Polyandry
The claim:
"Polyandry: Of those 34 women, 11 of them were married women of other living men. Among them being Apostle Orson Hyde, who was sent on his mission to dedicate Palestine when Joseph secretly married his wife, Marinda Hyde. Church Historian Elder Marlin K. Jensen and unofficial apologists like FairMormon do not dispute the polyandry."[1]
The CES Letter opens the whole section with a 2010 quote from a sitting Church Historian:
"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."
— Elder Marlin K. Jensen, Swedish Rescue Fireside, 28 November 2010[1:1]
Behind the technical words, the picture the CES Letter wants you to carry away is plain enough. Joseph Smith took other men's wives. He slept with eleven women who already had husbands, kept it hidden behind their existing marriages, and in at least one case shipped a husband overseas on a mission to get him out of the way. "Polyandry," in everyday English, means one woman keeping several husbands at once, all of it real, all of it physical. Read the word that way and you are looking at a serial predator hiding inside a church.
The hard part is real: Joseph Smith really was sealed to around eleven women who had living legal husbands. That is not a smear. It is in the Church's own 2014 history essay, and faithful historians acknowledge it.[2] So the question is not whether these sealings happened. They did. The question is what they actually were, and that is the part the CES Letter never lets you see.
Start where the strongest version of the critics' case spent more than a century, because of all places it is the one that came apart most completely. For over a hundred years the best single piece of evidence that Joseph fathered children with another man's wife had one name on it: Josephine Lyon. On her deathbed in 1882, Josephine's mother, Sylvia Sessions, told her she was "the daughter of the Prophet Joseph Smith." If that were true, here at last was the documented child the predatory story needed. In 2016 a geneticist named Ugo Perego ran an autosomal DNA test (the kind that traces inherited markers down through descendants) and answered the question directly. Josephine's father was Sylvia's legal husband, Windsor Lyon. Joseph was excluded.[3] The single best fact the critical story ever had dissolved under genetics, and it set the pattern for almost everything else here: a charge that sounds airtight in one sentence falls apart the moment you look at the actual record.
It all hangs on one word
Almost everything in this charge rides on the word "polyandry," and on the gap between what it means in plain English and what it means to historians.
In ordinary speech, polyandry means a woman living in several full marriages at the same time. To the historians who study early Latter-day Saint records, the word is used more loosely: a woman sealed to a second man while a first husband is still alive, whether or not that sealing ever involved living together or a physical relationship. Brian Hales, who wrote the most thorough study of these marriages ever published, prefers the clumsier but more exact phrase "sealing to a legally married woman," precisely because the documented pattern is not a woman juggling two husbands in bed.[4]
The CES Letter trades on that gap. It borrows the word in the loose, historians' sense (a man sealed to another man's wife) and then quietly loads it with the everyday meaning (concurrent sexual marriage) to color what those sealings were. The Jensen quote does the same work. Elder Marlin K. Jensen, the Church Historian, did say "Joseph did both" at a 2010 fireside in Sweden, and the Church does not run from that vocabulary. But in context Jensen was identifying the topic a questioner had raised, not announcing that Joseph carried on physical affairs with married women. His colleague Richard Turley, answering right after him, called the subject "a very complex subject" and pointed toward the fuller treatment the 2014 history essay would give.[5] Quoting the setup line and stopping is not the same as quoting the answer.
So what were these sealings? The women who lived them left their own description, and it is a phrase the CES Letter never quotes: "for eternity alone." This was a real category in Joseph's developing theology of sealing. A sealing bound two people for the next life; it did not have to mean a marriage in this one. Zina Huntington, sealed to Joseph in 1841 while married to Henry Jacobs, said flatly in an 1898 statement that she was sealed to Joseph "for eternity," not for time.[6] The women in these eleven cases did not move into Joseph's home, did not appear in public as his wives, and did not bear his children. They stayed in their own households with their own husbands.
The husbands are not the men the story needs
The whole "stealing another man's wife" picture depends on aggrieved husbands, men robbed and humiliated. The 1840s frontier gave a wronged husband plenty of ways to answer that kind of insult: lawsuits, public exposure in the newspapers, duels, fists. So if Joseph were sleeping with eleven men's wives, the record should be full of furious husbands. It is not. What the record actually shows runs the other direction.
The cleanest case is Ruth Vose Sayers. Her husband Edward was not a member of the Church and had no interest in joining. According to Church Historian Andrew Jenson's 1887 research notes, drawn from people who knew the participants, Edward himself "insisted that his wife Ruth should be sealed to the Prophet for eternity, as he himself should only claim her in this life."[7][8] The husband asked for the sealing. His reasoning was exactly the eternity-only logic the CES Letter pretends does not exist: as a non-believer, he expected to "claim her in this life" only, and he wanted Ruth to have an eternal bond inside the faith she held. Ruth went on living with Edward for eighteen more years, until he died. Whatever else one says about these eleven, this one cannot be described as Joseph taking another man's wife without simply contradicting the record.
Ruth is not alone in the pattern:
- Adam Lightner, also not a member, refused to testify against Joseph during the Missouri persecutions and "sacrificed his property" rather than betray him.
