Polygamy & Polyandry
No section on this site costs more to read than this one, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. If you have come this far in good faith and your stomach is tight, that is what a hard history does to a decent person, and it is the right place to start.
A word on terms before the facts, because the section turns on a distinction newcomers rarely hear. Polygamy is one man married to more than one woman. Polyandry is a woman sealed to more than one man, and Joseph Smith was sealed to about eleven women who already had living husbands.
In Joseph's theology, though, a sealing was not the same thing as a marriage in the ordinary sense. It was a covenant binding two people together in the next life; whether they lived together or had marital relations in this one was a separate question the ordinance did not settle. Holding those two ideas apart, the sealing and the marriage, is the single most important move in reading this history, and it is the move the CES Letter never makes.
So let me grant the hard part first. Joseph was sealed to roughly three to four dozen women besides Emma. Several were already married to other living men. One of them, Helen Mar Kimball, was fourteen. Some sealings came with the promise of eternal blessings for a woman's family, and at least one carried the account of an angel with a drawn sword. And in the spring of 1844 Joseph stood before a congregation and, accused of having seven wives, said he could "only find one."[1]
None of that is invented. A response that hurried past it would not deserve your trust, and it would not be worth your time.
The CES Letter gathers those facts and lays them out fast: the numbers, the ages, the angel, the denials, one after another, and then a chart that sets Joseph beside Warren Jeffs, the convicted child rapist.[2] The page wants the horror to do the reasoning. Feel enough of it in quick succession and a verdict arrives, predator, fraud, before you have weighed a single piece.[3]
But notice what the chart is built to skip. It counts wives and ages and sister-pairs, the things you can put in a bar. It never asks the question those bars are standing in for: what did this man actually want, and what did the women who lived it actually say?
Hold that question, because the evidence does answer it, and it answers the other way.
The number that is doing the work
Start with "34 wives," the figure the chart leads on, because most of the alarm is built into the count itself. The number is real, but it fuses three different kinds of sealing into one undifferentiated total, and only one of the three is a marriage in the sense a modern reader assumes. The Church's own Gospel Topics essay draws the line:
"Sealings for time and eternity included commitments and relationships during this life, generally including the possibility of sexual relations. Eternity-only sealings indicated relationships in the next life alone."[4]
Brian Hales, who produced the most exhaustive study of these marriages ever published, sorts Joseph's sealings into three groups: a smaller set of "time and eternity" marriages with documented conjugal relations, and two larger sets, "eternity-only" and "dynastic" sealings that bound families together, neither of which carries any documented evidence of marital relations at all.[5] By his count roughly ten to twelve of the thirty-some sealings show evidence of conjugal relations. The remaining two-thirds do not.
The chart runs on that inflation. A reader sees thirty-four and registers thirty-four wives in the ordinary sense, lined up against Warren Jeffs and his documented relations with dozens. The record does not support the equivalence. The Joseph Smith's marriages article works through the typology wife by wife and shows where the count quietly does the arguing the evidence cannot.
What the chart leaves off the page
A man with thirty-plus plural "wives" produced not one confirmed child with any of them. Every historically attributed child has now been DNA-tested, and every one has been ruled out; the legal husband or another man, never Joseph, comes back as the father.[6] He fathered nine children with Emma and, so far as the genetics can find, none with anyone else.
The strongest case the predatory reading ever had shows what that testing does. For more than a century the best single piece of evidence was Sylvia Sessions, who on her own deathbed in 1882 told her daughter Josephine that Joseph was her father. If true, here at last was the documented child the predatory reading needed. In 2016 a peer-reviewed autosomal DNA analysis tested Josephine's line directly:
"None of the five Smiths shared any amount of autosomal DNA with Josephine's grandchild."[7]
The match came back instead to Sylvia's legal husband, Windsor Lyon. Joseph was excluded.[8] Genetics undid the single strongest claim the critical narrative had, and in doing so it set the pattern for the section: a charge airtight in one sentence dissolves once the actual record is examined.
