A Foreign Kingdom

Mormons and Polygamy in American Political Culture, 1852-1890

Christine Talbot

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780252095351
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The years from 1852 to 1890 marked a controversial period in Mormonism, when the church's official embrace of polygamy put it at odds with wider American culture. In this study, Christine Talbot explores the controversial era, discussing how plural marriage generated decades of cultural and political conflict over competing definitions of legitimate marriage, family structure, and American identity. In particular, Talbot examines "the Mormon question" with attention to how it constructed ideas about American citizenship around the presumed separation of the public and private spheres. Contrary to the prevailing notion of man as political actor, woman as domestic keeper, and religious conscience as entirely private, Mormons enfranchised women and framed religious practice as a political act. The way Mormonism undermined the public/private divide led white, middle-class Americans to respond by attacking not just Mormon sexual and marital norms but also Mormons' very fitness as American citizens. Poised at the intersection of the history of the American West, Mormonism, and nineteenth-century culture and politics, this carefully researched exploration considers the ways in which Mormons and anti-Mormons both questioned and constructed ideas of the national body politic, citizenship, gender, the family, and American culture at large.

CHAPTER 1

“That These Things Might Come Forth”

Early Mormonism and the American Republic

In the spring of 1820, a fourteen-year-old New England farm boy retired to the woods to seek guidance from God. The fervent religious sentiment stirred up by the Second Great Awakening had confused young Joseph Smith, Jr. God answered his youthful prayer with a series of visions over the next several years—visions that gave rise to the largest religion ever founded on American soil.¹ Before his death in 1844, Smith would articulate a broad cluster of controversial doctrines and practices that placed Mormons at odds with other Americans throughout the nineteenth century. In 1852, eight years after Smith’s death, his most controversial doctrine—plural marriage—would set the nation alight with debate. Polygamy, central to early Mormonism, fueled early anti-Mormon sentiment and accusations of political theocracy, which became more virulent as the century progressed. Yet despite conflicts with other Americans that led to the expulsion of Mormons from New York and Ohio, then Missouri, and finally Illinois, Mormons retained a special place for the United States in their theology. In fact, Mormons believed they had a divine mandate to uphold religious freedom as guaranteed by the Constitution.

This chapter delineates how a New England farm boy changed the religious landscape of America and lays the groundwork for understanding the ideological battle known as “the Mormon question” in the nineteenth century. Three years after his first divine encounter—an event known among Mormons as the “First Vision”—seventeen-year-old Joseph received a second divine contact in a series of visions revealing to him the location of ancient buried golden plates that he would eventually obtain, translate, and call the Book of Mormon. While translating, he received a number of revelations that were later compiled and published first as the Book of Commandments and later with further additions as the Doctrine and Covenants, accepted by Mormons along with the Bible and the Book of Mormon as scripture. In May of 1829, John the Baptist conferred upon Smith “the Priesthood of Aaron, which holds the keys of … baptism by immersion for the remission of sins.”² A higher priesthood, the Melchizedek, would come later. The next year Smith received a “Revelation on Church Organization and Government,” which “regularly organized and established agreeable to the laws of our country” the structure of priesthood authority and responsibility.³ Smith, then twenty-four years old, organized the Church of Christ on April 6, 1830, in accordance with that revelation. The initial organization had six members, though others joined the fledgling religion that same day. Over the next several years, Smith established the essential doctrines that governed priesthood offices, Church organization, and leadership in the young religion. Beginning almost immediately, local persecution of the Mormon community drove a series of migrations that would eventually lead the Saints to Illinois, where locals were temporarily more tolerant.⁴

In the relative safety of western Illinois, the Saints gathered their resources, purchased land, and purchased the town of Commerce, later changing the name to Nauvoo. In 1840 the Illinois legislature approved their application to be recognized under state law. The Nauvoo Charter incorporated the city and granted the Mormons an unexpected measure of self-government. The creation of a city council, courts, a city police force, and even a militia marked the beginning of the Church’s commitment to self-government and isolationism. Through the Nauvoo Charter, Mormons imagined they were securing local power to protect themselves against abuses of democracy and to shore up the true intentions of the American Constitution—religious liberty and self-government. Mormons viewed the Nauvoo city charter as a sort of Constitution in miniature, granting them broad powers of local control more consistent with republican principles. Previously, the law had not been friendly to Mormons, especially in Missouri, where the governor had issued an “extermination order,” in effect equating the Mormon settlements with an infestation. Presumably, with a city charter, things would be different. According to one Mormon historian, “By invoking primary bases of law, [Smith in Nauvoo] attempted to avoid what he termed rapacious and evil misuses of the law.”⁵

