Brigham Young on Polygamy

So, here it is--the touchy topic. Part of understanding one's heritage is owning it--owning the darkness, the shadows, the mysteries, along with the light. Owning is coming to terms with it, accepting it and, still claiming it as your own. Still acknowledging that, despite the shadows, your identity is valid and what you hold to be true is still true. Not that I believe that polygamy is a shadow in my heritage. But I think that many people, both inside and outside the Church, believe it to be so. They are afraid of it. Until you face it and understand it, you cannot own it. And until you own every aspect of your heritage, it cannot truly be a part of you.

I am not an ignorant Mormon. I know our history. And I have owned it--all of it. I have owned apostasy, masons, gold hunts, Mountain Meadows--and polygamy. And let me tell you--polygamy was the easiest.

The early Saints practiced plural marriage because they were commanded to do so. The commandment was not received with joy--quite the contrary. It terrified them. Brigham Young said he would have rather died. When we talk about the revelation of plural marriage, we often miss the point: this doctrine came as a subset of a more important law: that of eternal marriage, marriage that does not end with death but continues forever. Forever! Forever marriages, linked into a web of forever families that bind the children of Adam and Eve together for eternity. That, brethren and sistren, is the point.

In 1892 when the federal government was placing immense pressure on the Church to abandon polygamy, officials seized the temples and threatened to close them to the Saints. This is the point where Wilford Woodruff turned to the Lord. And this is why most of the Saints willingly abandoned polygamy with little argument and dissension: why give up the higher law, the purpose of the law, for a lesser law? Celestial marriage was the point. Plural marriage was a subset.

But why would the Lord introduce plural marriage at all? We have had this lesson in Sunday school and seminary:
-restoration of all things (dispensation of the fullness of times)
-protect/care for widows and orphans during the exodus
-test/try/refine his people--build a foundation of faith and obedience
-seed

It is this last one that I want to talk about. The Lord wanted to build a strong, righteous people. There simply weren't enough early Saints to quickly multiply into a mighty people. I think this is also why Abraham and Jacob were commanded to obey this law--the Lord was building a righteous nation, and he only had a few righteous people to start with.

And this leads me to Brigham Young's defense of plural marriage:

“God never introduced the patriarchal order of marriage with a view to please man in his carnal desires, nor to punish females for anything which they had done, but he introduced it for the express purpose of raising up to his name a royal priesthood, a peculiar people….by the introduction of this law, I can be instrument in preparing tabernacles for those spirits which have to come in this dispensation. Under this law, I and my brethren [and sistren] are preparing tabernacles for those spirits which have been preserved to enter into bodies of honor, and be taught the pure principles of life and salvation, and those tabernacles will grow up and become mighty in the kingdom of our God."[The New York herald: NY-H no. 7266 (22 Jul 1856) p. 2, column 6, 3 col. in.]

There you have it, brethren and sistren. These wonderful, faithful Saints practiced polygamy for us. Their children; God's children. They made immense sacrifices by following this law, and they did it so we, the children of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, would be born into a legacy of faith and truth. All modern members of the Church should praise the names of these early Saints, who raised hundreds of fathers, mothers, and missionaries who gave us life and taught us the faith and truth that we will sustain and carry forward for generations to come.

I love pioneers!