This evidence is also the kind a skeptic can check independently, published in BYU Studies and the genetics literature, and it predicts the opposite of what a decade of sexual predation would leave behind. Whatever these sealings were, they did not leave that trail.
The women themselves are the part the CES Letter cannot use. They defended these sealings for the rest of their lives, in public, in print, under their own names, including women who later left the Church and had every reason to settle scores. Not one of them ever publicly accused Joseph of wronging her.[9] And these were not silenced women.
Roughly twenty independent accounts describe a Joseph who refused the command for years, who had to be pressed to it, not a man who reached for it.[10] Even the angel with the drawn sword, the detail the CES Letter leans on to make the practice feel coercive, points the wrong way for its argument when you read the accounts: in every telling the sword is aimed at Joseph, threatening him for hesitating, not at the women to frighten them into consenting.[10:1] The man at the center of these records keeps coming across as someone dragged toward a doctrine he did not want, which is a strange thing to be if the doctrine was the whole point.
The polyandry the revelation forbids
The polyandrous sealings sound the most damning compressed into a single clause, and the CES Letter compresses them. It opens the whole section with a sitting Church Historian, Marlin K. Jensen, granting the bare fact:
"So, the question of Polyandry. Polygamy is when a man has multiple wives. Polyandry is when a man marries another man's wife. Joseph did both."[11]
He did. The faithful side does not dispute it. What the CES Letter needs you to supply, silently, is the rest of the sentence: that "marries another man's wife" means took her to bed.
Read the records of those eleven or so sealings and that assumption thins to nothing. The women kept living with their legal husbands. There was no cohabitation with Joseph, no separation, no children.
At least one of these sealings was arranged at the husband's own request: Ruth Vose Sayers's husband, indifferent to the next life himself, asked that Ruth be sealed to Joseph for eternity while he kept her in this one.[12] Nothing about that resembles a predatory affair; it is the shape of a theology about who belongs to whom after death.
Two independent checks point the same way. The first is the revelation itself. D&C 132, the founding text of the whole practice, condemns sexual relations with another man's wife as adultery, three separate times, in the very document a critic would have to read as Joseph's license for it.[13] A man inventing a revelation to justify sleeping with other men's wives does not write three condemnations of sleeping with other men's wives into it. The D&C 132 contradictions article reads the section whole and shows its chronology cutting against the fraud reading rather than toward it.
The second check is the rare convergence of the field's most rigorous critic and its most rigorous defender. Dan Vogel, a prolific non-Latter-day Saint biographer with no motive to protect Joseph, agreed in print to the formulation:
"There is no solid evidence of polyandrous sexuality in any of Joseph Smith's plural marriages."[14]
Vogel still reads the secrecy and the interpretation more darkly than Hales does, and he says so. But on the empirical floor, whether the documentary record contains any case of sexual polyandry, the leading skeptic and the leading apologist end up in the same place: there is none. The Polyandry article walks the eternity-only framework, the missing cohabitation and offspring, and the harder question of concealment that outlives those findings. The best evidence the predatory reading ever had, here too, comes apart on inspection.
The women the CES Letter talks about but never lets speak
Read the section closely and you notice something quiet and telling: the women are everywhere in it and nowhere in it. The CES Letter counts them. It lists their ages. It never once lets one of them finish a sentence in her own voice. Helen Mar Kimball is there only as a frightened fourteen-year-old, and she is left there.
Helen left a record of her own. Her sealing involved no household and no documented conjugal relations, and she kept living with her parents. When the Church needed widows to testify under oath in 1892 about marital relations with Joseph, Helen, alive and articulate and a published defender of the practice, was not called.[9:1] In her own account of the sealing, written as a grown woman, she described it as a covenant reaching past this life, not into it:
"The step I now am taking's for eternity alone, / No one need be the wiser, through time I shall be free."[15]
The same Helen grew up and published two books defending plural marriage, wrote for the Woman's Exponent across two decades, and called the principle, even while admitting it had been among the severest trials of her life, one of the greatest blessings of it.[16] Both things were true of her at once, and she said so with nothing to gain. Honoring these women means letting their adult voices into the room, not freezing them at their youngest and most painful moment so they can be counted and put down.
