The following is a composite sketch of conversations I and others have had with people in the polygamy-truther movement, which rejects the idea that Joseph Smith ever practiced any kind of plural marriage. Their questions are in bold, followed by my answers.
- Why do you call us polygamy truthers?
The word “truther” arose following the 9/11 terror attacks, to describe people who developed a conspiracy theory that 9/11 was an “inside job” and not the work of terrorists. “Truther” just means a conspiracy theorist. And people who deny Joseph Smith’s plural marriages rely very heavily on conspiracy thinking. I would bet that if you were to survey polygamy truthers, you would find a disproportionately high number of them embracing all kinds of weird conspiracy theories like 9/11 truther narratives, Qanon, and more. Conspiracy thinking is a bias that people hold in an attempt to make sense of a chaotic world. A big part of the appeal of conspiracy thinking is that it provides the emotional comfort of having evil villains we can point to as the reason for the pain and confusion among humanity.
2. And you think that is what’s going on with those of us who are skeptical of Joseph Smith’s polygamy?
Yes.
3. Dismissing us as truthers looks like a convenient way to avoid discussing the facts we have presented.
No, this is where we see foundational differences in thinking. You speak in terms of “facts,” but we distinguish between facts (data) and narratives. For example, if I see a journal entry from early church history, the only “fact” I can claim is,
“There exists a journal entry that says ____.”
Historians look at these facts as simple historical data, and then create narratives about them. Who is the most likely author of the journal entry? Does this entry agree with other people’s journal entries recalling the same event? What was going on in the lives of the various people related to this journal entry?
Then, there are increasingly more subjective judgments. Does this journal entry reflect someone’s good or bad intentions? Is it part of a pattern that reflects some kind of a personal agenda?
You can see that historical narratives can involve a tremendous amount of guesswork, which will reflect the biases and choices of the historian. It is not possible to create a historical narrative of something like church history without bringing into our narrative some amount of our personal point of view. As N.T. Wright said,
It is when historians write as if they did not have a point of view, as if they themselves were ahistorical observers, that the trouble starts…
There is not, nor can there be, any such thing as a bare chronicle of events without a point of view. The great Enlightenment dream of simply recording ‘what actually happened’ is just that: a dream. The dreamer is once more the positivist, who, looking at history, believes that it is possible to have instant and unadulterated access to ‘events’.
(New Testament People God V1: Christian Origins And The Question Of God (p. 82). Fortress Press. Kindle Edition.)
So, we don’t dismiss any facts. Ever. But we do dismiss narratives that people create about facts.
4. Why do you accept the narrative of the church about polygamy? Why would you accept a narrative that Joseph Smith was a liar?
That is your characterization of the narrative, not ours. Many of us are comfortable with the idea that Joseph and others saw plural marriage as something that was not for the outside world, and therefore they spoke in ways that reflected a commitment to keep some things sacred.
Years ago, one day at work I was waiting with my co-workers before a meeting, and one of my co-workers asked about my religion. I told him I was a Latter-day Saint.
He then asked me something really specific about a sacred element of the temple.
I was shocked and unprepared, and I answered him with a lie. I told him I didn’t know what he was talking about. It was a reflexive response in the moment; I had never imagined that I would ever be asked something like that, and I was totally caught off guard.
I’ve been in enough of those situations that I now have better answers available to me. But back then, literally the only response that came to mind was the lie. And I don’t regret telling that lie at all.
Some people can’t fathom that Joseph or Emma Smith might have obfuscated in their responses to questions about polygamy, and I get that. Until you’ve been in some situations, the calculation of upfront honesty seems totally obvious. In the moment, it’s anything but.
But we remember Abraham lying to pharaoh about Sarah, and in a more extreme example, we think of Nephi lying to Zoram, misrepresenting himself and his intentions, then coercing Zoram, all following a divinely-sanctioned murder.
These aren’t the only examples of righteous people employing denial and deception in scripture.
In my career I have worked in situations that require very strict nondisclosure of specific things. There are many contexts where lying in order to maintain secrecy is totally normal, and to be expected.
I wish polygamy truthers would take courses in ethics. In those kinds of courses, students are presented with all kinds of difficult ethical dilemmas around how and when to tell the truth. For some basic reading on that, see here.
5. You still haven’t answered my question! You have two narratives available to you, and you choose the one that has tarnished the name of Joseph Smith?
Okay, I’ll concede some of your point. There are definitely two narratives available to me, and each narrative has all kinds of “facts” that are employed by the narrative’s adherents. And the truth of plural marriage is not knowable in the sense that things like the melting temperature of ice are knowable, so it really is a choice between narratives of history. So why do I choose the church’s narrative? Well, a number of reasons.
- There appears to be plenty of historical evidence for the church’s narrative.
- I don’t have a personal need for Joseph Smith to be someone who did not practice plural marriage or obfuscate about it.
- Every prophet throughout history has had a “tarnished name,” so that’s neither here nor there.
Also, sometimes when I have a choice between two narratives, I look at the quality of thinking in the groups that produced each narrative. And a big red flag is when a group holding a particular narrative has a poor relationship with reality. Qanon-level conspiracy thinking is an obvious indicator of that, but there are some others:
- Do members of the group holding a particular narrative tend to deny that President Nelson is a legitimate prophet of God?
- Do members of the group holding a particular narrative tend to deny that revelation and the gifts of the spirit are alive and well in the church, and always have been?
- Do members of the group holding a particular narrative deny the power of God in our temple work?
- Do members of the group holding a particular narrative interpret scripture well?
If members of the group cannot acknowledge plain realities, and if they interpret scripture poorly, then those are red flags as to the quality of whatever narrative they are promoting.
