Joseph Smith's Marriages
The claim:
"Joseph Smith was married to at least 34 women, as now verified in the Church's 2014 polygamy essays.... Out of the 34 women, 7 of them were teenage girls as young as 14-years-old. Joseph was 37-years-old when he married 14-year-old Helen Mar Kimball, twenty-three years his junior. Even by 19th century standards, this is shocking.... Some of the marriages to these women included promises by Joseph of eternal life to the girls and their families, or threats that he (Joseph) was going to be slain by an angel with a drawn sword if the girls didn't marry him.... Today, Warren Jeffs is more closely aligned to Joseph Smith's Mormonism than the modern LDS Church is."[1]
The CES Letter is painting one portrait here: Joseph Smith as a religious predator. He collected dozens of wives, threatened teenage girls with damnation if they refused, lied about all of it in public, and so resembled the convicted child rapist Warren Jeffs that you can line the two up side by side in a chart. On a first read, it is a hard picture to shake.
Some of that picture is true. Joseph Smith did practice plural marriage. He was sealed to around 34 women besides Emma. One of them, Helen Mar Kimball, was 14. He did deny the practice publicly while he was living it. Those facts are real, and this article meets them head on rather than around the edges.
What the CES Letter does is take those real facts and bury everything that complicates them: that most of those sealings were never marriages in the way you are picturing, that DNA has cleared Joseph in every case anyone has been able to test, that the women themselves spent the rest of their adult lives defending the practice in print, and that Joseph's worst enemies, who accused him of everything else under the sun, never once accused him of the thing the CES Letter is most sure of. When you put all of that back in, the predator picture falls apart. The genuine difficulty that remains is real and heavy, and I will get to it. It is just a very different difficulty from the one the chart is selling.
"34 wives" is not 34 marriages
Start with the number, because the whole case leans on it.
In Joseph's theology, a "sealing" was not the same thing as a marriage. A sealing was a priesthood ordinance that bound two people together for eternity. Whether they actually lived together or had a conjugal relationship in this life was a separate question with its own answer in each case. The 2014 Gospel Topics Essay, an official Church source, says it directly: some sealings were "for time and eternity" and "generally including the possibility of sexual relations," while others were "eternity-only" and "indicated relationships in the next life alone."[2]
That distinction is the whole game, and in plain numbers it is stark. Brian Hales wrote the most exhaustive study of Joseph's plural marriages ever published, three volumes of wife-by-wife documentation. His conclusion: of the roughly 35 sealings, only about 10 to 12 show any evidence of a conjugal relationship.[3] The other two-thirds leave no such evidence and read best as eternity-only bonds, including around 11 sealings to women who went right on living with their existing husbands.
So when you read "34 wives" and picture 34 marriages, or 34 sexual relationships, you are picturing something the record does not contain. You are picturing what is on the other side of the CES Letter's Warren Jeffs chart: a man with dozens of wives and dozens of children. Joseph had a small cluster of conjugal sealings and a much larger cluster of eternity-only ones. The single number flattens a system that had real, named categories, and a flattened number is a frightening number.
The DNA closes a door the CES Letter needs open
Here is a test that does not depend on trusting any Latter-day Saint, and it is the one I would point a worried friend to first.
If Joseph had really spent a decade sexually exploiting dozens of women, that decade should have produced children. Some plural wife, somewhere, should have borne a child that descendants attributed to Joseph. And in fact several such claims existed in the historical record, passed down in families as "we descend from Joseph Smith." Every one of them has now been DNA-tested.
A geneticist named Ugo Perego ran the tests, and the published results are a clean sweep. Six historical paternity claims, six rulings, and in every case the child belonged to the woman's legal husband, not to Joseph.[4] The most striking was Josephine Lyon, whose own mother told her on her deathbed that Joseph was her father. That deathbed statement had stood for over a century as the single best piece of evidence that Joseph fathered children in plural marriage. The DNA showed she was the biological daughter of her mother's legal husband, Windsor Lyon.
This matters because the predator story makes a prediction, and the prediction fails. A man running the pattern the CES Letter describes leaves biological children behind. Joseph left none that any historical claim can sustain. Six tested cases is a finite set, and a child who left no trace would never have become a candidate to test, so the claim has to be stated precisely: every paternity claim that has ever surfaced has been ruled out. No critical writer has explained that away, because there is no predatory reading that survives it.