The three articles in this section are mostly an exercise in slowing the cascade down and listening for those voices. Joseph Smith's marriages takes the marriages themselves: the count and how it fuses three kinds of sealing into one alarming number, the ages and Helen's case, the public denials, the DNA, and what the Jeffs comparison looks like when you weigh it on conduct rather than on bar height. Polyandry walks the sealings to women with living husbands. D&C 132 contradictions takes up the revelation the CES Letter reads as a rulebook Joseph wrote and then broke.
Where this leaves us
I want to say where this comes down as directly as I granted the hard part, because telling you it is all neatly resolved would be its own quiet dishonesty, and you would be right not to believe it. Some of this stays hard. The public denials are the hardest of all: Joseph had taken plural wives and told the public he had not, and no amount of context about who was accusing him fully dissolves the discomfort of reading it.[1:1] A fourteen-year-old in the record is hard. The secrecy was real, and it had real costs, and good people have left over less.
What I do not think it can do is carry the conclusion the CES Letter needs it to carry. Lay the actual evidence out, the DNA that finds no children, the women's own lifelong testimony, the documented reluctance, the polyandrous sealings that produced no household and no offspring, the revelation that forbids the very thing critics read into it, and you are not looking at a predator or a con man. You are looking at something harder to file and harder to dismiss: a man and a community working out a painful, demanding theology in private, leaving behind a record that is genuinely uncomfortable in some places and genuinely exculpatory in others. The discomfort is real, and you do not have to make it go away to deal squarely with it. It simply cannot settle a question that the evidence, when you let it speak, answers the other way.
And when a stretch of this history gets hard enough that the honest answer is "we do not fully know," it is worth remembering what has never come loose. This same man, a few years before any of these sealings, spoke the Book of Mormon into existence in one continuous burst of dictation in 1829, with no manuscript to read from and no second draft to fall back on. That record is still here, and it is still the most tangible thing the Church's claims rest on. The polygamy chapter is hard. It is not the foundation, and it never was.
Read the articles, and then let the women have the ending the CES Letter denied them. Helen Mar Kimball, who was the fourteen-year-old, spent the rest of her life telling anyone who would listen what she had made of it. That voice belongs in the room. Start there, and the section reads differently than the chart wants it to.
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Polygamy | Polyandry," pp. 57–58, quoting History of the Church 6:411 ("I am the same man, and as innocent as I was fourteen years ago... when I can only find one"). ↩︎ ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Polygamy | Polyandry," pp. 55, 59. The side-by-side "Joseph Smith vs. Warren Jeffs" chart compares the two men across six surface metrics (number of wives, age of youngest wife, other men's wives, mother/daughter pairs, biological sister wives, under-age-18 wives). ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Polygamy | Polyandry," pp. 51–52. The section opens (p. 51) with an epigraph from Church Historian Marlin K. Jensen defining the terms and noting "Joseph did both," and builds (pp. 51–52) toward the claim that the marriages reveal "the real origins of polygamy and how Joseph Smith really practiced it." ↩︎
"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, Joseph Smith's Polygamy, 3 vols. (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2013). Hales identifies three working categories of sealing, time-and-eternity (full marriage in this life and the next, with conjugal relations documented in roughly 10–12 of Joseph's sealings), eternity-only (an afterlife bond with no expectation of cohabitation in mortality), and dynastic/familial (an eternity-only sealing binding two priesthood families together). He concludes that the remaining roughly two-thirds of Joseph's approximately 35 sealings carry no documentary evidence of conjugal relations. See the Joseph Smith's marriages article for the wife-by-wife typology and the competing readings of Compton and Quinn. ↩︎
