Intro: 00:03 Welcome to Part II of this week’s podcast.

Kate: 00:07 So what I’m talking about here is verse 33 where Jesus says, “If you enter not into my law, you cannot receive the promise of my Father, which he made unto Abraham.” And I think what he’s talking about there is marriage. If you’re not married then you cannot receive the promise of my Father, which he made under Abraham. And you can see how that would be because how can you have seed if you’re not married? Or if you have seed but you’re not married then you’re not worthy of the Abraham covenant.

Kate: 00:41 But that’s tough and this is another place where we have to be relying on God and the atonement to make everything right. Because some people don’t have the opportunity to marry, for some people it’s not going to happen for a wide variety of reasons. For a lot of people this would not happen. And it makes me, frankly, it makes me not even want to talk about marriage because I can think about how painful it can be for a lot of people listening. But if we don’t talk about marriage then we lose sight of it as a guiding ideal that’s really important.

Kate: 01:18 And even in the secular world you find information about how important it is. There are studies that children do a lot better when their parents are married, it’s better for the rising generation. I was reading an NIH funded study this morning about how people who get married live longer. It’s good for us. There’s also a lot of evidence that when there’s a divorce, men become less happy and women become more happy. And to me that’s a call, that’s a call that we need to do better in our marriages and make them serve women as well as they serve men. But in addition to all of this spiritual growth that comes with marriage there are concrete practical reasons that even sociologists running studies see, that marriage is an important thing on a society level for us to pursue.

Hank: 02:24 Yeah. Well and I think what you did there, Kate, is yes, we’re going to talk about the ideal but let’s see people, let’s hear people, let’s make sure we acknowledge the pain that comes from living in a fallen world where the ideal often, you fall short of the ideal, that something happens. And I’ve thought of some of the incredible scholars we’ve had who were single, John, and just are incredible, incredible minds, people in every way, servants of the Lord, and yet this blessing isn’t available to them for some reason or another. I think Kate did an excellent job of like, “Let’s see this, let’s make sure we acknowledge this pain.” And I think the Lord does that too, right? But He doesn’t shrink from the ideal because of it.

John: 03:10 President Ballard recently gave that talk and acknowledged this huge group of our church, a large part of our Church, the single adult. Which is another, this can be a painful topic for them too.

Kate: 03:25 Over half of the members of Relief Society are unmarried, yeah. So that might be people who were married and are now widowed, but at this moment over half of the members of Relief Society are unmarried.

Hank: 03:43 Yeah. And Kate, wouldn’t you say the Lord is interested not just in this life but the next?

Kate: 03:49 Yes.

Hank: 03:49 That’s really a big part of this section is yes, in this life it can be very difficult and your choices, other people’s choices, the Fall, all of this can be very difficult, but he’s talking about an ideal in the next life which is going to be available to everyone.

Kate: 04:08 Yes.

Hank: 04:08 Anyone who wants it.

Kate: 04:09 I think we can hold that. We can hold our grief for people who don’t have this blessing in this life or who are married, sealed by the covenant and are miserable, or in an abusive situation. Like we hold their pain too. And at the same time we recognize that the commandments are to help our flourishing. And we have these commandments because for a majority of people marriage is a way to promote flourishing for the people involved and for the children. And if we have that ideal that also can help us work to make our own marriages places where both partners are flourishing.

Hank: 04:48 That was very well said. It seems like the next few verses can be potentially painful as well.

Kate: 04:55 Yes, it doesn’t get better.

Hank: 04:57 Yeah.

John: 04:58 Well I think yeah, with 33 was marriage and now we’re getting into okay, answering Joseph’s question, right?

Kate: 05:08 Yes. So I think of 33 is the last verse on marriage between one man and one woman. And now we’re getting into plural marriage.

John: 05:20 So here’s the buckle up part, yeah.

Kate: 05:22 Yes.

John: 05:23 And I built a foundation, now I’m going to answer the question you asked at the beginning after I built the foundation of what traditional one man, one woman marriage is. Jacob 2, it’s like 27 through 30. And when I look at verse 30 in there that’s like one of the only scriptural hints that we have of one of the possible reasons of plural marriage is that, “If I will raise up seed unto me I will command my people; otherwise they will hearken to these things.” The verses above, one man, one woman in marriage. So I’m glad you brought those verses up.

Hank: 06:01 The very reason Jacob brought them together was because they were using the scriptures to excuse themselves in marrying more than one, having more than one relationship. And Jacob is ready to bring down the hellfire on them for you can’t do this, this is not okay.

John: 06:18 Using David and Solomon whose names are going to come up here as a matter of fact.

Kate: 06:23 I’m glad John brought up those specific verses and read them. And that information about to raise up a righteous seed, we have allowed that in our imaginations to give us inaccurate understandings. I don’t know about you when you were on your missions, when I was on my mission I taught what my trainer had taught me, and it’s incorrect, and it was to say that the reason we had plural marriage in Utah is because there were more women than men. And so in order for all of those women to be able to be married there had to be plural marriage. And that’s not true, that’s incorrect. There were more men than there were women. But the thing that is correct is there were more righteous men than there were women.

