why me wrote:Polygamy was a hot potato for sure. If it were to go public, all hell would have broken out with the neighboring nonmormon community and many lives would have been lost. . . if the secret would have come out among the gentiles, the Mormons would have been slaughtered by mobs.
truth dancer wrote:
Hold the phone....
So, why in the world would anyone in the community have a problem with this, (let alone start slaughtering anyone) if all "the Principle" was was a little ceremony to ensure a friendship in the next life"? Who would care? Why would anything have to be a secret?
No one would have given the church a second thought and it all could have been above board and in the open, (still weird and kind of crazy but it would not have been an issue).
Dr. Shades wrote:why me wrote:Polygamy was a hot potato for sure. If it were to go public, all hell would have broken out with the neighboring nonmormon community and many lives would have been lost. . . if the secret would have come out among the gentiles, the Mormons would have been slaughtered by mobs.
In that case, wouldn't it have been more effective to simply not establish polygamy?
You cannot be serious. The early saints were punished from almost the very beginning for just being different and for living their faith. Now they did make mistakes by becoming an insular community but they certainly weren't living peacefully with their neighbors. You case would be different if they were. The Mormon war and the massacre at Haun's Hill and earlier the tar and feathering of Joseph Smith and the beating of Sidney Rigdon are a witness to that. Not easy to be a Mormon back then to be sure. And then we have polgamy. When William Law made polygamy generally known what happened? Murder soon followed.
truth dancer wrote:
I am very serious and you didn't really address my comments...
I don't think the Mormons were condemned just for being different. There were all sorts of "different" groups at the time.
The point is, if "the Principle" just consisted of a little prayer to ensure a heavenly friendship or some heavenly family who would have cared? No one! It wouldn't even be a blip on the screen.
So, Walmart, where is God in all this?
why me wrote:
For example, the tar and feathering of Joseph Smith. This occured in early 1832 and it had nothing to do with polygamy. It had to do with one Booth claiming that Joseph Smith was a fraud in his letters to a newspaper. Of course, there was opposition before this but these letters brought it all to a head. Booth was a member of the church who became disillusioned who claimed that Mormonism designed to 'allure the credulous and the unsuspecting, into a state of unqualified vassalage'. (see bushman page 178).
The writing was on the wall before the discovery of polygamy. Perhaps Satan was working overtime stirring up the hearts of men and women against Joseph to thwart the work.
The attack was due to a feeling that Mormonism was evil and needed to be crushed. A mob dragged him from the house.
(28 June 1815 in Pomfret, Vermont - 24 March 1886 in Salt Lake City, Utah). Jon Krakauer wrote in Under the Banner of Heaven that,[38]
"In the summer of 1831 the Johnson family took Joseph and Emma Smith into their home as boarders, and soon thereafter the prophet purportedly bedded young Marinda. Unfortunately, the liaison did not go unnoticed, and a gang of indignant Ohioans—including a number of Mormons—resolved to castrate Joseph so that he would be disinclined to commit such acts of depravity in the future."
Most Mormons believe that Joseph Smith's and Sidney Rigdon's tarring in February 1832 was done by an "anti-Mormon mob" inspired by the devil.
To the contrary, they were tarred not by an "anti-Mormon mob," but by their own followers, for two primary reasons.
First was their plan to have all of their church members sign over all of their assets and properties to the "United Order" communal experiment. Some members saw this as Smith and Rigdon's scheme to fleece them, and rightly so; the financial disaster that was the United Order, which culminated in the Kirtland Bank scandal, caused many Mormons to lose their life savings, and about half of all church members abandoned the faith over the incident, including most of the original twelve apostles.
The proof that it was his own church members who did the tarring was Smith's own statement that he recognized the perpetrators in church the morning after the incident, primarily one Symonds Rider and the sons of John Johnson. Smith, Emma, and Rigdon had been boarding with the Johnson family 35 miles from Kirtland at Hiram, Ohio. They weren't subjecting themselves to the communal lifestyle that they demanded of their followers at Kirtland.
Second, it was alleged that Smith made a pass at Johnson's 15 year-old daughter, Nancy Marinda, and that was her brothers' motivation for attacking Smith. "Mormon Enigma: Emma Hale Smith" supports this idea, but in his "In Sacred Loneliness" Todd Compton doubts it for lack of convincing evidence. It's likely true that Smith made the pass at Marinda for five reasons:
1. Joseph Smith had already taught his "plural marriage" concept in his 1831 "revelation" commanding a group of married men to "take ye wives from among the Lamanites" in 1831 (the tarring occurred in February 1832). This indicates that he had extra-marital relations on his mind during that period.
2. Joseph Smith eventually "plural married" Marinda in April of 1842, after sending her husband, Orson Hyde, on a mission. (Marinda later said she thought Smith was the father of her son, Frank.)
Thus, it is likely that Smith had his eye on Marinda since he had met the 15-year-old girl at Hiram in 1831, and that his 1842 "plural marriage" to her was his formalization of a long-existing desire for her (as it was also in the documented cases of Mary Rollins and Sarah Ann Whitney). The essence of Smith's "spiritual wifery" concept was that people knew each other in the "pre-existence," and that part of their earthly mission was to find their "soul mates" (Remember "Saturday's Warrior?") Once Smith had designated a female as one of his "soul mates," or "spiritual wives," they were to be "his" for eternity, even if they were already married to someone else; in this case, Orson Hyde.