6. Wait a minute- why would our interpretation of scripture be less valuable than anyone else’s?
Well, let’s talk about what goes into an interpretation of scripture. And let’s use a metaphor from nature. Imagine a snowy hillside with a pine tree on top. It sheds a pine cone, which rolls down the hill and gathers snow and even some soil along the way. By the time it arrives at the bottom of the hill, it’s a giant snowball mixed with dirt.
Using biblical prophets as an example, consider that they received revelation in various forms (the pine cone). Then they engaged in various forms of expression, and their prophecies were compiled, edited, transmitted, and translated…and then we receive those prophecies and there is a whole new set of factors on our receiving side before we arrive at interpretation. The less aware and careful we are all along the way, the larger the snowball will be, and the higher will be the ratio of soil (earthy human material) to snow (revelation from heaven).
Normally that’s not really a bad thing. Most people benefit tremendously from the simple activity of search/ponder/pray. But when our personal agenda and emotional biases are strong, we can end up with interpretations that are way off from the original inspiration given to the prophet, and we can even weaponize scripture against God’s ordained servants.
That is the level of interpretation we typically find in the polygamy truther community.
7. Well, people who believe in polygamy interpret scripture in ways that make God look awful.
Hatred or resentment toward God is called misotheism. And yes, it’s true that scripture can be interpreted in ways that make God look like a monster. See, for example, how protestants interpret scripture to say that God condemns most of humanity to hell.
But there is another extreme, and that is where we see in scripture things about God that are upsetting, and we end up reinterpreting scripture to create a new God in our own image. We reject anything about God that doesn’t fit our paradigm, until scripture becomes just an emotionally validating self-help book.
Think of the message of these scriptures:
And the Lord said unto Samuel, Hearken unto the voice of the people in all that they say unto thee: for they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them.
According to all the works which they have done since the day that I brought them up out of Egypt even unto this day, wherewith they have forsaken me, and served other gods, so do they also unto thee. (1 Samuel 8:7-8)
Yet ye say, The way of the Lord is not equal. Hear now, O house of Israel; Is not my way equal? are not your ways unequal?
Yet saith the house of Israel, The way of the Lord is not equal. O house of Israel, are not my ways equal? are not your ways unequal? (Ezekiel 18:25,29)
That word “equal” in Ezekiel is translated in other ways as fair, just, or right. The people had grown to hate the God that had been revealed to them through prophets, so they decided to make a new god. Idolatry is the product of misotheism.
In the verses in 1 Samuel, we read of God telling a prophet that the people had become misotheistic, and were rejecting not the prophet, but God. Prophets are always just proxies for our real grievances toward God. I’ll state it clearly: if you want to distinguish whether someone’s gospel questioning is based in honest curiosity versus misotheism, look at how they treat prophets like Brigham Young and Russell M. Nelson. Hostility toward prophets is hostility toward God.
A New Testament example of misotheism is found in John 6. After Jesus fed the multitude, they found him again, and we have this sequence:
34 Then said they unto him, Lord, evermore give us this bread.
35 And Jesus said unto them, I am the bread of life…
38 For I came down from heaven, not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent me.
41 The Jews then murmured at him, because he said, I am the bread which came down from heaven.
This led to Jesus losing many of his followers, and His pained question to the Twelve: “Will ye also go away?” (v.67)
This is a story of people going from satisfaction and rejoicing at being fed, to murmuring rejection, in a short period of time.
Other manifestations of misotheism include things like the Marcion heresy: Marcion was an early Christian theologian who argued that the god of the New Testament cannot be the god of the Old Testament. In the logic of Marcion, the New Testament revealed a loving god, while the Old Testament revealed an awful, mean-spirited god. Therefore, Marcion concluded, they can’t be the same.
With all of this in mind, we should be clear that there is value in analyzing scripture to understand where passages might be revealing more of the author’s worldview than an authentic revelation of God. But our analysis needs to be more rigorous than making judgments based on what we like or don’t like, how we think God should or should not be. If we never go to a deeper place than our own thoughts and feelings, we will end up fashioning an idol out of our thoughts and feelings and calling that idol “god.”
8. Even after all of this stuff you have written, you still haven’t responded to our evidence.
That’s because I don’t believe you have evidence. Just like judges in a court of law, we all make decisions about what constitutes evidence and whether it is admissible as we explore questions. And decisions around evidence are downstream of other things. Upstream are things like our life experiences, our emotional baseline, our assumptions, and more. In every criminal trial, in the courtroom the prosecutor presents evidence and the defense explains why those items are not evidence for the prosecutor’s narrative. Likewise, the defense presents evidence for innocence, and the prosecutor explains why those items are not evidence for innocence. Why have the prosecution and defense decided in advance that each other’s “evidence” is invalid? Because they have upstream professional commitments to establish guilt or innocence, and those commitments determine in advance what they will consider as evidence.
| Upstream Assumptions | Downstream reasoning | Downstream View of Evidence |
| There is no god | There can be no evidence for god, because god does not exist | None of the items presented to me are evidence for the existence of god. |
| Miracles are not possible | Miracles are not experienced by anyone | No witness testimony of a miracle is valid evidence for miracles |
| -Polygamy is only ever a bad thing -God does not command bad things | Nothing in scripture can reflect a view that God sanctions polygamy | There is no scriptural passage that serves as evidence that God has ever sanctioned polygamy |
Whenever people take the time to explore the upstream factors in the thinking of the polygamy truther movement, they are accused of avoiding “evidence.” No, we’re not avoiding evidence; we’re trying to explore the reasons why people characterize things as “evidence” or not. Those upstream discussions are the only discussions of any real value.