Kate: 07:10 There were more men who took the Restored Gospel very seriously, and Church participation, and obedience, and all of that very seriously. So for a woman who wanted that kind of a relationship her choices were more narrow. I’m not saying that that explains plural marriage, but we also see that the descendants of those plural marriages, hardly any, if any, I’m trying to remember descendants of plural marriages that took place in Nauvoo. But there are definitely a lot of descendants that resulted from plural marriages in Utah, I’m one of them. And among them have been Church leaders for decades, for generations. So it did produce a righteous seed.

Hank: 08:02 Okay. Yeah, that’s really good. He starts out by coming back to Abraham.

Kate: 08:09 Yes, I’m glad you noticed. Yes. And these verses I think teach us important things about the practice of plural, which God wanted at this particular time. And one is Sarah gave Hagar to Abraham to wife.

Hank: 08:29 Yeah.

Kate: 08:29 God commanded Abraham and Sarah gave Hagar to Abraham to wife. I wish I could ask our listeners what they make of that.

Hank: 08:38 Yeah.

Kate: 08:41 What I think is Sarah had agency here, right?

John: 08:46 There was consent from-

Kate: 08:47 She might not have had a ton of agency but she gave her consent. And I think Jesus is setting this up as a model here that a first wife gives consent to other marriages. And the way this played out in Nauvoo was more complicated, this didn’t always happen. Nauvoo plural marriage is very different than Utah marriage. Plural marriage in Nauvoo, they were trying to figure it out. They knew there would be a lot of social opposition. They knew it could wound a lot of their loved ones. And they were keeping it secret as they tried to figure it out but the secrecy was really wounding too. So this part of it was not always, was sometimes but not always fulfilled in Nauvoo, including in Joseph and Emma’s own marriage.

John: 09:39 Really good point.

Kate: 09:41 In Utah it was more often, there’s still fallen people. There were still people who didn’t obtain the consent of their first wives to take on more wives, but the rule they were supposed to.

Hank: 09:54 Well it’s important here that God was involved, Sarah was involved. And that’s why he says they were not under condemnation, for I the Lord commanded it.

Kate: 10:07 Yeah, great, great point. That’s essential, that’s essential for this to be okay. And then it’s really strange because suddenly go back to Abraham in verse 36 but we’re not talking about plural marriage again. “Abraham was commanded to offer his son, Isaac; nevertheless, it was written: Thou shall not kill. Abraham, however, did not refuse and it was accounted unto him for righteousness.”

John: 10:32 I like that the Lord is bringing up this Abrahamic test as we’ve come to call it because I feel like plural marriage is kind of an Abrahamic test for the whole Church, and even for us today. Even for us today trying to make sense of this is kind of an Abrahamic test for some of us.

Kate: 10:52 Yes, absolutely. And a lot of the people who were alive during the time when the practice was part of the Church, they referred to it this way as an Abrahamic test. And why an Abrahamic test? Because it was as painful as having to offer up your son as a sacrifice. It was, I mean this was painful. All of the ideals that they had of romantic marriage, of the intimacy of marriage between two people instead of marriage among five people or more, they had to give up all of those ideals which were really, really valued and prevalent in society at that time. Even more so than now, now we all have a lot of other visions of marriage than they did back then. So this was tough, this was a big ask.

Hank: 11:45 Kate, I don’t know if you were going to bring this up later. I don’t want to steal it from you, but if I remember right when Joseph introduces this principle to Brigham, Brigham says, “It’s the first time I desired the grave.”

John: 11:55 Yeah, he saw a funeral and he envied the corpse that he saw in the funeral.

Hank: 12:01 He said, “I’d rather die than live this.”

Kate: 12:05 Yes.

Hank: 12:06 I hope I didn’t steal that from you but I imagine everybody felt that way.

Kate: 12:12 What I read is that nobody liked it. They all, I mean Hyrum, Joseph’s own brother, just resisted and resisted for years. A couple of years there.

John: 12:23 Hyrum was pretty upset with Joseph.

Kate: 12:26 And then imagine the women who heard about this because, usually because they were invited to be sealed to Joseph Smith. They hated it too but we’re on the foundation of God’s love and grace here in this section, and God did, He answered prayers. And not every woman said yes, and those women who said yes, they had spiritual experiences. Deep ones, profound ones letting them know that this was God’s will. So they didn’t have to go into this blind.

John: 12:58 Most women would have to have something pretty powerful. And so agency, consent still operative here is what you’re saying.

Kate: 13:08 Yes, yes, absolutely. And we always think about how tough it was on women and it was, and it was also so tough on men. This is not an easy thing financially or emotionally.

Hank: 13:21 Yeah. I want to make a note about verse 36 where he mentions this commandment to sacrifice Isaac. Just imagine that. We all have children, everyone listening probably has nieces and nephews or children, or just the idea that you’re going to sacrifice this child is horrific. And I think it was meant to be, it was meant to be a severe, severe test. I can’t imagine. Where Joseph Smith says this, he says, “That which is wrong under one circumstance may be and often is right under another. God said, ‘Thou shall not kill.’ At another time He has said, ‘Thou shall utterly destroy.’ This is the principle on which the government of heaven is conducted.” Revelation adapted to circumstance, revelation adapted to circumstance. “Whatever God requires is right, no matter what it is, although we may not see the reason till long after the events transpire.”

