Joseph Smith, Polygamy, and the Levirate Widow

1. See especially Fawn M. Brodie, No Man Knows My History (New York: Knopf, 1945); Louis J. Kern, An Ordered Love: Sex Roles and Sexuality in Victorian Utopias—The Shakers, the Mormons, and the Oneida Community (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981); Lawrence Foster, Religion and Sexuality: The Shakers, the Mormons, and the Oneida Community (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 123-80; and Richard Hughes and Leonard Allen, Illusions of Innocence: Protestant Primitivism, 1630-1875 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). While M. Guy Bishop, “Eternal Marriage in Early Mormon Marital Beliefs,” Historian 53, no. 1 (Autumn 1990): 77-88 correctly draws attention to the relevance of eternal marriage to the question of polygamy, his treatment is limited and dated.

2. In this essay I expand and further contextualize the brief overview of this topic in my book In Heaven as it Is on Earth: Joseph Smith and the Early Mormon Conquest of Death (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 237-38. I originally presented a version of this paper at the American Academy of Religion meeting in San Francisco, November 2011.

3. Brown, In Heaven, 11, 124, 245, 260. I’m mindful of Charles L. Cohen’s apt observation that I explored insufficiently the question of marvelous literalism in prior work; this essay is a partial attempt to flesh out more of what I mean by marvelous literalism. See his review of In Heaven in Mormon Studies Review 3 (2016): 170-73.

4. I explore these topics in detail in a book in progress currently titled Joseph Smith’s Metaphysics of Translation.

5. Luke 20, Matthew 22, Mark 12. Matthew largely follows Mark.

6. On the nature of angels, see the essays in Peter Marshall and Alexandra Walsham, eds., Angels in the Early Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). For many centuries, a tension persisted between the concept of angels as the holy dead versus angels as a distinct type of creation from humans.

7. Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang, Heaven: A History, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 58, 92, 155, 258 and Brown, In Heaven, 205-08.

8. On evolving family structures, see, e.g., Stephanie Coontz, The Social Origins of Private Life: A History of American Families, 1600-1900 (New York: Verso, 1988).

9. Although precise estimates are difficult to obtain, as of the 1900 US census for men under fifty-five, there was still one currently widowed man for every ten currently married men, while the rates of widowhood were higher still. My analysis of data presented in David Kertzer and Peter Laslett, eds., Aging in the Past: Demography, Society, and Old Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 254. Although data aren’t available, the numbers from the 1900 census are certainly an underestimate for the early nineteenth century.

10. Schrödinger’s Cat is a classic thought experiment meant to exemplify the disquieting disjunction between subatomic and Newtonian events in quantum physics. In it, the prominent physicist, Erwin Schrödinger, wondered over the fate of a cat (a Newtonian object) whose life depended on radioactive decay (a quantum event). Given certain assumptions about quantum probability, the decay event was held to depend on the act of observation, suggesting the bizarre (im)possibility that a cat might be both alive and dead, trapped indeterminately in a field of quantum probability, like a subatomic particle. Erwin Schrödinger, “Die gegenwartige Situation in der Quantenmechanik,” Die Naturwissenschaften 23:48 (29 November 1935): 812.

11. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich explored these themes in her 2015 Mormon History Association Presidential Address, “Runaway Wives 1840-60.”

12. Cited and discussed in Phyllis Mack, Heart Religion in the British Enlightenment: Gender and Emotion in Early Methodism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 105-08. I thank Christopher Jones for bringing this source to my attention.

13. See, e.g., Wesley’s Notes on the New Testament or Henry’s one-volume Commentary or Clarke’s New Testament.

14. Stephen Fleming proposes evidence of the levirate practice in the Book of Mormon’s sole reference to polygamy in Jacob 2, but the anti-libertine sermon of Jacob 2 is more straightforwardly a reference to the story of Abraham and Hagar, in which God allows Abraham to father children with Hagar because his wife Sariah is barren. See Stephen Joseph Fleming, “The Fulness of the Gospel: Christian Platonism and the Origins of Mormonism” (PhD diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2014), 368-89, which argues that Genesis 16 is the relevant precedent for Jacob 2, then posits a fanciful connection to John Dee’s diary. While I’m sympathetic to the levirate narrative in general, Jacob 2 (expanded at length in D&C 132:30-37) more clearly refers to Hagar and Abraham (see Brown, In Heaven, 238).

15. The connection between resurrection and marriage is central to the second temple anointing, and that ritual connection encouraged the flourishing of an early Mormon belief that men would resurrect their wives at Christ’s Second Coming. On humans resurrecting each other, see Brown, In Heaven, 91-97, 199-200.

16. On metaphysical correspondence, see Jonathan Z. Smith, Map is not Territory: Studies in the History of Religions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 132 and Catherine L. Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008), 6, 13-16, 26-27, 141, 147, 164.

