Plural Marriage in Kirtland and Nauvoo: A Scholarly Response to LDS Discussions' Annotated Critique

A point-by-point examination of the claims, logical failures, and historical distortions in LDS Discussions' annotated version of the Church's Gospel Topics Essay on plural marriage.

I. Introduction: How LDS Discussions Frames the Essay

The LDS Discussions website presents an annotated version of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' official Gospel Topics Essay, “Plural Marriage in Kirtland and Nauvoo.” The site's author states upfront that “The entire church rises and falls based on the legitimacy of Joseph Smith, and this essay highlights an area where Joseph Smith introduced a practice that appears to be indefensible.” That declaration is not analysis — it is a predetermined verdict. The annotations that follow are written to confirm it, not to examine the evidence honestly.

This response does not minimize genuine historical difficulties. The Church's essay itself acknowledges them openly. What this response does is hold LDS Discussions to the same standard of evidence and logical rigor it claims to demand from believers. When that standard is applied consistently, many of its most forceful claims collapse. Others reveal themselves as arguments from silence, category errors, anachronistic moral reasoning, or selective quotation designed to manufacture outrage rather than illuminate history.

The Church's essay was reviewed and approved by the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve. It acknowledges embarrassing, uncomfortable, and deeply complex realities about early plural marriage. That transparency is itself significant. LDS Discussions treats every acknowledgment of complexity as evidence of concealment, and every historical uncertainty as proof of fraud. This is not scholarship; it is motivated reasoning dressed in footnotes.

The following sections address each major category of argument in sequence.

II. The Bushman Quotation and the Misuse of Scholarly Authority

LDS Discussions opens its annotation by citing historian Richard Bushman: “The dominant narrative is not true; it can’t be sustained.” The site deploys this to suggest Bushman agrees that the Church's historical claims are fraudulent. This is a profound misreading of Bushman's position.

Richard Bushman is the author of Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (2005), the most rigorously documented scholarly biography of Joseph Smith ever written. He is a believing Latter-day Saint. The “dominant narrative” he called unsustainable was the simplified, Sunday-school version of Church history — not the historical truth of the Restoration. His full argument, stated repeatedly in interviews and publications, is that members must be prepared to engage the full historical record, which the Gospel Topics Essays are designed to provide. Bushman has explicitly said that this engagement strengthens rather than destroys faith.

“I see the Gospel Topics Essays as a positive step… The Church is saying: here is the complicated truth, and we trust you to handle it.” — Richard Bushman, on the Church's transparency initiative regarding its history

Citing Bushman as an authority against the Church's historical credibility, when Bushman himself remains a faithful, temple-attending member who defends Joseph Smith's prophetic claims, is a textbook case of selective quotation.

III. The Biblical Basis for Plural Marriage: The Jacob 2 Contradiction Examined

LDS Discussions argues that the Book of Mormon's Jacob 2 condemns polygamy absolutely, making Joseph Smith's practice a self-contradictory fraud. It quotes Jacob 2:24 calling David's polygamy an “abomination,” then compares this to D&C 132:38 which says David's wives were given to him of God. This, the site claims, “cannot be reconciled.”

This argument fails on multiple grounds.

1. Jacob 2 Contains Its Own Explicit Exception

LDS Discussions quotes the condemnation in Jacob 2:24 but then acknowledges — in its own annotation — that Jacob 2:30 states: “For if I will, saith the Lord of Hosts, raise up seed to me, I will command my people; otherwise they shall hearken unto these things.” That single verse demolishes the claim that Jacob 2 presents an absolute, unconditional prohibition. The text itself carves out the divine-command exception. Any reading that ignores verse 30 to weaponize verses 24–27 is eisegesis, not exegesis.

