D&C 132 Contradictions
The claim:
"Many members do not realize that there is a set of very specific and bizarre rules outlined in Doctrine & Covenants 132 (still in LDS canon despite President Hinckley publicly stating that polygamy is not doctrinal) on how polygamy is to be practiced. It is the kind of revelation you would expect from the likes of Warren Jeffs to his FLDS followers... AGAIN, CONTRARY TO D&C 132, THE FOLLOWING SUMMARIZES HOW POLYGAMY WAS ACTUALLY PRACTICED BY JOSEPH SMITH..."[1]
There are really two accusations stacked on top of each other here, and it helps to pull them apart. The first is that the revelation itself is ugly, a cult leader's rulebook for controlling women, the sort of thing a Warren Jeffs would hand his followers. The second is that Joseph Smith couldn't even keep his own rules: he wrote a revelation that said plural wives had to be virgins, that the first wife had to consent, and then he broke both rules himself, which proves he made the whole thing up to license his behavior.
This page is about that second charge, the scriptural one: did Joseph contradict his own canon? The marriages themselves, the ages and the denials and the DNA, are answered in Joseph Smith's Marriages, and the sealings to already-married women in Polyandry. What I want to do here is simpler. I want to put the verses the CES Letter quotes back next to the verses it leaves out, because in almost every case the missing verse is sitting a few lines away in the very same revelation.
D&C 132 is not a comfortable text. It uses hard language, it puts Emma Smith through something the Church's own essay calls "an excruciating ordeal," and a careful reader will finish it with real questions. I will not dress that up. But the specific charge, that Joseph laid down rules and then violated them, depends on quoting the rules without their exceptions. When you read the exceptions, the contradiction closes.
What kind of document this actually is
First, a fact that reframes everything: D&C 132 was dictated in one sitting, about three hours, on July 12, 1843. And the reason it got written down at all is almost domestic. Joseph's brother Hyrum believed that if the teaching on celestial marriage were put on paper, he could carry it to Emma, who was resisting, and talk her into it. Joseph doubted it. He told Hyrum, "you do not know Emma as well as I do." Hyrum took the page to Emma anyway and came back saying he "had never received a more severe talking to in his life."[2]
Sit with that for a second, because it does not fit the Warren Jeffs picture. A man forging a coercion manual to bend his wife to his will does not hand it to his brother and watch it fail spectacularly. The document was written to persuade a resistant Emma, and it did not even manage that.
It also is not mostly about polygamy. Of its sixty-six verses, only a minority deal with plural marriage at all. The bulk of it, verses 1 through 33, lays out the doctrine of eternal marriage, the "new and everlasting covenant" that grounds every temple sealing in the Church today, almost all of them between one man and one woman.[3] The plural-marriage rules the CES Letter zeroes in on are a subsection inside a much larger revelation about marriage lasting beyond death. That framing matters, because every contradiction the CES Letter builds is quarried out of that one subsection. The full breakdown of what the revelation covers is in the in-depth version.
The sentence the Book of Mormon never finishes
The cleanest version of the contradiction is this: the Book of Mormon condemns polygamy, D&C 132 commands it, so Joseph's own scriptures fight each other. The CES Letter even names the Book of Mormon passage, Jacob chapter 2, as the flat prohibition that D&C 132 reverses.[1:1]
The trouble is the half-quote. Jacob 2 does condemn the Nephites for taking many wives, and for most of the chapter it sounds like an absolute ban. But the chapter does not end where the argument needs it to end. Verse 30 is the last word, and it reads:
"For if I will, saith the Lord of Hosts, raise up seed unto me, I will command my people; otherwise they shall hearken unto these things."[4]
Read that slowly. God says: the default rule is one wife (otherwise "they shall hearken unto these things"), but I reserve the right to command an exception when I want to "raise up seed." That is not a loophole someone smuggled in. It is built into the very chapter critics cite as the prohibition. So the Book of Mormon does not say "never." It says "one wife, unless God commands otherwise," which is exactly the structure D&C 132 uses.
And the two texts line up even tighter than that. Jacob 2 also gives the reason the Nephites were condemned, in verse 23: they were "excus[ing] themselves in committing whoredoms, because of the things which were written concerning David, and Solomon." In plain terms, they were pointing at scripture heroes to license polygamy they had cooked up on their own, with no command from God behind it. That is unauthorized polygamy. And D&C 132 condemns the exact same thing while it authorizes the commanded kind: verse 39 says David's plural marriages were fine because they were "given unto him of me, by the hand of Nathan," but he sinned "in the case of Uriah and his wife," meaning the murder, not the marriages.[3:1]
So both books carry the same three-part shape: one wife as the rule, commanded plural marriage as the exception, and self-appointed polygamy condemned. The contradiction only appears if you stop reading Jacob 2 one verse early.