Helen Mar Kimball, and what the CES Letter leaves on the cutting-room floor
The case turns on Helen, age 14. A 37-year-old man being sealed to a 14-year-old girl is uncomfortable, and no fact about 1840s law makes that discomfort go away. I am not going to pretend it does.
But look at what the record actually says about Helen's case, because almost none of it survives in the CES Letter's three sentences.
Her father proposed the sealing. Heber C. Kimball, one of the Twelve Apostles, went to Joseph after Joseph taught him plural marriage; Joseph did not approach Helen.[5] The sealing was eternity-only. Helen kept living with her parents afterward. She never set up a household with Joseph, and there is no evidence of cohabitation or a conjugal relationship of any kind. In her own words, written years later, the sealing was "for eternity alone."[6] Even a non-Latter-day-Saint historian with no reason to defend Joseph, Michael Marquardt, read the record and called Helen's sealing "a spiritual one unlike other wives who had sexual relations with the prophet."[5:1]
The most telling detail is the one this article opened on. In 1892, the Church was in court and needed to prove that Joseph had practiced plural marriage with real conjugal relations. Three of his plural widows were put under oath and asked about it directly. Helen was alive, articulate, a published defender of the practice, and closer at hand than several of the women who did testify, and the Church never called her.[5:2] The simplest reason is that there was nothing of that kind to testify to.
And then there is the part the CES Letter most needs you not to see. It quotes a 14-year-old's private grief and stops. But that 14-year-old grew up, and the adult Helen Mar Kimball spent roughly thirty years defending plural marriage and her own sealing in public. She published two book-length defenses, in 1882 and 1884, and wrote dozens of essays for the leading Latter-day Saint women's paper. In the 1884 book, at age 56, she wrote that the practice "had been one of the severest" trials of her life and, in the same breath, "one of the greatest of blessings... it had done the most towards making me a Saint and a free woman, in every sense of the word."[7] You are allowed to weigh the 14-year-old's pain. You are not getting the full picture if no one shows you the 56-year-old's conviction, in her own published words, about the same event.
One more thing the CES Letter inverts. Joseph's contemporaries are the people best positioned to have been scandalized by a 14-year-old sealing, and they said nothing about the ages. John C. Bennett, William Law, the hostile Nauvoo and Illinois press: these men attacked Joseph on every front they could invent, from theft to treason to seducing grown women. Not one of them complained that his plural wives were too young.[8] In 1843 Illinois, 14 was within the legal range and teenage marriage was not rare, and the enemies who would have pounced on a genuinely shocking age did not pounce. (There is a caveat I will not hide: Bennett's own conduct ran in a similar age range by his later admission, so part of that silence may be mutual.) The point stands that the contemporaries who knew everything did not raise the alarm the CES Letter raises now.
There is a great deal more here, including the demographic context and the other six teenage sealings, most of which were to 17-year-olds. The in-depth version walks through it case by case.
The Warren Jeffs chart is a magic trick
The CES Letter's most powerful image is the chart that sets Joseph Smith next to Warren Jeffs, the convicted FLDS leader, in matching rows: number of wives, age of youngest, sister wives, and so on. The numbers run in the same direction, so the eye concludes the two men were doing the same thing at different scale. Then comes the line: "Warren Jeffs is more closely aligned to Joseph Smith's Mormonism than the modern LDS Church is."[1:1]
The trick is that it compares counts and hides conduct. Compare conduct and the chart collapses.
Warren Jeffs is a convicted child rapist, serving life plus twenty years, convicted on the strength of his own audio recordings of the assaults. He fathered dozens of children through forced marriages, documented in court records. Former wives testified against him.
Joseph Smith was never charged with a sexual crime of any kind. He fathered no children in plural marriage that DNA can sustain, as we just saw. The women defended him in print for decades. And his most aggressive enemy, John C. Bennett, who had been Mayor of Nauvoo and knew everything happening in the city and was actively trying to destroy Joseph, never accused him of coercing a girl. Bennett threw every other charge he could find. He did not throw that one, and his silence on it is the single loudest fact in the comparison.[8:1] Even the Salt Lake Tribune, no friend of either church, ran its own side-by-side and reached the opposite conclusion from the CES Letter once it weighed conduct instead of counts.