2. The D&C 132 / Jacob 2 “Contradiction” Is Accounted for Within the Texts Themselves

D&C 132:38 distinguishes between wives given to David by God and wives he took unlawfully. Jacob 2:24 condemns the latter. The texts are not in tension once both are read in full. This is a standard hermeneutical framework: conditional moral laws with divine-command exceptions are common throughout scripture — Abraham and Isaac, the command to Hosea to marry a prostitute as a prophetic sign act (Hosea 1), the Israelite conquest narratives. Critics who demand a system without exceptions are importing a philosophical framework foreign to both the Hebrew Bible and the Restoration scriptures.

IV. The Angel with the Drawn Sword: Evidence, Context, and Theological Logic

LDS Discussions invests significant energy mocking the account of the angel commanding Joseph under threat. It asks rhetorically: “Is this really how God operates?” and frames the angel story as an unverifiable manipulation device used to coerce women into marriage.

1. The “Is This How God Operates?” Argument Proves Too Much

If the standard for rejecting a revelation is whether it fits our prior intuitions about how God should act, then we must equally reject the command to sacrifice Isaac (Genesis 22), the command to exterminate the Canaanites (Deuteronomy 7), and Hosea’s symbolic marriage. Divine commands throughout sacred history are frequently disturbing by ordinary human moral standards. The argument “God wouldn’t do that” is not a historical or textual argument; it is an appeal to the speaker's personal theology.

2. The Angel Account Was Primarily About Joseph’s Own Reluctance

The primary documentary function of the angel account in the sources is to explain Joseph’s own hesitation — to himself and to close male associates. As Brian C. Hales documents extensively in Joseph Smith’s Polygamy (Greg Kofford Books, 3 vols., 2013), the angel narrative appears most frequently in accounts by men (Lorenzo Snow, Brigham Young, Heber C. Kimball) describing why Joseph finally moved forward with the practice despite personal and domestic anguish. The claim that it was a stock coercion line deployed against women requires demonstrating that this was its primary, documented use — which LDS Discussions cannot do.

3. Women Refused Without Consequence

Multiple women declined Joseph's plural marriage proposals and suffered no documented retribution. Martha Brotherton refused. Sarah Pratt refused. Several others declined. If the drawn-sword narrative was an irresistible coercive device deployed against every woman approached, the documented pattern of refusals — with no reprisals — directly contradicts that claim. FAIR Latter-day Saints has catalogued these refusals in detail.

V. Fanny Alger: Affair or Marriage?

LDS Discussions insists that the Fanny Alger relationship was an affair, not a marriage, citing the absence of a marriage record and Oliver Cowdery’s description of it as a “dirty, nasty, filthy affair.” It also argues that the sealing power had not been restored by 1833–35, making any marriage theologically invalid.

1. Multiple Witnesses Corroborate a Ceremony

Levi Hancock stated he performed a ceremony. Mosiah Hancock, Eliza Webb (Fanny's niece), and several other witnesses later described it as a marriage. The absence of a formal marriage record in 1833–35 is not surprising given that this was an illegal plural marriage practiced in secret. The standard of evidence required to dismiss the testimony of multiple, independent witnesses simply because they reported decades later is not one LDS Discussions applies consistently — it freely cites later reminiscences when they support its case.

2. Cowdery’s Characterization Reflects His Own Opposition

Oliver Cowdery was already in growing conflict with Joseph Smith over multiple issues by 1838. His characterization of the relationship as a “dirty affair” is the language of a man who did not accept plural marriage as a revelation — not a neutral historical description. As Brian Hales and other historians have noted, Cowdery never publicly accused Joseph of adultery in formal proceedings; when pressed, he declined to elaborate. His private letter to his brother reflects personal moral revulsion, not a verified factual finding.

3. The Sealing Power Chronology Is Not Disqualifying

LDS Discussions argues the marriage was theologically invalid because Elijah had not yet appeared in the Kirtland Temple (April 1836). This assumes that the sealing authority required for eternal marriage could not have existed in any form before that event — an assumption the Church's theology does not require. The Lord can authorize ordinances through living prophets in advance of their full institutional establishment. The 1831 revelation on plural marriage is itself a demonstration of that principle.