Hank: 14:25 I bring this up with a Nephi killing Laban in the Book of Mormon, that we’ve grown up with and so we’re pretty used to it. But someone who is a first time reader of the Book of Mormon might be horrified by the idea of Nephi killing Laban. And so I don’t think anyone needs to come into plural marriage feeling good about it like, oh, this is a good thing. I feel so warm and fuzzy inside. I don’t think that’s the Lord’s expectation, he’s just saying this is revelation adapted to circumstance. This is my law, this is how we’re going to do this. So I don’t know, I like the comparison with Nephi killing Laban that it’s an exception, not the rule. But you have to trust Nephi and trust the Lord that this is really from him.

Kate: 15:14 I think that’s another really powerful explanation for why we have this verse 36 that otherwise doesn’t seem to fit. And it’s because that is, the rule is do not sleep with anyone other than your wife, the person you’re married to, but then here’s a situation just like Abraham’s situation, just like Nephi’s situation where you do something different.

John: 15:38 I think that’s exactly why it’s in there.

Hank: 15:41 Wow, this is an intense scripture. Let’s keep going, Kate, keep walking us through this.

Kate: 15:48 So then we get several scriptures again looking to ancient prophets who had more than one wife. And it explains that most of them, “It was accounted unto them for righteousness.” They were not sinning when they did this because they were doing it according to God’s will. But then one of them did not do it according to God’s will, this is verse 39 with David. So at first it was okay it says, “In none of these things did he sin against me, save except in the case of Uriah and his wife.” And we know that’s Bathsheba. David sees her bathing, desires her, sleeps with her, and then doesn’t want to get caught so sends him to the front lines where-

Hank: 16:37 Uriah be killed.

Kate: 16:38 He’s sure to be killed.

John: 16:39 I remember the jaw drop that I had in seminary when I learned that the same David, hero David who slew Goliath, was this same David. I thought, “Wait, but no. But he slew Goliath!”

Kate: 16:54 Such a disappointment.

John: 16:55 So eight-foot giants are no problem but your own lust, oh man, that was a sad day.

Kate: 17:05 Yeah, yeah. And so we see what happens to him. David has fallen from his exaltation. He received his portion already, “He shall not inherit more out of the world.” God gave that portion, that heavenly, those thrones and principalities and powers, “those are given unto another person.”

Hank: 17:29 Now, Kate, correct me if I’m wrong here but I see in verse 39 the Lord saying, this principle I’m going to give you, plural marriage has very strict boundaries and you cannot cross those boundaries. This isn’t,  “Okay, do whatever you want” type thing if you want this. This is a strict law that we’re going to carefully hold in line. Is that, would I be correct in saying that in verse 39 this is very serious?

Kate: 17:56 I think that’s absolutely true. So I think we’ve learned two things so far, and the first is that the first wife should consent. And the second is this, that this is not a free for all. And the way this played out, the way my house is the house of order comes out in what we’re talking about now is you had to ask the prophet. You couldn’t practice plural marriage with authority unless you had Joseph Smith’s permission, and in Utah, Brigham Young’s permission.

Hank: 18:28 Isn’t that Joseph’s conflict with John C. Bennett? If John C. Bennett is seeing his, “Hey, I can do whatever I want here.” And Joseph is, “No, this is strict.”

Kate: 18:41 Yes. And John C. Bennett had not been brought into this story of Joseph, like he just heard rumors but he hadn’t been invited. Joseph Smith had not invited him to practice plural marriage, but he took those rumors and used them, and so did a few other of his friends, used them to seduce women saying I have… And because they were friends with Joseph Smith, women believed them. “I have authority, Joseph Smith has told me that I have authority to sleep with women that I’m not married to,” and did. And then those women had to come up on public trial. And we don’t know a lot of detail about plural marriage in Nauvoo because it was secret and people didn’t even write, most people, there are a couple of exceptions, didn’t even write about it in their journals. But we do have these court cases of people who were seduced and deceived.

Hank: 19:41 So because this could be so abused the Lord is putting very strict rules on it, and he uses David as an example.

Kate: 19:52 And another evidence of why we learned early in this section, “My house is a house of order.” You can see how high the stakes are with that by the time you get here.

Hank: 20:02 And I’m glad about that. I don’t know, there’s something about that that says, “Yes, I’m going to command this but this is a very strict, careful principle that we’re going to live.” It gives me confidence moving forward with this.

John: 20:15 I’d like to make sure and I want to restate something Kate said, so you had to be invited by the president of the Church, by the prophet to participate in this, whether that was Joseph or in Salt Lake, Brigham. But there were some who lied and said that they had been-

Hank: 20:35 Abused.

John: 20:37 Yeah. So I have heard percentages thrown around, I don’t know, maybe this isn’t the time to talk about it but about how many were actually practicing this in Salt Lake here for example, how many of the men of the church were practicing this in Salt Lake or Nauvoo. Do we know, do we have good numbers?