Joseph and Jeffs do not belong on the same chart. Putting them there is the section's central act of misdirection, and the misdirection only works for as long as you stare at the counts instead of the conduct.
The public denials
So far I have shown you where the CES Letter's case is built on omission. Not all of it is, and the piece it gets most right is the one that follows.
While Joseph was privately practicing plural marriage, he and other leaders publicly denied it. This is documented and undeniable. One month before his death, with more than thirty sealings behind him, Joseph preached, "What a thing it is for a man to be accused of committing adultery, and having seven wives, when I can only find one... I can prove them all perjurers."[9] An 1842 affidavit denying that the Church practiced any marriage system but the published monogamous one was signed by people who knew it was misleading, including a woman Joseph had been sealed to and a father who had performed his own daughter's sealing to Joseph.[10]
There is a real defense here: in technical terms, Joseph was often denying a specific thing he genuinely was not doing, namely the "spiritual wifery" that Bennett was peddling, which was adultery dressed up in religious language. Celestial sealing and Bennett's scheme really were different things. And the legal stakes were severe, since plural marriage was a crime in Illinois and public confirmation could have meant arrest and mob violence against the Saints.
But I am not going to hand you that defense and call the problem solved, because it is not. The public in 1842 did not hear careful theological distinctions. When Joseph denied "polygamy," people heard him deny having multiple wives, and he knew that was what they heard. Carefully worded denial is still denial. Recent scholarship reads it as a sustained decade-long pattern of concealment, not a few isolated moments, and that pattern is genuinely harder to defend than any single sermon. A reader who finishes this section and concludes that the public denials are a real moral problem in Joseph's record is not misreading anything. I think they are right that it is a problem. The honest move is to set it against the whole of who Joseph was, not to pretend it away.
The age difficulty belongs here too. Helen was 14, and the framing under which she consented, that her family's eternal salvation depended on it, is the kind of pressure a 14-year-old cannot really weigh freely, by her own adult account of how it was put to her. The sealing involved no cohabitation, but the power imbalance was real, and the defense is not that it was absent. The defense is that Helen herself, as a grown woman who had every freedom to renounce it, instead defended it in print. Both things are true, and a 14-year-old facing that choice is a hard thing to read about even knowing the rest.
And there is a letter. In August 1842, hiding from the law, Joseph wrote to the Whitney family asking Sarah Ann, the 17-year-old he had recently sealed, and her parents to visit him, and telling them to come when Emma was away because "when she is not here, there is the most perfect safty."[11] He is casting his own wife as the danger to avoid. The most defensive reading is that he was concealing the sealing's existence from Emma, who did not yet know, not arranging a sexual encounter, and there is no evidence of conjugal relations with Sarah Ann. But the letter looks bad, the text does not have a fully innocent reading, and the faithful answer is not "this is fine." It is "this is hard, here is the context that limits it, and the difficulty does not fully dissolve." The in-depth version lays out this letter and the strongest scholarly case in full, including Emma's genuine anguish, which was real and rational and which the apologetic tradition has too often brushed past.
It clears the charge, not the weight
Put the picture back together and you do not get the apologetic fantasy that any of this was easy, and you do not get the CES Letter's predator. You get a harder, truer thing: a man who believed God had commanded something costly, who delayed for years and described being driven to it by an angel he said threatened him, not the women,[12] who practiced and concealed a marriage system that imposed real pain on his wife and on some of his plural wives, and who fathered no child the record can trace and whom those same women defended as adults across decades. The defensible facts do not stack into a tidy vindication, and I am not offering one. What they do is narrower and they do it cleanly. They rule out the specific charge. Joseph was not Warren Jeffs, and the evidence forecloses it categorically.