VI. Polyandrous Sealings: The Covenantal vs. Conjugal Framework

The site treats Joseph Smith’s sealings to already-married women as self-evidently scandalous and sexually motivated. This is the section where LDS Discussions' arguments are simultaneously most emotionally charged and most analytically weak.

1. The Time/Eternity Distinction Is Not a Post-Hoc Apologetic Invention

LDS Discussions dismisses the sealing-for-eternity-only framework as “based purely on assumptions” and invented to help apologists avoid the implication of sex. This is false. The time/eternity distinction appears in the period documents themselves. Multiple women who were sealed to Joseph Smith stated, in their own words and in sworn testimony, that their sealings were “for eternity alone.” These are first-person declarations, not later apologetic constructions.

2. The Dynastic Sealing Framework Has Historical Parallels

Early Nauvoo theology understood plural sealings partly as a mechanism for binding families together in eternal covenant networks. Brian Hales documents this in detail in “Dating Joseph Smith’s First Nauvoo Sealings” (Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship, 2016): the recorded purposes of sealings included dynastic and covenantal dimensions that had no necessary sexual component. The site offers no engagement with this literature.

3. The Site’s Own Evidence Undermines Its Conclusion

LDS Discussions cites Patty Bartlett Sessions' journal entry — that she was sealed to Joseph “for time and all eternity” — as evidence that the polyandrous sealings were not merely dynastic. But it then argues that all the polyandrous sealings were sexual. These two claims cannot coexist as a general argument. Some were explicitly for time and eternity; others were explicitly for eternity alone; the documentary record is mixed, which is exactly what the Church’s essay states. Using one example to impute a universal pattern is the logical fallacy of composition.

4. The First Husbands’ Documented Behavior

The Church’s essay notes that “most if not all of the first husbands seem to have continued living in the same household.” LDS Discussions counters by citing complaints from husbands of women who were approached but refused. Those are logically distinct cases. The men whose wives actually entered the sealing relationship with Joseph — Henry Jacobs, Windsor Lyon, and others — show a documented pattern of continued spousal relationship with their wives. That does not fit the picture of displaced, victimized husbands the site seeks to paint.

VII. Helen Mar Kimball: Age, Context, and What the Evidence Actually Shows

The sealing to Helen Mar Kimball at fourteen (or just before her fifteenth birthday) is the case LDS Discussions presents most aggressively, describing it as roughly equivalent to marrying a modern eleven-year-old. This argument deserves honest engagement.

1. What the Historical Evidence Shows About Consummation

Helen Mar Kimball herself stated the marriage was “for eternity alone.” She bore no children by Joseph Smith. She continued to live with her parents. She was not established as a household companion in a conjugal sense. In her later writings she describes the sealing in covenantal, not marital terms. None of this is conclusive proof of non-consummation, but it is the entirety of the available evidence — and it points consistently in one direction.

2. LDS Discussions' Selective Reading of Helen’s Own Record

The site quotes Helen’s later poem and memoir as evidence of anguish and deception. But Helen spent decades as a public defender of plural marriage, authoring Why We Practice Plural Marriage (1884) and multiple pamphlets. LDS Discussions cannot simultaneously use her private anguish as evidence that she suffered while dismissing her decades of public advocacy as irrelevant. Both are part of the historical record of a complicated woman navigating a genuinely difficult situation in good faith. Selecting only the dark passages is not history — it is narrative assembly.

3. The Anachronism Problem

LDS Discussions argues that contemporary moral standards should apply retroactively to 1843. This is a legitimate ethical conversation, but it must be conducted consistently. If nineteenth-century marriage norms are morally indistinguishable from contemporary ones, then the entire edifice of historical moral inquiry collapses. We cannot use present-day standards to condemn past actors while simultaneously claiming to do historical analysis. Historians — including those deeply critical of Joseph Smith — distinguish between moral evaluation and anachronistic projection.

