beastie wrote:Seriously? One reference proves his point? So if ONE time during the church's history, someone is published saying "Joseph Smith had more than one wife", then no member has any excuse for not knowing this information?
Talk about a low bar.
No kidding. I didn't speak up on the other board because I know how pointless it would be but the impression I had as a kid was that Joseph Smith received the revelation in D&C 132 but died before it was really practiced. In my mind, Brigham Young was the polygamist.
The topic was avoided, regardless of whether it was in the seminary manual, and we did our level best to distance ourselves from the church's polygamist past as it did not go over well with our Bible belt friends, family, and neighbors. We passed along the faith promoting rumor that polygamy was all about taking care of women whose husbands were murdered by bloodthirsty Mormon haters who chased the saints from state to state until they fled across the plains. We also talked about how many women were sealed to Joseph Smith after his death, as if this alone accounted for the long list of wives local anti-Mormons claimed he had.
This was the narrative I was given at church, right or wrong, and it was how we coped with the local persecution for issues about which we had almost no historical data. The closest thing we had to information about our own beginnings other than manuals and church magazines were entries in Encyclopedia Britannica and the books my dad purchased from Deseret Book when we made the 7 hour trek to the nearest temple. That book store didn't open shop until the mid 70s and it's shelves were filled with faith promoting books written by church leaders and materials designed to help one succeed in teaching Primary or preparing a "Two-Minute Talk".
Even if you devoured the church magazines, it wasn't like there was an online database so you could research old issues. If you converted after one of Scott's referenced articles were released, or were a child then, the odds against encountering information about Joseph's polygamy or the stone and hat were astronomical.
At my house, where my father purchased every inspirational LDS book he could get his hands on, where we got all the church magazines, and where we attended faithfully (my dad was the bishop in my formative years, then high councilor, stake presidency counselor, etc throughout my childhood and youth - my mom went from Primary President to the Stake Relief Society Presidency for most of those years), there was a dearth of information.
We did have a copy of Lucy Mack Smith's biography of Joseph which I skimmed as a 10 or 11 year old. And there was a brother in the ward who kept mimeographed papers that looked like newsletters from FARMS in a three ring binder but he was mostly obsessed with finding archaeological evidence for the Book of Mormon. Polygamy never came up in any conversation I had with him or overheard.
I would expect there was a lot more information to be had out West, given the reality of polygamist off shoots, and the ever present reality of church members with polygamist progenitors. Perhaps some of those claiming to have always known, really did always know, the history of polygamy being an unavoidable undercurrent of their culture and community.
In my LDS experience, far from "Zion", it simply was not so.
"In my more rebellious days I tried to doubt the existence of the sacred, but the universe kept dancing and life kept writing poetry across my life." ~ David N. Elkins, 1998, Beyond Religion, p. 81