- Jonathan Holmes, a faithful member and close friend, served as a pallbearer at Joseph's funeral, then later stood in as proxy at his own wife's eternal sealing to Joseph.
- Henry Jacobs, Zina's husband, wrote, "I have no feelings against [Brigham] nor never had," and signed a slip agreeing his civil marriage to Zina had been "for time only."
A man does not stand at his own wife's eternal sealing to another man if he believes that man committed adultery with her. A husband does not refuse to betray the man who supposedly stole his wife. These are not the actions of wronged men, and in the cases where a husband's consent is not documented, what the record holds is silence, not a single contemporary complaint.
The lead example actually clears Joseph
The CES Letter leads with Orson Hyde, the apostle "sent on his mission to dedicate Palestine when Joseph secretly married his wife." The implication is a scheme: get the husband out of the country, then move on the wife. The dates dismantle it.
Orson's mission to dedicate Palestine was a major assignment from the Quorum of the Twelve, not a pretext Joseph invented. Orson left Nauvoo in April 1840 and did not return until December 1842, an absence of nearly three years. The earliest date anyone assigns to Marinda's sealing to Joseph is April 1842, two full years into that mission, and the sealing date Marinda herself later affirmed in a signed affidavit was May 1843, five months after Orson was already home.[9] A plot to remove a husband does not sit on its hands for two years. And Orson's own behavior after he returned is telling: within weeks he went to Joseph and asked Joseph to perform Orson's own next plural marriage, hardly the move of a man who had just learned his wife was stolen.
The Hyde case is the one example the CES Letter picks because it fits the framing best, and even it does not hold. The wider pattern is worse for the charge: of the twelve "polyandrous" husbands one critical historian identified, ten were not away on missions at all when Joseph was sealed to their wives.[10] The "sent men away to take their wives" story fits, at most, a single case.
His own revelation calls it adultery
There is one more fact that sits very awkwardly against the predatory reading. The founding text of Joseph's marriage theology, Doctrine and Covenants section 132, condemns exactly the thing the CES Letter accuses him of. It states that a woman "with another man" outside the covenant "hath committed adultery," and it says so more than once.[11] A man writing a revelation to excuse sleeping with other men's wives does not write a condemnation of sleeping with other men's wives into that same revelation. The simplest reading is that Joseph believed the very act he is charged with was sin. (The CES Letter also tries to turn D&C 132 against itself on other grounds; that separate argument is taken up in D&C 132 Contradictions.)
Step back and the empirical floor is firmer than the CES Letter can afford to admit, because it is not only faithful scholars standing on it. Dan Vogel, one of the most rigorous historians of Joseph Smith who does not believe the Church's claims, agreed in his exchanges with Hales that there is "no solid evidence of polyandrous sexuality in any of Joseph Smith's plural marriages."[12] He reaches that conclusion grudgingly and still reads the secrecy differently, but on the bare question of whether documented sexual polyandry exists, the most demanding believer and the most demanding skeptic in the field end up in the same place. There is no documented case.
The Sylvia Sessions case
Start with her again, because the DNA does not resolve everything. The test proved Joseph did not father Josephine. It does not tell us what Sylvia believed. On her deathbed, Sylvia told her daughter that Joseph was the father, and there is no reason to think she was lying. For Sylvia to have sincerely believed that, she must have understood her relationship with Joseph to have included the kind of physical contact a child could come from. She may simply have been mistaken about which man fathered which child. But her own understanding of that relationship is not something genetics can erase, and of the eleven cases, hers is the one where the eternity-only description is hardest to sustain. What the record actually allows is narrow: it permits that some physical contact occurred during her brief sealing window. It does not require it, and it does not rule it out. One ambiguous case is a long way from the systematic sexual polyandry the CES Letter is selling, but it is not nothing, and pretending it is clean would be a dodge.
The larger difficulty is the secrecy, and it survives every empirical finding above. Even granting that these sealings were eternity-only and produced no children, Joseph kept the practice hidden, from the public, from some of the husbands, and from his own wife Emma for most of the years he practiced it. The most serious recent critical work, a 2024 anthology called Secret Covenants, grants that there is no documented sexual polyandry and then presses exactly this point: the concealment itself carried a real moral cost.[13] There is context that explains the secrecy, and it matters. Plural marriage was a felony in Illinois, public knowledge would have meant arrest and likely mob violence against the Saints, and from Joseph's view a sealing was a different thing entirely from a civil marriage, a distinction invisible to anyone outside the faith. That context lowers the cost. It does not erase it. Emma was deceived. Some husbands did not know in real time. And because the whole thing was done in secret, the surviving record is thin and patchy, which is its own kind of cost. A reader who finishes here and still feels the weight of that concealment is not misreading anything. The faithful case does not ask you to feel otherwise. It asks you to weigh that concealment alongside everything else Joseph was and did, not to wave it away.