Plural Marriage and the Nauvoo Doctrines

In the relative quiet of Nauvoo in the early 1840s, Smith devoted more of his energy to the development of Church doctrine. Though initiated before 1840, the full doctrine of polygamy evolved during this period. Smith anticipated resistance from both Church membership and America at large, so at first only the highest Mormon officials were taught the doctrine and allowed to live its principles. Scholars of early Mormonism have hotly debated the place of polygamy in Mormonism for decades. But despite its being officially abandoned by the contemporary mainstream Church, polygamy fits in too neatly with other aspects of early Mormon theology, aspects which only make sense as part and parcel of each other, to be considered incidental to the overall theological system. Plural marriage was a key element within that system. While absolute secrecy surrounded plural marriage in Nauvoo, an air of mystery also enveloped the rest of the constellation of theological claims that surrounded polygamy, now known among scholars as the “Nauvoo doctrines.”⁶ The doctrine of plural marriage cannot be understood outside the following interrelated doctrinal concepts: the plan of salvation; priesthood and the powers of sealing, adoption, and ordinance work for the dead; and, of paramount importance, eternal increase.⁷ Smith taught these interconnected ideas mostly in private sermons and conversations, and no single doctrine took shape without the others; they were inextricably connected.

The “plan of salvation” outlined God’s divinely ordained agenda for His children. Smith taught that during a pre-mortal existence predating the creation of earth, human “intelligences” (roughly equivalent to the traditional Christian concept of “soul”) existed. Through divine processes, large numbers of intelligences were “spiritually born” as children of God the Father and endowed with a kind of “spirit matter” beyond mortal comprehension.⁸ After their spiritual birth, these spirits lived with God as his spirit children, before venturing into earthly mortality.⁹

Smith taught that God’s plan required a sojourn in mortality for two reasons. First, only a mortal body allowed participation in the physical ordinances and rites necessary for Mormon exaltation—baptism, the gift of the Holy Ghost through the laying on of hands, temple endowment, and sealing in the temple. These were physical ordinances not available to spirit beings. Second, mortal separation from God allowed agency and moral choice. By their choices all humankind would be judged and rewarded in the afterlife. Smith posited that nearly all humans would be saved by the grace of God, but he made a clear distinction between salvation and exaltation. Salvation meant eternal life, while exaltation meant becoming like God, indeed, becoming a god. Only the most righteous would be exalted in the celestial kingdom. Exaltation was attained, Mormons believed, through righteous living combined with sacred priesthood-administered ordinances. God’s power, flowing only through divinely ordained chains of priesthood authority, validated these ordinances.¹⁰ Mormons believed that the chain of priesthood authority had been broken during a period they called the “Great Apostasy,” approximately a century after Jesus’s ministry until its restoration to Joseph Smith and his associate Oliver Cowdery. Ordination to priesthood empowered men to perform rituals and ordinances that prepared Mormons for exaltation and also endowed them with the spiritual power to occupy positions in Church government. All worthy male Church members older than twelve could participate in priesthood at some level.¹¹

The most important function of the priesthood at its highest levels was the authority to perform sealing rituals in the temple.¹² Sealing, perhaps Smith’s most unique religious innovation, figured centrally in his vision of God’s plan for humanity; in the Mormon doctrine of exaltation, communion and equality with God depended on sealing. In sacred rituals, kept secret and carried out in the Mormon temple, priesthood administrators sealed Church members to one another in several ways. Temple marriage sealed men and women together and special sealing ceremonies sealed children to parents. Sealings enabled members to “procure to themselves an eternal exaltation” and live with God as part of his divine family.¹³ Temple sealings made marriage bonds sacred and eternal, and no one could be exalted outside the celestial marriage covenant.

