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.
So let me grant the hard part first, plainly. Joseph Smith 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.
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.[4] He fathered nine children with Emma and, so far as the genetics can find, none with anyone else. Whatever a decade of plural sealing was, it did not leave the trail that a decade of sexual predation leaves.
The women themselves are the part the 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.[5] 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.[6] Even the angel with the drawn sword, the detail the 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.[6:1] 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.
Then there are the polyandrous sealings, the ones that sound the most damning compressed into a single clause. Read the records and they thin out. The women kept living with their legal husbands. There was no cohabitation with Joseph, no separation, no children. For more than a century the strongest single case for sexual polyandry was Sylvia Sessions, whose daughter said on a deathbed that Joseph was her father; in 2016 a peer-reviewed DNA test matched the daughter to Sylvia's legal husband instead, and Joseph was excluded.[7] The best evidence the predatory reading ever had came apart under genetics.
None of that is the profile the chart is trying to draw.
The women the 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 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. 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.[8] Both things were true of her at once, and she said so as a grown woman 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 different 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 through the eleven or so sealings to women with living husbands: the eternity-only framework, the missing cohabitation and missing children, the places where faithful and critical scholars actually agree, and the harder question of concealment that outlives those findings. D&C 132 contradictions takes up the revelation the Letter reads as a rulebook Joseph wrote and then broke, and asks what section 132 says when it is read whole instead of in fragments, and why its chronology pushes against the fraud reading rather than toward it.
Where this leaves us
I want to say where this lands as plainly 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 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, 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 be honest. It simply cannot settle a question that the evidence, when you let it speak, answers the other way.
Read the articles, and then let the women have the ending the 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." ↩︎
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. ↩︎
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. ↩︎ ↩︎
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. ↩︎
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. ↩︎