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 making four claims in its polygamy section:
- Joseph Smith had at least 34 wives, a number the Church itself now confirms.
- Seven of the 34 were teenage girls. Helen Mar Kimball was the youngest at 14, an age the CES Letter says was shocking even in the 1800s.
- Joseph pressured women into these marriages, promising the girls and their families eternal life, or warning that an angel with a drawn sword would slay him if they said no.
- Add the marriages to other men's wives and the years of public denial, and Joseph Smith looks more like Warren Jeffs, the imprisoned leader of a polygamous splinter sect, than like today's Church.
Together they paint one portrait: Joseph Smith as a religious predator, and the CES Letter drives it home with a side-by-side chart of Joseph and Warren Jeffs. 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 his wife Emma. One of them, Helen Mar Kimball, was 14. He did deny the practice publicly while he was living it. Those facts are real.
Put back what the CES Letter buries, and the predator disappears.
- Most of those sealings were never marriages in the way you are picturing. Roughly two-thirds were "eternity-only" bonds for the next life, with no evidence the couple ever lived together as husband and wife.
- DNA testing has ruled Joseph out as the father of every plural-marriage child ever attributed to him. His only known children are with Emma Smith.
- The women themselves spent the rest of their adult lives defending the practice of plural marriage in print.
- Joseph's enemies in his own day accused him of everything else under the sun, but never once of preying on young girls, the very charge the CES Letter is most sure of.
The difficulty that remains is real, and I will get to it. It is just a very different difficulty from the one the CES Letter is selling.
"34 wives" is not 34 marriages
The CES Letter's whole case leans on that number.
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]
In plain numbers, the distinction is stark. Brian Hales spent three volumes documenting Joseph's plural marriages wife by wife. His conclusion: of the roughly three dozen 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. Even the conjugal side is thinner than the label suggests: Joseph's only known children are Emma's, because DNA testing has ruled out every child ever attributed to him by a plural wife (the DNA section below tells that story).
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 number 34 is only frightening when those categories are stripped away, and stripping them away is exactly what the CES Letter's presentation does.
The DNA closes a door the CES Letter needs open
The DNA evidence does not ask you to trust a single Latter-day Saint source, and it is the test 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.
The geneticist Ugo Perego ran the tests, and the published results are a clean sweep. Six historical paternity claims, six rulings, and not one of the children was Joseph's.[4] The last to fall 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 one paternity claim with a mother's own word behind it. 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. So where are Joseph's children? He 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.
Helen Mar Kimball, and the rest of her story
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.
But look at what the record actually says about Helen's case, because almost none of it survives in the CES Letter.
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]
In 1892, the Church found itself in a strange spot: it had to prove in court that Joseph really had practiced plural marriage. A rival church led by Joseph's own son had long insisted he never practiced it, and a lawsuit known as the Temple Lot case turned partly on which side was right. Proving the marriages meant proving they were marriages in full, so three of Joseph's plural widows went on the stand and were asked directly about conjugal relations. Helen was alive, articulate, closer at hand than some of the widows who did testify, and a published defender of the practice, and the Church never called her.[5:2] The simplest reason is that there was nothing of that kind to testify to.
But Helen's story has a second act, 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, in her mid-fifties, 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] The 14-year-old's pain is real, and it counts. But you are not getting the full picture if no one shows you the conviction she published at the other end of her life, in her own words, about the same event.
As for the claim that this was shocking even in Joseph's own day: Joseph's contemporaries are the people best positioned to have been scandalized by a 14-year-old sealing, and the surviving record has them saying 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 shocking age did not pounce. (Bennett had his own seductions to cover, six or seven by his own confession, as Hyrum Smith remembered it, 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, five of which were 16 or 17. 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, leader of the polygamous FLDS sect that broke away from the Church, 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 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 convicted of 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 an underage girl. Bennett threw every other charge he could find. Why never this one? His silence says more than the chart's numbers do.[8:1] Even the Salt Lake Tribune, no friend of either church, ran its own side-by-side during Jeffs's 2011 trial. It granted the parallels and let the contrasts stand: Hales, surveying Joseph's plural wives, noted that "none of them claimed they were victimized or beguiled by the prophet," while legal historian Sarah Barringer Gordon said Jeffs "inherited a great deal of religious power and has spent his life exploiting it."[9]
Putting Joseph in the same rows as Jeffs 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 public denials are the piece it gets most right.
While Joseph was privately practicing plural marriage, he and other leaders publicly denied it. This is documented and not in dispute. 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."[10] An 1842 affidavit denying that the Church practiced any marriage system but the published monogamous one was signed by people who knew how misleading it was, including a woman Joseph had been sealed to and a father who had performed his own daughter's sealing to Joseph.[11]
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 harder to defend than any single sermon. A reader who finishes this section and concludes that the public denials leave a real moral problem in Joseph's record is not misreading anything. I think they are right that it is a problem. Set it beside the whole of who Joseph was, and weigh them together.
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."[12] 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 clear 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 to call it fine. It is to admit it is hard, give the context that limits it, and accept that the difficulty remains. The in-depth version lays out this letter and the strongest scholarly case in full, including Emma's 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,[13] who practiced a marriage system he hid, one that put 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 closes that door.
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. Faith does not require denying that weight. Set against the whole of Joseph's mission, it 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, and it does not get smaller while you weigh this.
Go back one last time to that 1892 courtroom. To prove conjugal relations, the Church put three plural widows on the stand, and Helen Mar Kimball, the very wife the CES Letter quotes, was never among them. The hardest questions about Joseph Smith are eyewitness questions, the widows under oath here, the witnesses to the plates on the book itself, and both times the eyewitness answer favors Joseph.
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, 59, 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/ The page identifies ten wives with documented evidence of sexual relations and three ambiguous cases (Eliza R. Snow, Sarah Ann Whitney, Hannah Ells), concluding that "less than half of Joseph Smith's polygamous unions were consummated"; counting some of the ambiguous cases yields the figure of roughly twelve in Hales's print treatments (cf. Hales, Joseph Smith's Polygamy, vol. 1). 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 58, no. 4 (2019): 143. https://byustudies.byu.edu/article/using-science-to-answer-questions-from-latter-day-saint-history The underlying study: "Resolving a 150-Year-Old Paternity Case in Mormon History Using DTC Autosomal DNA Testing of Distant Relatives," Forensic Science International: Genetics 42 (2019): 1–7. Earlier exclusions were published in Journal of Mormon History 31, no. 2 (2005) and John Whitmer Historical Association Journal 27 (2008). ↩︎
"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), 23–24. Full text: https://archive.org/details/whywepracticepl00whitgoog (the josephsmithfoundation.org entry carries only a catalog listing with a one-paragraph excerpt). ↩︎
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/ ↩︎ ↩︎
"Comparing Mormon Founder, FLDS Leader on Polygamy," Salt Lake Tribune. https://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=52371806&itype=CMSID ↩︎
History of the Church, vol. 6, 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 ↩︎