The rules he supposedly broke contain their own exceptions
Now to the heart of the "he broke his own rules" charge. The CES Letter points to two rules in D&C 132 and says Joseph violated both.
Rule one: plural wives had to be virgins. The CES Letter cites verse 61, "if any man espouse a virgin, and desire to espouse another," and notes that Joseph was sealed to women who were not virgins. But verse 61 is describing one specific situation and calling it acceptable; it is not a wall around every other situation. The way you can tell is that the same revelation, twenty-six verses earlier, holds up a non-virgin plural marriage as a good thing. Verses 34 and 35 point to Abraham and Hagar: "God commanded Abraham, and Sarah gave Hagar to Abraham to wife... Was Abraham, therefore, under condemnation? Verily I say unto you, Nay; for I, the Lord, commanded it."[3:2] Hagar was a servant and a concubine, not a virgin bride. If verse 61 were a hard "virgins only" law, Joseph would have written a revelation that forbids and praises non-virgin plural marriage twenty-six verses apart, in one three-hour dictation. The simpler reading is that verse 61 covers one case among several, not the gate that controls them all.
Rule two: the first wife had to consent. This is the one that looks most damning, because Joseph clearly was sealed to women without Emma's knowledge. Verse 61 does include the consent step, "and the first give her consent." But the CES Letter stops there, and the revelation does not. Verses 64 and 65 spell out what happens when the first wife will not consent:
"if any man have a wife, who holds the keys of this power, and he teaches unto her the law of my priesthood... then shall she believe and administer unto him, or she shall be destroyed... Therefore, it shall be lawful in me, if she receive not this law, for him to receive all things whatsoever I, the Lord his God, will give unto him... and he is exempt from the law of Sarah."[3:3]
The "law of Sarah" is the consent procedure, and verse 65 says in plain words that the husband is exempt from it if the first wife refuses. So the revelation anticipates the exact situation the CES Letter calls a violation. The rule the CES Letter says Joseph broke is qualified, in the same breath, by the same revelation that states it. You cannot quote a rule to convict a man and then leave out the clause that says the rule has an exception.
I want to be clear that this answer is narrow. It dissolves the "he violated a written rule" charge, because the rule was written with the exception attached. It does not make the exception comfortable, and I will come back to that in a minute.
"Destroy" did not mean what we hear today
One word does a lot of work in the CES Letter's case: "destroy." Verse 54 warns that the Lord "will destroy her if she abide not in my law," and the CES Letter reads that as a physical threat against Emma, Warren Jeffs telling a woman to obey or die.[1:2]
Two things take the menace out of that reading. The first is the dictionary. In Noah Webster's 1828 dictionary, the standard American English of Joseph's day, "destroy" carried a much wider range than it does now: not just to demolish physically, but "to ruin," "to bring to naught," to cause something "to cease to be."[5] The revelation uses it that way elsewhere. Verse 26 says covenant-breakers will be "destroyed in the flesh, and... delivered unto the buffetings of Satan," which is plainly a spiritual consequence, not an execution order. We hear "destroy" through a modern ear tuned to violence against women; the 1843 text is using an older, broader word.
The second thing is that the warning is not aimed at Emma in particular. It runs all through the revelation, at everyone. Verse 4 warns Joseph himself that if "ye abide not that covenant... ye are damned." Verse 26 warns anyone. Verses 41 and 42 warn plural wives. Verse 64 warns any wife who refuses the law. The hard language is a feature of the covenant, applied across the board, not a personal threat singling Emma out. A man building a tool to frighten his wife does not aim the same warning at himself in verse 4.
"Just for babies" leaves out two-thirds of the verse
One more quick one, because it shows the pattern so plainly. The CES Letter says D&C 132:63 makes the "only purpose of polygamy" to "multiply and replenish the earth," and then points to a wife who was already pregnant to argue Joseph violated even that.[1:3] But verse 63 names three purposes, and the argument keeps only the first:
"they are given unto him to multiply and replenish the earth, according to my commandment, and to fulfil the promise which was given by my Father before the foundation of the world, and for their exaltation in the eternal worlds, that they may bear the souls of men."[3:4]
Procreation is one reason. Covenant fulfillment is the second. Exaltation, eternal life with God, is the third, and faithful scholars argue it was the most important of the three.[6] Reading the verse as "babies only" requires crossing out two-thirds of the sentence. By now you can probably see the move: the contradiction is manufactured by where the quotation stops.
The shape of the exception
The genuine difficulty here is not the CES Letter's version of it.