Ugo A. Perego, "Joseph Smith, the Question of Polygamous Offspring, and DNA Analysis," in Newell G. Bringhurst and Craig L. Foster, eds., The Persistence of Polygamy: Joseph Smith and the Origins of Mormon Polygamy (Independence, MO: John Whitmer Books, 2010). See also Perego et al., "Resolving the Paternities of Joseph F. Smith, Mosiah L. Hancock, and Zebulon W. Jacobs," Forensic Science International: Genetics (2019). Every credible historical claim of a Joseph Smith biological child from a plural wife that has surfaced for testing has been DNA-excluded. ↩︎
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). ↩︎
Brian C. Hales, "Joseph Smith's Sexual Polyandry and the Emperor's New Clothes: On Closer Inspection, What Do We Find?" Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship (2013). https://interpreterfoundation.org/journal/joseph-smiths-sexual-polyandry-and-the-emperors-new-clothes-on-closer-inspection-what-do-we-find/ On the 2016 autosomal DNA exclusion of Joseph as the father of Josephine Lyon (the strongest historical case for sexual polyandry), see Ugo A. Perego, cited above. ↩︎
Brian C. Hales, Joseph Smith's Polygamy, 3 vols. (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2013). See vol. 2 for extensive firsthand accounts from plural wives including Helen Mar Kimball, Lucy Walker, and Mary Elizabeth Rollins Lightner. ↩︎ ↩︎
Brian C. Hales, "Encouraging Joseph Smith to Practice Plural Marriage: The Accounts of the Angel with a Drawn Sword," Mormon Historical Studies 11, no. 2 (Fall 2010): 69–70. Hales's catalog identifies more than twenty independent accounts of the angel-with-drawn-sword tradition, in which the angel threatened Joseph, not the women, to compel his compliance. ↩︎ ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Polygamy | Polyandry," p. 51. The Jensen epigraph is from the "2010 Sweden Fireside with Marlin Jensen and Richard Turley," held November 28, 2010; Jensen's actual word in the fireside is "polygyny" (the technical term for one man with multiple wives), which the CES Letter renders as "polygamy." Both refer to the same form. ↩︎
Brian C. Hales, "Ruth Vose" biography. https://josephsmithspolygamy.org/plural-wives-overview/ruth-vose/. Quoting Andrew Jenson's 1887 research notes (Andrew Jenson Collection, Church History Library): "Mr. Sayers, not attaching much importance to the theory of a future life, insisted that his wife Ruth should be sealed to the Prophet for eternity, as he himself should only claim her in this life." ↩︎
"Revelation, 12 July 1843 [D&C 132]," in Joseph Smith Papers. https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/revelation-12-july-1843-dc-132/1 The revelation condemns sexual relations with another man's wife as adultery three times (vv. 41, 42, 61–63), specifying that plural wives must "belong to him, and to no one else." See the D&C 132 contradictions article. ↩︎
Dan Vogel agreed to the formulation "no solid evidence of polyandrous sexuality in any of Joseph Smith's plural marriages" in his published exchanges with Brian Hales. The wording is Hales's; Vogel's own characterization is more grudging — he frames the conclusion as "more probable than Hales' unwarranted assertion that all of JS's polyandrous wives were for eternity only." See Hales-Vogel exchanges at https://josephsmithspolygamy.org/hales-vogel-1-facebook-exchanges/ and https://josephsmithspolygamy.org/hales-vogel-2-private-correspondence/ ↩︎
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, Plural Marriage as Taught by the Prophet Joseph (Salt Lake City: Juvenile Instructor Office, 1882); Why We Practice Plural Marriage (Salt Lake City: Juvenile Instructor Office, 1884). In the 1884 work Helen wrote that plural marriage "had also proven one of the greatest of blessings" even as she described it as "one of the severest" trials of her life. ↩︎