What is left is a genuine weight: a prophet did a hard, painful thing on the strength of revelations he believed but could not publicly confirm, and some people got hurt. You are allowed to find that heavy. The faithful position does not deny the weight; it sets it against the whole of Joseph's mission and finds that the weight does not topple the larger claim. And the largest piece of that claim is not even about the marriages. It is the Book of Mormon, dictated in roughly 60 working days with no notes and no rewrites, witnessed, and never recanted by a single witness who watched it come forth.[2:1]
Which is where this began. In 1892 the Church declined to put Helen Mar Kimball on the stand, because there was nothing of the predator's kind to prove. On the hardest questions about Joseph Smith, the record keeps turning on what the eyewitnesses actually said, the women under oath, the witnesses to the plates, and they did not say what the predator thesis needs them to. You can read more on the witnesses to the Book of Mormon.
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. 51–55, with comparison chart on p. 59. ↩︎ ↩︎
"Plural Marriage in Kirtland and Nauvoo," Gospel Topics Essays, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, October 2014. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics-essays/plural-marriage-in-kirtland-and-nauvoo ↩︎ ↩︎
Brian C. Hales, "Did Plural Marriages Include Sexual Relations?," Joseph Smith's Polygamy. https://josephsmithspolygamy.org/common-questions/plural-marriages-sexual/ — Hales's earlier 2017 BYU Studies treatment phrased the figure as "approximately 12"; his more recent josephsmithspolygamy.org common-questions page phrases it as "approximately 10" with three other ambiguous cases. Both phrasings are defensible against the documentary record; this article uses the 10–12 range to capture both. ↩︎
Ugo A. Perego, "Using Science to Answer Questions from Latter-day Saint History: The Case of Josephine Lyon's Paternity," BYU Studies 57, no. 2 (2018). https://byustudies.byu.edu/article/using-science-to-answer-questions-from-latter-day-saint-history Earlier rulings (Mosiah Hancock, Oliver Buell, Moroni Pratt, Zebulon Jacobs, Orrison Smith) appear in Forensic Science International: Genetics (2005, 2007). ↩︎
"Helen Mar Kimball: Circumstances of Her Plural Marriage," FAIR. https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/Joseph_Smith/Polygamy/Plural_wives/Helen_Mar_Kimball/Circumstances_of_her_plural_marriage and the FAIR Helen Mar Kimball hub at https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/Helen_Mar_Kimball ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Helen Mar Kimball Whitney, 1881 Autobiography, in Jeni Broberg Holzapfel and Richard Neitzel Holzapfel, eds., A Woman's View: Helen Mar Whitney's Reminiscences of Early Church History (Provo: BYU Religious Studies Center, 1997). Appendix one (full text) at https://rsc.byu.edu/womans-view/appendix-one ↩︎
Helen Mar Kimball Whitney, Why We Practice Plural Marriage (Salt Lake City: Juvenile Instructor Office, 1884). Full text: https://josephsmithfoundation.org/why-we-practice-plural-marriage-helen-mar-kimball-whitney/ ↩︎
Craig L. Foster, "Assessing the Criticisms of Early-Age Latter-Day Saint Marriages," Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 31 (2019). https://interpreterfoundation.org/journal/assessing-the-criticisms-of-early-age-latter-day-saint-marriages/ ↩︎ ↩︎
History of the Church, vol. 6, ch. 19, p. 411 (May 26, 1844). The full sermon, as redacted in the History of the Church, includes the "I can only find one" passage. ↩︎
"Notice," Times and Seasons 3, no. 23 (October 1, 1842), pp. 939–940 (the affidavit denying that the Church taught any system of marriage other than the published Doctrine and Covenants). ↩︎
"Letter to Newel K., Elizabeth Ann Smith, and Sarah Ann Whitney, 18 August 1842," The Joseph Smith Papers. https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/letter-to-newel-k-elizabeth-ann-smith-and-sarah-ann-whitney-18-august-1842/1 The transcribed text quoted in this article preserves the Joseph Smith Papers' editorial conventions, including bracketed clarifications where the manuscript spelling departs from modern orthography. ↩︎
Brian C. Hales, Encouraging Joseph Smith to Practice Plural Marriage: The Accounts of the Angel with a Drawn Sword (Ensign Peak Foundation). https://ensignpeakfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Encouraging-Joseph-Smith-to-Practice-Plural-Marriage-The-Accounts-of-the-Angel-with-a-Drawn-Sword.pdf ↩︎