17. Brown, In Heaven, 229, 232-33.

18. Doctrine and Covenants [1835], 251.

19. Andrew F. Ehat, “Joseph Smith’s Introduction of Temple Ordinances and the 1844 Mormon Succession Question” (MA thesis, Brigham Young University, 1982), 126-27. See also Brigham Young, Address, Oct. 8, 1866, CHL.

20. Franklin D. Richards, “Scriptural Items” Notebook, LDS CHL, Aug. 12, 1843. I thank Don Bradley for bringing this source to my attention.

21. Hyrum Smith, [Conference Minutes], April 8, 1844, Richard E. Turley, Jr., Selected Collections from the Archives of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 2002), 1: DVD 1, 6:1985-88.

22. Bishop, “Eternal Marriage,” 87-88. See also Lyndon W. Cook, Nauvoo Marriages Proxy Sealings 1843-1846 (Provo: Grandin, 2004), 56-57 et passim.

23. On adoption in this period, see Jonathan Stapley, “Adoptive Sealing Ritual in Mormonism,” Journal of Mormon History 37, no. 3 (Summer 2011): 53-117.

24. “An Important Testimony,” Deseret News, Feb. 6, 1886 includes an affidavit dated Jan. 31, 1886, in which she laid out the plan to have Hyrum devote new offspring to her dead husband at the time of resurrection.

25. Joseph Smith’s widows (who chose to remain in polygamy) are the best-known cases of this phenomenon. See, e.g., Cook, Proxy Sealings, 55.

26. The Nauvoo Neighbor extra (Jun. 17, 1844), quoted here, contains a reasonable typescript of the manuscript minutes, albeit with minor shufflings and clarifications.

27. In some respects, Smith’s use of the precedent of polygamy among Bible patriarchs was a complement to this claim about remarriage after bereavement. See D&C 132:1, 34-39.

28. Revelation dated Jul. 27, 1843 at LDS Church History Library in Salt Lake City.

29. For a review of polyandry generally, see Katherine Starkweather and Raymond Haynes, “A Survey of non-Classical Polyandry,” Human Nature 23, no. 3 (June 2012): 149-72. In that account, polyandry is generally a system, mainly in hunter-gatherer societies, in which a primary male spouse recruits other male spouses—often his blood kin—to limit the fracture of agricultural inheritances or to assure protection of offspring during frequent absences. In some instances, polyandry is associated with multiple fatherhood, in which more than one man is simultaneously considered father to a child (recall that older societies did not share our understanding of the biology of human reproduction). In early Mormon polygamy, dual wives had a low-status/civil husband and a high-status/sacerdotal husband, and the first husband generally was the lower status one. When offspring resulted, the children were not considered to have two fathers.

30. Fleming, “The Fulness of the Gospel,” 351-85. Fleming’s notion that Smith was in some way recapitulating the shared wives of Plato’s Republic strikes me as far-fetched at best.

31. On dual wives, see Brown, In Heaven, 242-43.

32. Brown, In Heaven, 260-61.

33. Brown, In Heaven, 92-93.

34. Kate Holbrook and I explore this topic in “Embodiment and Sexuality,” in Terryl L. Givens and Philip L. Barlow, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Mormonism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 292-305.

35. The scandalous question of who had sex with whom has activated considerable debate, mostly but not entirely informal and online, but that line of inquiry strikes me as basically orthogonal to the important religious and conceptual questions.

36. On marital sacramentalism, see Kathleen Flake, “The Development of Early Latter-day Saint Marriage Rites, 1831-1853,” Journal of Mormon History 41, no. 1 (January 2015): 77-103.

37. In general, this status fell primarily on Joseph Smith’s widows, who were remarried sacerdotally for time only with his polygamous heirs, generally the apostles.

38. On waning spiritual authority for women, see, e.g., Catherine A. Brekus, Strangers & Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740-1845 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1998). Seneca Falls would occur in 1848, and female suffrage in the US wasn’t fully granted until 1920.

39. On unthinkable things, see, e.g., Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 428-29.

40. The term super-nova in this sense belongs to Charles Taylor. On secularity, see his Secular Age, 300, 377, 412, and 423ff.

41. On Mother in Heaven, see Susanna Morrill, “Mormon Women’s Agency and Changing Conceptions of the Mother in Heaven,” in Women and Mormonism: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Kate Holbrook and Matt Bowman (Salt Lake: University of Utah Press, 2016), 121-35. On women as priestesses/goddesses within the Mormon temple cultus, see Flake, “Early Latter-day Saint Marriage Rites,” 88-94, 102 and Kathleen Flake, “Ordering Antinomy: An Analysis of Early Mormonism’s Priestly Offices, Councils, and Kinship,” Religion & American Culture 26, no. 2 (2016): 155-66.