessing. And if their attitude about the Church is negative – their guessing will be negative. Even those who are faithful Latter-day Saints, if they make the mistake of judging the past by today’s standards – their conclusions will be flawed.
I use those information holes and combine them with the delightful human habit of assuming the worse. If something is not clear, I tell my client: See? Joseph’s intentions were immoral. And he buys it, because he has never learned in school how to think critically, how to consider possibilities, how to look for answers and when appropriate – give the benefit of doubt. He lets his doubts turn into the crisis of faith. I don’t stop at that point yet. Every intelligent person asks questions and sometimes doubts. My work isn’t done until his testimony is gone. That’s when I start celebrating.
The subject of polygamy works the best, but there are other aspects of Joseph Smith’s life that humans cannot know much about, thus giving me the opportunity to make up some funniest and most unfavorable stories by either making things up or distorting facts – magic stones, walking on water, freemasonry, mental illness which allows to hypnotize his followers, alien abductions, and many other silly things. Almost as silly as the lies I used long ago in Jerusalem to distort the image of Jehovah into something that looked more my boss.
You might say that all my efforts are in vain because the current dispensation will not end with another apostasy. You might also rub my face with the prophecy that all nations will speak good and evil about Joseph Smith, making the point that nothing is new, everything is going according to God’s plan. As much as I hate to admit it – yes, you are right. But I can still get some of you people on my side. I won’t stop while I still can. I don’t have much time left, so I will leave it here and get back to work.
Yours truly,
devil
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