Kate: 21:00 We don’t have good numbers. Not for lack of trying, but the people who have looked very closely at this still feel that there are too many sorts of questions and not enough data to really come out with a secure number. We know it was not a majority of people, it was a minority of people. Especially a minority of men.

Hank: 21:29 That’s what I think Elizabeth Kuehn called, “Historical silence,” right? She said we’ve got to get used to historical silence.

Kate: 21:37 She has a lot of good phrases. Good, smart phrases. So we know there are clearly very specific ways to go about doing this, and then finally we know that agency is essential. And we see this in the way that Joseph Smith went about this. He didn’t tell women they were going to be sealed to him or to someone else, he asked them and he invited them to go on their own and think about it and pray about it. That was a very important part of this process.

Kate: 22:17 And let’s talk about when this revelation came. We talked about how this revelation came in July of 1843, but that is not the beginning of plural marriage. And again, there are a lot of question marks but it looks like Joseph Smith was probably in about 1833 sealed to what was probably his first plural wife. And we don’t know, with some unions because women spoke later in Utah, signed affidavits on this, we know there was a sexual relationship that was part of some of these marriages. And we also know that a lot of these marriages didn’t have a sexual component. And we also don’t have evidence of Joseph Smith having children with any of his plural wives. So what that ends up looking like is not all of these were marriages in the sexual sense. And even if they were marriages in the sexual sense it wouldn’t have been a lot or there would’ve been children resulting from the unions.

Kate: 23:25 So in 1843, he had this revelation because even though God told him to practice this 10 years earlier and he, more than 10 years, he resisted and resisted and resisted. And as he describes it an angel came to him three different times saying, you have to do this. And finally threatened him with death and destruction and problems, it’s a threat to his exaltation if he didn’t do this. He finally began to practice plural marriage but it was sort of a little bit at a time. And this period in Nauvoo is when he’s practicing it a lot more. He has a number of wives by the time this revelation comes. And that has led some people to speculate that he asked for this revelation in order to appease Emma, because there were times when she was aware of what was going on and she felt okay about it, felt like it was God’s will. And there were other times when it was so painful for her that she couldn’t stand it and she was against it.

Kate: 24:37 So when Joseph Smith received this revelation he already had some plural wives. He was in the Red Brick Store, which is such an important building–upstairs. And it was a store, so that’s important for the community, that’s where they could go to buy supplies and food. And upstairs is where they were studying together. I think at this point it was still only men who were preparing for the temple endowment, although that became women. Those early meetings were up here on the second floor, the Relief Society was formally organized and had a lot of their early meetings here on this second floor of the Red brick Store. So, this building is a big deal.

Kate: 25:19 And Joseph Smith was in his office there, and William Clayton is the one who was scribe, Joseph spoke the revelation and William Clayton wrote it down. And William Clayton said, he’s the one who said, “Well Hyrum came to Joseph and said Emma is still resisting this, so try to have a revelation, maybe that will help her.” But William Clayton is the source of that, so a lot of people have taken that to be the actual story. And it very well could be but I’m not 100% convinced that that is the story.

Hank: 26:02 Yeah. And Kate, will you correct this if I’m wrong because I love being corrected, actually. But a lot of what we know about Nauvoo doesn’t come until decades later when people are talking about it finally in the 1800, I don’t know, ’60s, ’70s. And as a historian aren’t I supposed to, I’m not a historian, but as I’m trying to be a historian aren’t I supposed to be a little bit more careful with memories that are 20, 30 years after the fact than I am with maybe a contemporary source? Can you talk about that just a little bit, that what we know about polygamy maybe comes from these later sources that as much as people, I don’t think they’re lying, I just think that memories can change over time?

Kate: 26:51 Yes, that’s absolutely true, Hank. Our best tools as historians are things that are written really close to the time something happened. So that’s journal entries, and letters, and even newspaper articles. And newspaper articles are good because they’re contemporary, they happened around or they were written around the same time as the event happened but they’re also secondhand, so they’re not perfect but they’re good. But really our job as a historian is to always weigh evidence, we try to triangulate. Maybe we can get a newspaper article, and a letter, and then a memoir, somebody looking back and telling the story 50 years later. And then we start to feel more confident about what really happened. And this is why our hands are tied. If we only have one source that says something it could be, I mean William Clayton was the scribe for this revelation, he was there. But we don’t have Joseph Smith and Hyrum Smith saying it.

Hank: 27:59 Yeah, writing it down right then.

Kate: 28:01 Yeah. We’re always weighing those things carefully.

John: 28:06 This is one of the things that just fascinates me about Church History and helps me extend mercy because the only sources we have are the only sources we have, and some are better. Those people aren’t here to defend themselves, they’re not here to be interviewed. And my dad once was a hero in a bad accident and the newspaper article that came out about it was complimentary, but there were so many errors about the facts that I just think sometimes it’s hard to know. And therefore we’re backed up against the wall of faith and asking the Lord to help us feel peace about things sometimes because we’ve got what we’ve got, but thankfully we have Revelation and the Holy Ghost to comfort us as well when we don’t get it.

