Purpose of Polygamy?

I will state up front that I am not in favor of polygamy. That said, I do not deny that Joseph Smith, Jr. engaged in polygamy. One of my ancestors, in fact, signed an affidavit affirming that he was present when Hyrum Smith carried forth and read the revelation on polygamy which Joseph Smith had dictated. Thus I am not in favor of Denver Snuffer's position that Joseph did not practice polygamy, and I take strong exception to him attacking contributors to the Joseph Smith Papers Project for publishing evidence of Joseph Smith's polygamist practices.

Still, like many others, I feel the need to understand Mormon polygamy as part of the Restoration tradition. I still don't condone it, and I don't think that Joseph Smith, Jr. himself practiced polygamy responsibly, even by the standards he claimed God had revealed to him. So, I refuse to feel obligated to justify something I fundamentally do not agree with. On the other hand, I take Joseph Smith seriously enough that I cringe at people lazily ascribing Smith's practices to sheer libido. In other words, this excuse for an argument would be that Joseph wanted to justify his desire and weakness for having sexual relations with women other than his wife Emma.

Here, then, is my attempt to make some sense out of polygamy. It won't be long, at least at this stage. Thus far I simply want to set down something like a placeholder for future arguments, if these ideas hold up at all well.

Don Bradley has argued that Joseph Smith initiated polygamy partly through restoring the principle of levirate marriage. Joseph Smith married Emma in order to "raise up seed unto" the deceased Alvin Smith, and the first child of that union was named Alvin, after the deceased brother. This was a new twist on levirate marriage. Usually, in levirate marriage according to the Biblical model, a man married his brother's widow to raise up seed unto the dead brother. Alvin had not been married to Emma, but Joseph believed that Alvin was supposed to be present when he retrieved the Gold Plates. So, Joseph needed to find a way to bring Alvin with him. That way was through this modified levirate marriage to Emma. Joseph Smith may have expanded this modified levirate marriage beyond those who were brothers by blood to other forms. A tantalizing possibility here is that Joseph married Lucinda Morgan, the widow of the Masonic traitor William Morgan, to raise up seed unto William Morgan.

Bradley's argument regarding Smith's practice of levirate marriage is an interesting and attractive theory. We know that Joseph Smith looked to Biblical models for his practices, and that this method was part of what he meant by the Restoration. My argument is not based on a historical understanding of what Joseph Smith thought he was doing in life when he practiced polygamy, but what one might understand the purpose of polygamy to have been in retrospect. Building on earlier arguments presented on this blog, I propose that the purpose of polygamy was to ensure the salvation and exaltation of those families Joseph connected himself to by marriage and to establish a larger anchor for the highest priesthood before Joseph's death.

As D. Michael Quinn argued in the first volume of Mormon Hierarchy, Joseph Smith, Jr. had the priesthood by birthright. What this means is that Smith, unlike others, was born with the priesthood. This also means that he passed on the priesthood to his children at birth. The sealing power enabled him to seal individuals and families to him, thus also connecting these individuals and families to him and his priesthood. According to D&C 132:19, those who entered into the new and everlasting covenant and kept the covenant would have a "continuation of seeds forever and ever." One might imagine this continuation of seeds occurring in a kind of sexual bliss of the afterlife, but another alternative here is to imagine the continuation of familial and ancestral bonds linking back to Joseph Smith, who had used the sealing power as a tool to bring the blessings of his ancestral priesthood to others.

We have some evidence of Brigham Young's acceptance of the doctrine in Brigham's move to have himself sealed to Joseph Smith in 1846, after Smith's death, according to a new practice called the "law of adoption." Brigham had himself adopted to Joseph for practical reasons. First, those who were connected to Joseph Smith by blood or sealing might argue that they outranked Brigham in a sense, and that would imperil any future plans he might have had to take his place as leader of the church Joseph founded. Joseph Smith's living family were obviously Brigham's potential competitors, and they knew it. Secondly, Brigham may have truly believed that he needed to be sealed to Joseph, at the very least, if he were going to possess/exercise Smith's ancestral priesthood both to insure his own salvation and exaltation and to lead the Church Smith had founded. Brigham claimed that in 1847 he conferred with the deceased Joseph in a dream about the law of adoption, probably to suggest that Joseph approved of both the law in general and his own proxy adoption of Brigham specifically.

I will not opine on whether such a dream took place or whether the law of adoption is legitimate. It seems to me that the law of adoption was Brigham's practical measure to insure the continuation of the church and all of its ordinances, partly because it was clear to those who had participated in the highest ordinances and councils when Joseph was alive that the post-assassination leadership of the Quorum of the Twelve under Brigham's presidency was shaky and needed buttressing. The important point in my argument is that Brigham Young felt he had to forge a familial connection to Joseph Smith through the sealing power before he could move forward with his plans. This perceived need also suggests that those who came to have all the keys through the second anointing and who were already connected to Joseph Smith, Jr. through the sealing power had as much of a claim to exercise all the keys legitimately through Joseph Smith as Brigham did.

Behind Joseph's polygamy lay the need to connect others to his ancestral priesthood. One might argue that Brigham Young's ability eventually to convince others that he was Joseph Smith's successor in every sense made the priesthood gains of Joseph Smith's polygamy a moot issue, but, if we take stock of where this has left the priesthood authority now, and we begin to trace our priesthood lineage back through those ancestors connected to Joseph instead of those who depended on Brigham's authority, that might provide another way forward for those in search of such an alternative. Polygamy will not have been in vain, but its purpose after the death of Joseph Smith would be uncertain. It may be that Mormon polygamy fulfilled its purpose by the time Smith was assassinated, and that there was no further need, after a point, to continue the practice, in contradiction of what many came to believe and do, largely because of Brigham Young's forceful leadership.