VIII. The “Carefully Worded Denials” and the Charge of Lying

LDS Discussions argues at length that Joseph Smith lied about polygamy, comparing him to Bill Clinton's semantic evasion. This is one of the most rhetorically powerful sections of the site's presentation, and it deserves a careful answer.

1. The Church’s Essay Acknowledges the Denials Directly

The Gospel Topics Essay itself says plainly that statements “emphasized that the Church practiced no marital law other than monogamy while implicitly leaving open the possibility that individuals, under direction of God’s living prophet, might do so.” It also acknowledges that the denials were “carefully worded.” This is not concealment; it is the Church engaging the historical record with more transparency than its critics acknowledge. LDS Discussions criticizes the Church for hiding this information while simultaneously quoting the Church’s own essay disclosing it.

2. The Theological Context of Public Denial Under Persecution

Joseph Smith and other early leaders understood themselves to be under divine command to practice plural marriage secretly until the appropriate time for public disclosure. Within that framework, denials of “polygamy” (distinguished from “celestial plural marriage”) were analogous to the practices of religious communities throughout history who withheld dangerous information from hostile external authorities. The history of the early Christian church, Jewish communities under Roman rule, and many others shows that withholding practice under threat of annihilation is not the same moral category as casual deception for personal gain. Condemning it as straightforward lying ignores the internal logic of the actors' beliefs and circumstances.

3. Joseph’s 1844 Statement Examined

LDS Discussions cites Joseph's statement: “What a thing it is for a man to be accused of committing adultery, and having seven wives, when I can only find one.” The site presents this as a flat lie. Scholars including Andrew Ehat and Lyndon Cook have analyzed this statement extensively. Joseph was denying adultery (relationships outside sacred ordinance) and the specific charge of “seven wives” (an undercount in either direction). The statement is evasive; it can reasonably be called misleading. It is not, however, straightforwardly equivalent to a false factual assertion under oath — the Bill Clinton analogy the site invokes.

IX. D&C 132: Did Joseph Follow His Own Revelation?

LDS Discussions argues that Joseph violated D&C 132 in multiple ways: marrying non-virgins (already-married women), failing to obtain Emma’s consent before taking additional wives, and operating in secret. These are serious charges that deserve careful examination.

1. The “Virgin” Requirement

D&C 132:61 specifies that new wives should be “virgins.” LDS Discussions argues Joseph violated this by marrying already-married women. However, D&C 132 is not a simple legal code but a complex theological document whose application required prophetic discernment. The same section addresses cases requiring different handling (verses 41–44). The argument that Joseph straightforwardly violated his own revelation assumes the most restrictive possible interpretation of every term while applying no interpretive charity. Scholars of 19th-century covenant theology read these terms within their theological context rather than by 21st-century legal literalism.

2. The Emma Consent Clause and Its Built-In Exception

LDS Discussions emphasizes that Joseph was supposed to obtain Emma's consent before taking additional wives. This is correct — the essay acknowledges this tension openly. But the site fails to engage with D&C 132:65, which the Church’s essay quotes directly: if the first wife “receive not this law,” the husband “shall be exempt from the law of Sarah.” That exemption clause exists within the same revelation. The claim that Joseph violated D&C 132 by exercising a provision that D&C 132 itself contains is self-defeating as an argument.

3. Oral Revelation Preceding Written Record

The site repeatedly emphasizes that D&C 132 was not written down until 1843, while Joseph had been practicing plural marriage since the early 1830s, treating this gap as evidence of retroactive justification. But oral revelation preceding its written record is a standard feature of religious history: the Mosaic law was transmitted orally for generations before codification; Paul's letters document teachings given in person years earlier; the Qur’an was compiled after Muhammad's death from memorized recitations. The timing of a revelation’s written record does not determine when the underlying directive was given.