Kate: 28:54 And because the newspaper writers have agendas too. My first experience being quoted, I did an interview, I was in graduate school, I was still young. And I thought I told a joke and in the newspaper article it came out that my joke ended up as the final lines of the article. And then 10 years later the reporter used it again.

John: 29:15 Oh my word.

Kate: 29:21 Yeah, we try to weigh things and keep all of this in mind. We try to be, we recognize bias, we recognize holes, and we try to have the best integrity we can have as scholars and grace. I really believe for every historian inside or outside of the church you want to be honest and you also want to give people the benefit of the doubt. Richard Bushman said so beautifully to one of his students who repeated it to me, just know that this person that you’re writing about, how will you feel about what you’ve written when you see them and shake hands with them in the afterlife? It’s just, it’s something we as Latter-day Saints keep in mind. And it doesn’t, I mean I believe those people would want us to be honest, it doesn’t mean we whitewash anything, but it does mean that we approach this with empathy and respect for their humanity.

John: 30:22 Beautiful.

Hank: 30:23 Oh, that is so well said. I tell my students I get my medical advice from trained doctors, I get my dental advice from trained dentists, and I get my history from trained historians. Not everyone is a historian, despite what the internet tells you not everyone is a historian. Just because they have a source doesn’t mean that they’ve done the work. This might be a good chance for us to talk about a new book that I think would be helpful for anyone who’s struggling, written by Brittany Nash, I think it’s called, John, you can help me out here.

John: 31:00 They’ve done a series, I think Brad Wilcox who we interviewed before did one on patriarchal blessings, they have count similar covers. And this one is just called Plural Marriage? Or is it-

Hank: 31:10 I think it’s called, Let’s Talk About Plural Marriage by Brittany Nash. I was listening to her interview on a podcast called All In, if anybody knows that podcast, which I really like so if anybody knows Morgan Jones who’s the interviewer on that podcast tell her good job from us here at followHIM. But I think that, I just thought the things she said were excellent. I just want to read something from her really quick, Morgan quoted this in her interview with Brittany. She says, “When I first began my journey studying polygamy, I was angry by what I saw as an injustice. That God required such a difficult principle to be lived by these faithful, tried people. But as I studied the personal writing, stories, and testimonies of polygamous, accepting them on their own terms,” that’s a lot what Kate just mentioned.

Hank: 32:02 She says, “I found peace. The practice could have never been sustained for a half century by compulsion, manipulation, or simple sexual desire. Those who set the foundation of the Latter-day Saint faith were not two-dimensional superheroes as they are sometimes portrayed, but they were complex, strong, intelligent, full-bodied kingdom-builders who were willing to leave loved ones, wealth, comfort, and native countries for what they believe to be true. This same willingness drove them to accept polygamy, a practice they accepted as a commandment of God, instituted in their time for his unique purposes.” And I’ll finish here, “I have since come to view plural marriage as part of the Latter-day Saint history to unapologetically own and to hold as one of the most valuable testaments of the faith in the history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” I love that.

John: 32:55 Boy, she should be a writer.

Kate: 32:56 I’m glad you shared that, Hank. She is a writer and she’s a great researcher. And she worked on this for a long, long time. You can trust the work she did on that book.

John: 33:08 Yeah. Well, you sold me, that is a beautiful way to put it. And to go to original sources, what did the people involved actually say? I’m so appreciative of that kind of a thing instead of all of us judging this decades later looking back and making our own judgments. So that’s a great one, Hank.

Hank: 33:29 That’s Brittany Nash, and you can listen to her podcast with Morgan Jones on All In, or you can pick up the book, Let’s Talk About Polygamy, or Let’s Talk About Plural Marriage. I think it’s one or the other. And I will say this too, John, you bring up a great statement in my mind from Maclane Heward. Do you remember Dr. Heward, when he came on way back Section 40 or something, back when we were brand new with this? And he said, “Please stop being offended on their behalf and start being inspired by them.” I’ve always remembered that, “Stop being offended on their behalf and be inspired by these people.” Read their stories, read what they actually have to say. All right, John and I have taken over too long, Kate, let’s go back to you and let you take over.

Kate: 34:10 No Hank, but that important quotation you just read also reminds me of our brothers and sisters of color say that same thing to white people who want to do the right thing but then end up making up things that are a little off the mark or defending them in ways that don’t feel true to them, the brothers and sisters of color. It’s the same thing, listen to them, listen to their voices, listen to their stories, their testimonies.

Hank: 34:42 Absolutely. I really like that, yeah. Okay, we’ve got, we’re about halfway through our section. Let’s keep going.