3. Third, Smith's "plural" relationship with the 16-year-old Fanny Alger began in 1833. Since the 1832 tarring incident occurred between the 1831 marry-the-Lamanite-girls revelation and the 1833 beginning of his affair with Fanny, it's entirely likely that the tarring was at least partly because of Smith's budding unorthodox sexual concepts, which he tried out on fifteen year-old Marinda.
4. Fourth, it seems more likely that Marinda's brothers would want to castrate a man because of a sexual advance on their teenage sister, rather than over an issue of money.
5. The mob of church members that attacked Rigdon and Smith that night did not attempt to castrate Rigdon. Smith was the sole target of castration by Marinda's brothers.
Some have admitted that Joseph Smith became involved in polygamy but later tried to disentangle himself from the practice. Brigham Young conceded in 1866 that "Joseph was worn out with it, but as to his denying any such thing I never knew that he denied the doctrine of polygamy. Some have said that he did, but I do not believe he ever did" (Unpublished Address). But Smith's niece, Mary Bailey, writing in 1908 said that her uncle finally "awoke to a realization of the whole miserable affair [and] … tried to withdraw from and put down the Evil into which he had fallen" (Newell and Avery 1984, 179). Prominent early leaders of the RLDS church also shared this viewpoint. Isaac Sheen, who became affiliated with the RLDS movement in 1859 and edited the church periodical Saints' Herald, wrote in the first issue of that paper (March 1860) that though "Joseph Smith taught the spiritual-wife doctrine," he "repented of his connection with this doctrine, and said it was of the devil." Former Nauvoo stake president William Marks, a close friend of Emma, wrote in a July 1853 letter to the Zion's Harbinger and Baneemy's Organ that he met with the prophet a short time before his death. "We are a ruined people," Marks quoted Smith; "this doctrine of polygamy, or Spiritual-wife System, that has been taught and practiced among us, will prove our destruction and overthrow. I have been deceived … it is wrong; it is a curse to mankind, and we shall have to leave the United States soon, unless it can be put down, and its practice stopped in the Church." Marks said that Smith ordered him "to go into the high council, and I will have charges preferred against all who practice this doctrine; and I want you to try them by the laws of the Church, and cut them off, if they will not repent, and cease the practice of this doctrine … I will go into the stand and preach against it with all my might, and in this way, we may rid the Church of this damnable heresy." But Smith was killed shortly after this conversation, and when Marks related what Smith had said, his testimony "was pronounced false by the Twelve and disbelieved."
Two respected LDS historians, James Allen and Glen Leonard, have called the book "a much-needed, balanced treatment" of Emma Smith. The book is a bit less balanced regarding Joseph. The authors' sympathies are clearly with Emma. But overall it is an excellent biography. I have two copies, one I keep on my shelf and one I lend out to friends.
If you're interested in Emma, I recommend the movie Emma Smith: My Story. It is hagiography, to be sure (Joseph is positively angelic), but I found it very well done and quite moving.
As a bonus, if you don't have two hours to spare and just want to see the parts in the movie that discuss polygamy, you'll only need about 12 seconds.
Ray A wrote:I suppose it's pointless asking why me if he's read Van Wagoner's Mormon Polygamy: A History. In any case, here's an interesting excerpt (emphasis added):Some have admitted that Joseph Smith became involved in polygamy but later tried to disentangle himself from the practice. Brigham Young conceded in 1866 that "Joseph was worn out with it, but as to his denying any such thing I never knew that he denied the doctrine of polygamy. Some have said that he did, but I do not believe he ever did" (Unpublished Address). But Smith's niece, Mary Bailey, writing in 1908 said that her uncle finally "awoke to a realization of the whole miserable affair [and] … tried to withdraw from and put down the Evil into which he had fallen" (Newell and Avery 1984, 179). Prominent early leaders of the RLDS church also shared this viewpoint. Isaac Sheen, who became affiliated with the RLDS movement in 1859 and edited the church periodical Saints' Herald, wrote in the first issue of that paper (March 1860) that though "Joseph Smith taught the spiritual-wife doctrine," he "repented of his connection with this doctrine, and said it was of the devil." Former Nauvoo stake president William Marks, a close friend of Emma, wrote in a July 1853 letter to the Zion's Harbinger and Baneemy's Organ that he met with the prophet a short time before his death. "We are a ruined people," Marks quoted Smith; "this doctrine of polygamy, or Spiritual-wife System, that has been taught and practiced among us, will prove our destruction and overthrow. I have been deceived … it is wrong; it is a curse to mankind, and we shall have to leave the United States soon, unless it can be put down, and its practice stopped in the Church." Marks said that Smith ordered him "to go into the high council, and I will have charges preferred against all who practice this doctrine; and I want you to try them by the laws of the Church, and cut them off, if they will not repent, and cease the practice of this doctrine … I will go into the stand and preach against it with all my might, and in this way, we may rid the Church of this damnable heresy." But Smith was killed shortly after this conversation, and when Marks related what Smith had said, his testimony "was pronounced false by the Twelve and disbelieved."
Perish the thought that LDS may be defending a doctrine Joseph had very serious doubts about, and privately repudiated. All of that energy defending a false doctrine.
Plus, I have no idea who this Marks fellow is but if he were a good friend of Emma, I can understand why he would write what he wrote if he wanted to remain a good friend of Emma.