X. Emma Smith: What the Record Actually Supports

LDS Discussions portrays Emma as a perpetual victim, systematically deceived and humiliated. The full documentary record is considerably more complex. The Church's essay acknowledges Emma's “excruciating ordeal” while also noting that she herself “approved at least four of Joseph’s plural marriages and accepted those wives into her household.”

Emma’s own biographers — Linda King Newell and Valeen Tippetts Avery in Mormon Enigma (1984), a work the site finds credible when it is critical — document a woman who oscillated between resistance and acceptance, who understood far more about Joseph’s marriages than the site implies, and who retained complex loyalty to her husband throughout. The picture of Emma as an entirely passive victim erases her own agency and the documentary evidence of her active, if conflicted, participation in navigating an unprecedented theological situation.

XI. The Manifesto and Post-Manifesto Practice

LDS Discussions claims the Church continued to perform polygamous marriages in secret after the 1890 Manifesto until the Second Manifesto of 1904. This is a genuine historical reality the Church has acknowledged in its own Gospel Topics Essay on the Manifesto. The question is what it proves.

LDS Discussions treats it as evidence that the Manifesto was fraudulent from the beginning. A more careful reading shows a community under intense federal pressure gradually and imperfectly transitioning away from a practice they believed was divinely mandated, with individual leaders making decisions at variance with the institutional direction — a pattern familiar from every major institutional moral transition in religious history. Imperfect institutional compliance with a new policy is not the same as coordinated institutional fraud, and the analytical conflation of the two is not warranted by the evidence.

XII. The “Fourteen Fundamentals” and Prophetic Fallibility

LDS Discussions opens its essay with the argument that because Church leaders have taught “follow the prophet,” Joseph’s moral failures are ecclesiastically fatal. It cites Ezra Taft Benson's 1980 address “Fourteen Fundamentals in Following the Prophet” as if it represents the settled and binding doctrine of the Church on prophetic infallibility.

That address was not canonized. Several of its propositions have been explicitly qualified or corrected by subsequent Church leadership. The LDS Church's actual doctrine of prophetic fallibility is well-documented: prophets are acknowledged to be fallible men who can make mistakes, speak as men rather than as God, and whose personal views are not necessarily scripture. D&C 1:24–28 explicitly addresses this:

“These commandments are of me, and were given unto my servants in their weakness, after the manner of their language, that they might come to understanding.” — Doctrine and Covenants 1:24

Moses was denied entrance to the Promised Land for disobedience. Peter was publicly rebuked by Paul. David committed adultery and arranged murder. Ancient prophets who received divine revelation also acted in culturally conditioned, fallible, and sometimes morally problematic ways. The argument that every moral failure of a prophet destroys the prophetic office assumes a doctrine of prophetic perfection that Latter-day Saint theology has never actually held. The LDS framework for dealing with prophetic fallibility is more sophisticated than “follow blindly or leave,” regardless of how some popular presentations have framed it.

XIII. Logical Fallacies Pervading the LDS Discussions Approach

Across its annotations, LDS Discussions commits several recurring logical errors that undermine its claims to scholarly rigor.

Argument from Silence: “There is no record that Fanny Alger’s parents gave consent” becomes “therefore no consent existed.” The absence of documentation in a period when all plural marriages were deliberately kept secret is not evidence of absence.

Composition Fallacy: Because some polyandrous wives were sealed for time and eternity (including sexual relations), therefore all were. The evidence is explicitly mixed — the site itself produces the counter-examples.

Anachronism: Evaluating 1840s marriage practices by 2026 standards, then claiming to be doing historical analysis, without applying the same standard to other historical figures of the same era.

Appeal to Emotion: Using YW class names (“Mia Maids,” “Laurels”) to describe Joseph’s wives is rhetorically calculated outrage, not argument. It substitutes shock value for evidence.

Selective Quotation: Citing Bushman to impugn the Church while omitting that Bushman defends Joseph Smith; citing Helen Mar Kimball’s anguish but not her decades of advocacy; quoting Jacob 2:24 but not 2:30.