To be legitimate, the ability to perform a sealing had to be traced back through human history all the way to biblical patriarchs ultimately to Adam, who received the priesthood from and was sealed directly to God.¹⁴ Only through legal priesthood sealings could one be “adopted into the family of heaven, becoming an heir with the Saints that have formerly lived upon the earth, and heir with the Prophets and with Jesus Christ, and being numbered with the children of the Most High.”¹⁵ The challenge for early Church members was to ensure the divine legitimacy and continuity of the chain of sealing that bound them by priesthood across human history. Mormon theology facilitated two approaches to this enormous challenge: the law of adoption and ordinance work for the dead.

The law of adoption played a much more central role in the early Church than it does in contemporary Mormonism. Much confusion and debate surrounded the law of adoption in the nineteenth century.¹⁶ Mormons espoused the traditional Christian notion that a convert is adopted by baptism into a community of believers, becoming “fellow citizens with the saints, and the household of God.”¹⁷ But for Mormons, adoption was also about earthly family relationships and was no metaphor. It provided one means through which every member could be “‘grafted’ into the patriarchal order, thus becoming ‘legal heirs,’ and acquiring the ‘fathers in the priesthood’ necessary to link each one to the chain of families built up in the days of the patriarchs.”¹⁸ Although the absence of a functioning temple in Utah from 1846 to 1877 meant that adoption was not practiced during that period, it retained its theological salience for much of the nineteenth century.¹⁹ In 1894, Church president Wilford Woodruff essentially discontinued the practice and it became much less central to twentieth-century Mormonism.²⁰

Ordinance work for their deceased ancestors, however, provided Church members a second means by which to ensure the validity of their priesthood sealings. This practice took on a new urgency after 1894 that continues in the contemporary Church.²¹ If exaltation required priesthood sealing, the Church required some mechanism by which to provide sealings for the millions who, by accident of birth, had missed the blessings of priesthood. Contemporary Church members must seal themselves to the ancient priesthood by sealing themselves to their ancestors (located through genealogical research) and establishing an unbroken chain of sealings back to biblical times. The rituals of sealing, referred to as “temple work,” must be done by the living on behalf of the dead by proxy.

In yet another controversial doctrine, Mormonism also held that God possessed a physical, although perfected immortal body. Smith said, “That which is without body, parts and passions is nothing. There is no other God in heaven but that God who has flesh and bones.”²² This doctrine had two implications that other nineteenth-century Americans found blasphemous. First, the commitment to a God of flesh and bones meant that Smith held God and Jesus to be physically separate beings, each possessing a perfected mortal body. Second, a God of flesh and bones suggested a relationship between God and man that was closer than most Christians imagined. According to Smith, “God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man.”²³ Furthermore, given men’s pre-mortal state as God’s spirit children, this view of the nature of God suggests that men are gods in embryo.²⁴ In the resurrection, human spirits would also be reunited with perfected immortal versions of their own physical bodies.²⁵

Under this theological framework, the importance of sealings for early Mormon men and women can hardly be overestimated. For Smith, becoming “like God” was inextricably tied to the doctrine of eternal increase. Men as gods would spiritually reproduce—birthing intelligences into spirits as had God the father—and would govern the progression of their spirit children through a mortal experience. If a man’s spirit children were themselves exalted and attained godhood, that man’s glory increased. For this reason, until polygamy was officially abandoned, some Mormon men sought to swell their potential kingdom of glory in the afterlife by sealing multiple wives and children to them on Earth.²⁶

The logic of eternal increase led Smith to believe that more than one god existed. If God was once a man in precisely the position of Smith and all humankind, then God’s mortal sojourn must have been supervised by another God, and that God’s mortality by yet another, ad infinitum. Smith publicly outlined the biblical backdrop for his polytheism in the “King Follett Discourse,” a sermon at the funeral services of prominent Church member King Follett.²⁷ Smith’s emerging belief in polytheism, however, did not prefigure its practice—Mormonism retained its monotheism because, as Smith claimed, “the heads of the Gods appointed one God for us.”²⁸

Smith’s most controversial Nauvoo doctrine was unquestionably that of plural marriage, a practice which originated well before Nauvoo. Smith’s curiosity about polygamy had likely been pique...