Kate: 34:50 If we look in verse 40 again we have that mention of, “I’ve given to thee, my servant Joseph an appointment and restore all things.” So again, we’re being reminded that this is a restoration, the most important thing to remember. Then we have all of these verses about adultery and what somebody thinks might be plural marriage isn’t plural marriage, it’s actually adultery. And some for those listeners, for those people out there who will read this carefully, you’ll see a little bit of contradiction. You’ll see that what it says here isn’t how it always played out in Joseph Smith’s practice of plural marriage. And so then again, I think we need to go back down here to verse 66 at the end. “And now as pertaining to this law, verily, verily, I say unto you I will reveal more unto you hereafter.” So that’s not only a sentence for us, it was a sentence for Joseph Smith himself. And it was a sentence for the Saints as life in Nauvoo wrapped up and they traveled west, and they kept staying with this principal in Utah, and plural marriage looked different then than it did in Nauvoo.

Kate: 36:04 And then in 1890 when Wilford Woodruff announced that there should be an end to plural marriage, that was very devastating for a lot of Saints who had sacrificed so much for this principle. And they felt not only the sacrifice, but they just felt it was a key thing that set them apart and was a crucial part of their testimony. To hear the prophet whom they would honor, because these were orthodox believers, say that this will no longer be a part of our system, that was a whole new trial. So continuing revelation or the way it says in here, “I will reveal more unto you,” that’s another really important thing to keep in mind in studying both this section and the practice of plural marriage.

Hank: 36:55 What a turnaround, that’s such a fascinating turnaround. It’s so hard to accept and then so hard to let go of.

John: 37:01 So hard to leave. I’d never thought of that, I thought they’d be glad that’s over. But it’s more like, but wait these are our families, these are our relationships, we have a testimony of it. Interesting.

Kate: 37:13 Yeah, yeah. And you get at something really important, John, that one of the reasons it was hard was because it threatened family bonds and it made some wives much more vulnerable financially, physically. It was another Abrahamic trial. Yeah, a test. And there were people who were very relieved. I just, I want to make sure we’re covering all of the perspectives.

Hank: 37:41 Kate, I think, and I want to ask this correctly, I think in our listeners mind, might be the fear that Joseph or Brigham is using this to get what they want. Is there anything in the historical record that says Joseph and Brigham or any others were, didn’t think this was from God, they knew it wasn’t from God and they were just kind of sneaking in something because they knew the people would buy it. I just want to calm that fear coming from anyone. Is there anything in history that says they were trying to pull the wool over someone’s eyes?

Kate: 38:16 No, no. I mean nothing in any letter, nothing. It’s very clear to me that this was something that they believed God wanted, didn’t just want, but commanded them to do. And also Kathleen Flake is the one who first mentioned this perspective so I’m roughly quoting her, but there are a lot easier ways to have extramarital sex or to have sex with a lot of women than to marry them.

Hank: 38:50 And be responsible for the offspring and everything.

Kate: 38:52 I hope that’s not too coarse, but yeah. And to invent this elaborate, there are plenty of other religious leaders, not Latter-day Saints who also had vibrant sexual lives. They did not, they just did it.

Hank: 39:11 There’s no theology.

Kate: 39:14 There was no theology, there was no revelation, there was no explanation and bringing people in carefully and telling them and telling them to go and pray about it, there was none of that. This is an exceptional situation, this does not look like those other cases.

Hank: 39:31 I think that’s important to, thank you, Kate. I think that was very important for people that just kind of calm their fears a little bit, that Joseph isn’t the man they thought he was.

Kate: 39:41 I hope there were, there are a couple more fears I hope we could just talk about briefly. And one is the situation of Joseph’s youngest wife, and the other so you’ll remind me of it, is plural marriage in the afterlife. Because I know that’s maybe-

Hank: 39:58 That’s a fear, yeah.

Kate: 39:58 What people worry about the most right now.

John: 40:01 Well here comes agency again, right?

Kate: 40:04 Right.

Hank: 40:06 So did you want to talk about Helen Kimball and Helen for a second?

Kate: 40:11 Yeah. So Helen Mar Kimball was 14 when she married Joseph Smith. And some of us want to think, oh, people regularly got married at age 14 back then. Well that was young back then. It wasn’t unheard of and it was legal, but it was young. Joseph Smith didn’t approach Helen Mar Kimball, Helen Mar Kimball’s father approached Joseph Smith because he wanted through his daughter for his family to be sealed to Joseph Smith. And there’s an article on this by Spencer Fluhman, it’s available online, and it’s terrific so I highly recommend it for anybody who wants to look closely into this. And the theology, my husband Sam Brown has written a lot about this in different venues, including a book called, In Heaven As It Is On Earth. But it helps explain why plural marriage, it’s sometimes involved sex, and with Helen Mar Kimball we have her reminisces about plural marriage.

Kate: 41:16 We actually have a lot of records about her, which is great because she was so young that she’s the one that troubles us the most. She never mentioned there was a sexual component to this marriage. But we do know she suffered on account of it because she lost her hopes for romance and all those things a teenager has of who am I going to marry and what will my wedding be like and all of that, that was all gone for her. And she stayed, she lived for decades, she lived to be an old woman and she stayed faithful to the Church the whole time. Which I think helps, which I think is an important context for that union.

Hank: 41:55 When we hear these people, yeah. See them.

Kate: 41:58 Yes, yes.

Hank: 41:59 See her whole story.