Double Standard on Evidence: Demanding documentary certainty from believers while accepting suggestive, late, or single-source evidence when it supports the critical narrative.

XIV. What the Church’s Essay Actually Achieves

LDS Discussions treats the Gospel Topics Essay as a damage-control document designed to minimize uncomfortable truths. A different reading is possible and better supported by the text itself.

The essay acknowledges: that Joseph married between 30 and 40 women; that one was fourteen years old; that many were already married to living husbands; that Joseph publicly denied polygamy; that Emma was not fully informed; that the historical record is thin and uncertain; that participants suffered emotionally; and that the practice ended under government pressure. No institution publishes a document like this unless it is committed to transparency even at institutional cost.

The essay is also theologically honest about uncertainty. It does not claim to explain everything. It says “some ambiguity will always accompany our knowledge about this issue.” That is not evasion; it is an accurate description of the historical record. Demanding that a religious institution produce certainty where none exists, and treating the honest acknowledgment of uncertainty as further evidence of fraud, is an impossible epistemic standard that no institution — religious or secular — can meet.

XV. Conclusion: The Standard of Evidence and the Weight of the Record

The history of plural marriage in Kirtland and Nauvoo is genuinely difficult. Faithful Latter-day Saints are not required to pretend it isn’t. The Church's own scholars — Richard Bushman, Brian Hales, Craig Foster, Don Bradley — have documented the record in full, including the painful parts, and remained believers. That is not cognitive dissonance; it is the same posture every serious religious tradition requires of its adherents when engaging difficult historical material honestly.

LDS Discussions' annotated essay is not a balanced historical analysis. It is a prosecution brief. It begins with a verdict — Joseph Smith is indefensible — and marshals every piece of evidence, however partial, however decontextualized, however logically strained, in service of that conclusion. When evidence cuts the other way, it is dismissed. When scholars it quotes are believers, their faith is not mentioned. When the Church acknowledges historical difficulties, it is accused of concealment.

The honest questions raised by early plural marriage deserve honest engagement. This response has tried to provide it. The covenantal and dynastic dimensions of Nauvoo sealings are documented in period sources, not invented by later apologists. The pattern of documented consent, however imperfect by modern standards, exists in the historical record. The women who entered these relationships — most of them intelligent, literate, spiritually serious adults — recorded their own experiences in their own words, and those words tell a more complicated and more human story than “victims of a predatory fraud.”

The evidence, assessed by a consistent standard, does not produce the verdict LDS Discussions announces at the outset. It produces something harder and more honest: a complicated history that requires both intellectual rigor and charitable reading to understand — qualities that prosecution briefs, however carefully footnoted, cannot supply.

Sources and Further Reading

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. “Plural Marriage in Kirtland and Nauvoo.” Gospel Topics Essays. churchofjesuschrist.org

Hales, Brian C. Joseph Smith’s Polygamy, 3 vols. Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2013. Also at josephsmithspolygamy.org.

Hales, Brian C. “Dating Joseph Smith’s First Nauvoo Sealings.” Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 20 (2016). scholarsarchive.byu.edu

Bushman, Richard Lyman. Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling. New York: Knopf, 2005.

Newell, Linda King, and Valeen Tippetts Avery. Mormon Enigma: Emma Hale Smith. New York: Doubleday, 1984.

Compton, Todd. In Sacred Loneliness: The Plural Wives of Joseph Smith. Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1997.

FAIR Latter-day Saints. “Detailed Response to CES Letter, Polygamy and Polyandry.” fairlatterdaysaints.org

FAIR Latter-day Saints. “LDS.ORG Essay on Nauvoo Polygamy: What Did Readers Expect?” fairlatterdaysaints.org

Whitney, Helen Mar. Why We Practice Plural Marriage. Salt Lake City: Juvenile Instructor Office, 1884.

Ehat, Andrew F., and Lyndon W. Cook, eds. The Words of Joseph Smith. Provo: BYU Religious Studies Center, 1980.