Every piece has to fail at once
Add up what the CES Letter actually needs to be true: eleven concurrent sexual marriages, aggrieved husbands hiding their humiliation, children quietly fathered and concealed, contemporaries who somehow never noticed. The record contains none of it. The husbands are not aggrieved; several asked for the sealing or honored it after Joseph's death. The women never moved into his house and described the bond in their own words as "for eternity" only. No biological child has ever been found, and every paternity claim that could be tested has been ruled out. Joseph's bitterest enemies in his own lifetime, men who accused him of everything imaginable, never once charged him with this specific thing; that accusation surfaces only decades later. And his own revelation calls the act adultery. The predatory story requires all of that evidence to fail at the same time, and it does not.
What remains is genuinely hard, and worth holding onto rather than burying: a prophet practiced and concealed a marriage system that imposed real pain, and the secrecy carries a cost the faithful answer does not pretend away. If that sits heavy with you, it should. But notice why the paternity question could be settled at all. DNA could close it because the relevant facts were there to test, traceable down the generations. That is exactly what the secrecy of polygamy lacks, and exactly what the Book of Mormon has in abundance. It was not produced in secret. It was dictated out loud, start to finish, in roughly sixty working days, in front of scribes and family who watched the words come and told that same story without contradiction for the rest of their lives. The polygamy questions are real and some of them stay hard. The foundation they rest against is not hidden, not fragmentary, and not in doubt.
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. 51–53. ↩︎ ↩︎
"Plural Marriage in Kirtland and Nauvoo," Gospel Topics Essays, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (2014). https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics-essays/plural-marriage-in-kirtland-and-nauvoo?lang=eng ↩︎
Ugo A. Perego, "Resolving the Paternity of Josephine Lyon Fisher Through DNA Analysis," Mormon Historical Studies (2016). The 2016 paper specifically resolves the Josephine Lyon paternity question via autosomal DNA. Summary at Mormon Heretic, "Joseph's DNA Test," https://mormonheretic.org/2016/06/19/josephs-dna-test/ ↩︎
Brian C. Hales, "Joseph Smith's 'Polyandry': Expanding the Narrative," Journal of Mormon History 50, no. 2 (April 2024). https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/uip/jmh/article-abstract/50/2/105/386867/Joseph-Smith-s-Polyandry-Expanding-the-Narrative ↩︎
"2010 Sweden Fireside with Marlin Jensen and Richard Turley" (full transcript with corrected Q&A), FAIR. https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/archive/resources/primary-sources/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); the CES Letter renders this as "Polygamy" — both refer to the same form. Turley's substantive contribution acknowledged the topic's complexity ("this is a very complex subject. This is one we could spend a lot of time on") and pointed toward the institutional engagement that the 2014 Gospel Topics Essay would later articulate, rather than delivering a complete eternity-only / non-conjugal framework in the fireside itself. ↩︎
Zina Diantha Huntington Jacobs Smith Young, 1898 statement on her sealing to Joseph Smith. See Brian C. Hales, "Zina Diantha Huntington" biography, https://josephsmithspolygamy.org/plural-wives-overview/zina-diantha-huntington/; and Martha Sonntag Bradley and Mary Brown Firmage Woodward, Four Zinas: A Story of Mothers and Daughters on the Mormon Frontier (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1999), http://signaturebookslibrary.org/4-zinas/ ↩︎
Andrew Jenson, "Plural Marriage," The Historical Record 6, no. 6 (May 1887). The foundational primary-source compilation for many of the polyandrous-sealings affidavits, drawn from Jenson's contemporaneous interviews with surviving participants. The Edward Sayers material on Ruth Vose's sealing appears in Jenson's research notes preserved in the Andrew Jenson Collection at the Church History Library and is reproduced in Hales's wife-biography pages. ↩︎
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." ↩︎
Brian C. Hales, "Marinda Nancy Johnson" biography. https://josephsmithspolygamy.org/plural-wives-overview/marinda-nancy-johnson/ ↩︎
"Did Joseph Smith send men on missions in order to steal their wives?" FAIR. https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/Joseph_Smith/Polygamy/Sent_husbands_on_missions_to_steal_wives. Containing the Hales-attributed finding: "Of the twelve 'polyandrous' husbands identified by Todd Compton, ten were not on missions at the time Joseph was sealed to their legal wives." ↩︎
"Doctrine and Covenants 132," The Doctrine and Covenants of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/132?lang=eng ↩︎
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/ ↩︎
Cheryl L. Bruno (ed.), Secret Covenants: New Insights on Early Mormon Polygamy (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2024). https://www.signaturebooks.com/books/p/secret-covenants. Multi-author anthology with critical editorial framing, including contributions from Compton on eternity-only sealings, Bruno on Emma's denials, Tensmeyer on polygamy denial, Don Bradley on Nauvoo sealing chronology, Susan Staker, and others — some critical, some faithful-leaning. The volume's editorial direction and several contributing chapters contextualize the polyandrous sealings within the Nauvoo culture of secret councils (the Anointed Quorum from May 1842, the Council of Fifty from March 1844, the developing temple endowment) and shift the moral weight from sexual polyandry to systematic concealment. A faithful-side review appears in Times & Seasons, "Secret Covenants: A Review" (September 2024), https://timesandseasons.org/index.php/2024/09/secret-covenants-a-review/ ↩︎