Kate: 42:00 She didn’t run screaming. And I think I didn’t finish this thought, but plural marriage was a lot, we didn’t practice sealing then the way that we do now. Where you’re sealed, like my husband and I are sealed, and we were married in the temple so our children were part of the covenant with us. Or another couple can join the Church or get married in the temple after they’re married and then their children are sealed to them. That wasn’t, that came much, much later. Right now in the Church, sealings meant just being part of a family network with people that would help secure your salvation. And so this is why even there are women who were married, who were sealed to Joseph Smith while their husbands were alive, and that’s the way to make sense of that is maybe their husband wasn’t a member of the Church. And getting sealed to a really valiant person, especially the prophet, there are all kinds of people sealing themselves to the prophet, even after his death. Sealing themselves as a child, sealing themselves, all these other things.

Hank: 43:14 Right, they just want to be connected to him in an ordinance.

Kate: 43:16 They want to be connected to him and they want to be saved, and they saw being sealed to him as a way to secure their own salvation. So that is what Helen’s father was trying to achieve for their family. Helen then did have a choice about whether to enter this marriage. And it was something that she prayed about, but unlike some other women who entered plural marriages she said she had no angel appear, she did not have a large, brilliant revelation. She said she decided to enter this marriage because of logic, because it made sense to her for the things we were talking about, her own salvation and the salvation of her family. And her records say that it was difficult but she felt that she made the right choice in it also.

Kate: 44:11 And we, I know when I was 14 I would’ve been influenced. I don’t want to whitewash this, I would’ve been influenced by what my Bishop, let alone my prophet wanted me to do and what my parents wanted me to do. But it’s important to me still to honor the decision that she made. I mean Joseph Smith was also 14 when he had the First Vision. It’s important to me to honor the agency that she did have, the decision she made and particularly her legacy of staying, not just true to the Church, but really continuing to build Zion throughout her life.

Kate: 44:48 And one last thought on plural marriage in Utah is that not everyone said yes to it, and those who did not say yes to it were not excommunicated, they were not excluded. Sarah Kimball who was one of the founders of Relief Society, after the death of her husband she never married again, she didn’t become a plural wife, and she was one of our most important leaders in Relief Society for decades. She was a Relief Society President for decades, she helped Eliza R. Snow reestablish Relief Society throughout Utah because it was disrupted towards the end of the Nauvoo period. All praise to her, all of the people in the high circles were friends with her and honored her. So you could still be socially successful in Salt Lake and in the Church even while turning down plural marriage, I think that’s an important thing to understand.

Kate: 45:51 So really this was for these people, we’ve said it but I want to say it again, an Abrahamic test. It was very difficult. For some of them it worked out better than for others. Some women got along really well with their sister wives and they found they had some freedom to develop their talents. And they take turns caring for each other’s children and it really, it worked in a beautiful way. And other people didn’t get along well with their sister wives or there was a lot of jealousy over limited resources. So for a lot of people there was also pain.

Kate: 46:25 For Emmaline Wells, whose diaries are published, we’re continually publishing them and a lot of them are online now on the Church Historians Press Site. She’s a fabulous diarist, keeps very detailed diaries. And you can see in her diaries the pain that came from plural marriage, especially when she was married to Daniel H. Wells, whom she really loved. And she just wanted to have more time with him. They were both intellectuals and she enjoyed talking with him and exchanging ideas, but you also see her absolute faith that she was doing the right thing, that he was doing the right thing. And she’s devoted her entire life to building the church and supporting the gospel. So it’s important for us to honor the legacy of women and men who accepted this.

Hank: 47:15 Kate, what you just said reminds me of a quote from Brittany Nash, who I just mentioned earlier. It’s actually not a quote from Brittany Nash but a quote from a woman she studied who was in a polygamous marriage and a plural marriage, and her name is Martha Cragun Cox and this is what she wrote. She said, “To me it is a joy to know that we laid the foundation of a life to come while we lived in that plural marriage. That we three,” and she’s talking about the three women, “Who loved each other more than sisters. Children of one mother’s love will go hand in hand together down through all eternity. That knowledge is worth more to me than gold and more than compensates for all the sorrow I have ever known.”

Kate: 48:08 That’s beautiful. And that gets at something that, one of the things that plural marriage did was it opened people up, it broadened their sense of who they were responsible for. I think that’s a challenge we have today in our nuclear families is to really take seriously our responsibilities to our ward families, to the people beyond our nuclear family. Of course, we prioritize our nuclear family, but plural marriage was an effective way to get people to really look out for each other beyond themselves.

Hank: 48:41 Wow. Wow, wow, wow.

Kate: 48:44 And I wonder just as we finish up, there’s one more fear I know people have and so I wanted to address it. And maybe it’s the biggest fear people have now, especially female Church members in thinking about the afterlife and that is, will I be forced to practice plural marriage? What our current leaders have assured us is that nobody will be forced to practice plural marriage in the eternities. And what we know is that those foundational truths of God’s love and mercy, and that foundational truth of agency. So it’s not the gospel I believe in if people were, it’s not the gospel that exists in our scriptures and in our other holy texts if we were to be forced to participate in plural marriage.

Hank: 49:46 The Lord promises a fullness of joy, right?