The real problem with the consent rule was never that Joseph "broke" it. The trouble is the shape of the exception he wrote into it. Look again at the law of Sarah. If Emma consents, the marriage proceeds. If Emma refuses, she "becomes the transgressor," and the marriage proceeds anyway. A writer at By Common Consent, Laura Brignone, put the discomfort exactly: the verses "make it clear that Joseph will have plural wives whether Emma says yes or no."[7] That is a real asymmetry, and pretending it isn't there helps no one. In an ordinary consent arrangement, "no" stops things. Here "no" only reassigns who is held responsible. The revelation even frames the whole trial as Abraham-like (verse 51, "to prove you all, as I did Abraham"), but in that story the one being tested is the father, Abraham, while Emma sits in the structural place of Isaac, the one bound on the altar without a vote. Naming the test "Abrahamic" sharpens the difficulty; it does not soften it.
And Emma's actual experience was harder than any clean story, faithful or critical, makes it. She was sealed to nothing and consulted about little in the earliest cases. Joseph was sealed to Sarah Ann Whitney in July 1842 without Emma's knowledge, and a surviving letter in his own hand arranges a visit conditioned on Emma being gone.[8] The Church's own Gospel Topics Essay grants that Emma's experience was "an excruciating ordeal."[9] None of that is comfortable, and the in-depth version walks through the strongest form of this argument without flinching. The summary I will stand behind is this: the textual-contradiction charge fails, because the rules contained their exceptions, but a deeper question stays open about whether a 19th-century covenant frame that asks this much of a wife is morally adequate. I am not going to wave that away to win an argument the CES Letter already lost on the smaller point.
There is also the awkward fact that an 1835 statement in the Doctrine and Covenants disavowed polygamy outright, and it stayed in the book for the rest of Joseph's life even as he privately taught the opposite. The "someone else wrote that statement" defense explains how it got in; it does not fully explain why he left it there for nine years. That tension is treated squarely in the in-depth version. I would rather you hear it from me than discover it later and feel I hid it.
It condemns what it supposedly licenses
Step back from the verse-by-verse and notice what the whole revelation does that a fraud's rulebook would never do. Two verses after the harsh warning to Emma, verse 56 has the Lord say, "let mine handmaid forgive my servant Joseph his trespasses."[3:5] A man inventing a revelation to justify himself does not write his own "trespasses" into the text of it. And three separate times the revelation condemns exactly the sexual misconduct critics accuse Joseph of, women being "with another man" outside the authorized order. A self-serving forgery shapes the rules to fit the author's behavior. This one repeatedly condemns the behavior it is supposedly inventing cover for. Those are strange things to find in a document built to license a predator, and they are why the serious critical scholars, the ones who have actually read every page, do not argue that Joseph fabricated D&C 132 to excuse himself. The in-depth version engages that more careful criticism directly.
So every contradiction the CES Letter assembles turns out to be a product of where the scissors fell. The case needs Jacob 2 read without verse 30, verse 61 read without verses 34 and 64, verse 54 read without verse 4, and verse 63 cut from three purposes down to one. Put every omitted verse back and the contradictions close, one after another.
When a topic gets this tangled, I find it steadying to remember where the firm ground is. The same Joseph Smith the CES Letter wants to cast as a careful forger dictated the Book of Mormon aloud in about sixty working days, some 270,000 words, working from no notes and going back to fix nothing as the pages piled up. A man assembling self-serving documents to cover his tracks does not work that way, and after two centuries no one has produced a credible natural account of how the book was dictated at all. D&C 132 has real edges, and I have not filed them down. But the same man left behind a book that remains the firmest evidence the Church has, one that has only held up better as the years pass. A hard chapter does not crack a foundation that solid.
Want the full case, including the strongest arguments the critics make and every source? Read the in-depth version.
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Polygamy | Polyandry," pp. 55–58. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Brian C. Hales, "Emma Smith Struggles," josephsmithspolygamy.org. https://josephsmithspolygamy.org/history/emma-smith-struggles/ ↩︎
"Revelation, 12 July 1843 [D&C 132]," in Joseph Smith Papers. https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/revelation-12-july-1843-dc-132/1 ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Jacob 2:23–30, in The Book of Mormon. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/bofm/jacob/2 ↩︎
Noah Webster, American Dictionary of the English Language (1828), s.v. "destroy." https://webstersdictionary1828.com/Dictionary/destroy ↩︎
"D&C 132," Debunking-CESLetter. https://debunking-cesletter.com/polygamy-polyandry-1/dc-132/ ↩︎
Laura Brignone, "She Shall Believe or She Shall Be Destroyed: D&C 121 and 132," By Common Consent (Oct 28, 2021). https://bycommonconsent.com/2021/10/28/she-shall-believe-or-she-shall-be-destroyed-dc-121-and-132/ ↩︎
"Letter to Newel K., Elizabeth Ann, and Sarah Ann Whitney, 18 August 1842," in Joseph Smith Papers. https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/letter-to-newel-k-elizabeth-ann-and-sarah-ann-whitney-18-august-1842/1 ↩︎
"Plural Marriage in Kirtland and Nauvoo," Gospel Topics Essays, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics-essays/plural-marriage-in-kirtland-and-nauvoo ↩︎