John: 49:50 I have that elder Bruce R. McConkie said once, “Plural marriage is not essential to salvation or exaltation. Nephi and his people were denied the power to have more than one wife, and yet they could gain every blessing in eternity that the Lord ever offered to any people. In our day the Lord summarized, by revelation, the whole doctrine of exaltation and predicated it upon the marriage of one man to one woman.” And the reference is Doctrine and Covenants, Section 132:1-28, when he said that.

Kate: 50:24 So it’s a good reminder that there’s plenty of scriptural evidence in addition to the fact that plural marriage is not a prerequisite for salvation. I think the reason this is so painful to think about is because death is painful, the separation that comes with death. I remember my grandma, I grew up with my grandma and my grandpa died when I was five. And every once in a while she’d admit she was really worried when she died and he came to meet her that he would have another wife on his arm. It was a very real fear for her.

Hank: 50:59 Oh, wow.

Kate: 51:00 And even my cousin recently left a husband and she just worries, she’s young, she’s in her fifties, that by the time she dies they won’t have much in common anymore because they will have had such different perspectives for decades. With our human minds it’s poignant and it hurts. I remember myself when I was facing a life-threatening illness and was considering the possibility of my own death, theoretically I’d always thought I wanted, if I were to die I wanted my husband to take another wife for companionship, for all of these good things that we get through marriage. But when I thought about it in actual terms it was excruciatingly painful.

Kate: 51:44 And I think one sort of that’s helped me is in the business world or in my world too in the History Department at Church Headquarters, you know that a manager is sometimes privy to information that the direct reports to the manager just don’t have. Because that’s what a manager does, the manager has other conversations. And then the higher up you go the more that person is privy to information that the other people, the people who do more producing and less managing just don’t have. And so you learn that you don’t make your decisions based solely on your own experience and what you know, you need to check in with the people ahead of you because they have more information than you do. So in my job I know that my boss checks in with our Apostle advisors, so I know that he has a perspective and information that I don’t have.

Kate: 52:45 Well ,that is just a tiny little example of what you think about when you think of our relationship with God. God knows so much more than my boss, or the Church Historian, or even the Apostle advisors, right? God has all of the wisdom, all of the knowledge, all of the understanding. And so once again, we’re back there to that foundation of faith in God and God’s goodness. And if I think of every experience I’ve had when I have felt close to God, I have felt encouraged. I have felt peaceful, I have felt clear in my head, and I above all have felt loved. And that’s my tiny little experiences with God on earth, to be in his presence, to think about what the afterlife is out, what the different kingdoms are like. I think they’re just that experience of God’s love magnified over and over again, I don’t even know what exponent to use.

Hank: 53:45 Yeah. I love that. Trust the manager, he has the information, he’s going to take care of you. I like that. Kate, Dr. Holbrook, I think our listeners would love to hear from someone who has studied the history of the Church so in depth as you have for so long, you don’t look at it but for so long, what are your personal feelings towards Joseph Smith, his contemporaries, and the Restoration?

Kate: 54:16 I am so grateful that I’ve had the job I’ve had where I get to, my office is in the archive and I get to call up these documents, things in people’s handwriting, and think about how to include them in stories, and papers, and books that then the rest of the Church can have. And when I’m in my office with these records I feel guided by the Spirit so strongly. And sometimes it feels like I really feel the spirit of the person who created the document. Those experiences I have, sometimes it’s just not being able to find something I need and then have a missionary just stop by and wonder if I could use this and then it turns out to be just what I need, all of those everyday miracles that have happened throughout my career at the Church History Department have really taught me I have the knowledge. I know what’s in the sources now, but I also have some of those, like the spiritual testimonies of the people who made the records, both because they’ve written things down and because I’ve felt them with me.

Kate: 55:38 There is nothing to be afraid of in Church History, except maybe getting information from a bad source or getting only a little bit of information when you need more, you need more context and you need other sources. But when you see it through, and I can say this with the opportunities I’ve had to see things through and I think I’ve seen all the troubling things through in my own research, it all increases my faith. It all increases my wisdom. There’s nothing out there that I’m scared of. I know that God is in this Church. I know that our Savior is in this Church. I know that even this tricky revelation that we studied today, I know that God is in it, that Joseph Smith was a prophet, and that when we honor them and seek to go closer to them they’ll come closer to us. That’s where the truth is.

Hank: 56:41 John, it was a great episode of followHIM, man.

John: 56:45 It’s going to bless a lot of people. Thank you so much, Kate, for being with us today. You’ve blessed my life and have changed the way I will read and have marked this section forevermore.

Kate: 56:59 Well thank you so much for the kind words and for the opportunity to join you and talk about this.

Hank: 57:05 Yeah, it was time well spent. We hope that all of our listeners feel the same way. We can’t thank you enough for listening, we wouldn’t have a podcast if it weren’t for you. We want to tell you that we’re grateful. We want to thank our executive producers, Steve and Shannon Sorensen, and our production crew Will Stoughton, David Perry, Jamie Neilson, Lisa Spice, and Kyle Nelson, and we hope all of you will join us on our next episode of followHIM.