Justified True Belief

(P1) A true prophet of God does not receive divine commands that he secretly violates, publicly denies, and that systematically benefit himself at the expense of vulnerable women and his own wife. + This is not an argument from squeamishness about an unfamiliar cultural practice. It is an argument from the internal logic of Smith's own claimed revelation. The standard being applied here is the standard D&C 132 itself sets, combined with the basic requirement that a prophet of God not lie to his followers about what he is doing in God's name. (1) D&C 132 sets out specific divine rules that Smith himself violated. - According to D&C 132:61, plural wives must be virgins before the marriage. Smith married at least eleven women who were already married to living husbands, which his own revelation explicitly defines as adultery. - According to D&C 132:63, the stated purpose of plural marriage is to "multiply and replenish the earth" and "bear the souls of men." At least one of Smith's plural wives, Zina Huntington Jacobs, was six months pregnant by her husband at the time of her sealing to Smith. This is incompatible with the stated divine rationale. - According to D&C 132, Emma was to be given the opportunity to consent to plural marriages. Smith concealed most of his marriages from Emma, often for years. Emma later described discovering Smith and Fanny Alger together in the barn. She was not given the opportunity to consent. - A genuine divine revelation for plural marriage would not be systematically violated by the man who claimed to receive it. (2) Smith publicly denied practicing plural marriage while actively practicing it. - In May 1844, Smith stood before a congregation in Nauvoo and stated: "What a thing it is for a man to be accused of committing adultery, and having seven wives, when I can only find one." This statement was made while Smith had approximately thirty plural wives. - The LDS Church's own Gospel Topics Essay on plural marriage acknowledges that Smith and other Church leaders issued "carefully worded denials" of polygamy. The essay describes these as denials of "spiritual wifery" while being "silent about what Joseph Smith and others saw as divinely mandated celestial plural marriage." This is a euphemistic description of lying: denying something publicly while doing it privately. - Oliver Cowdery, one of the Three Witnesses to the Book of Mormon, confronted Smith about his relationship with Fanny Alger and called it a "dirty, nasty, filthy affair." He was excommunicated shortly after. (3) The pattern of practice follows personal motivation, not divine mandate. - Smith frequently married women who lived in his home as household workers, giving him sustained access to them and placing them in a position of financial and social dependence before any proposal. - Smith married the wives of men who were away on missions for the Church, including Zina Huntington (whose husband Henry Jacobs was a faithful member) and Marinda Hyde (whose husband Orson Hyde was on a mission Smith had sent him on). - In several documented cases, Smith told women that an angel with a drawn sword had appeared to him and commanded that he take plural wives, and that if he did not comply, he would be destroyed. This threat was then conveyed to the women themselves as additional pressure to comply. Zina Huntington, Almera Johnson, and Mary Lightner all received versions of this claim. - The youngest of Smith's wives, Helen Mar Kimball, was sealed to him several months before her fifteenth birthday. This occurred at the request of her father Heber, who believed the sealing would secure his own family's salvation.

(P2) The cumulative picture is not consistent with obedient compliance to a difficult divine command. It is consistent with a man using prophetic authority to pursue personal desires while constructing theological justification after the fact. + (1) The revelation was written to control Emma, not to codify divine truth. - D&C 132 was formally recorded on July 12, 1843, in direct response to tension with Emma over Smith's plural marriages. Joseph's brother Hyrum brought the written revelation to Emma specifically to persuade her to accept the practice. - The revelation was not written when plural marriage supposedly began in 1831. It was not written when Smith married Fanny Alger in the mid-1830s. It was not written during the years Smith quietly married dozens of women. It was written at the moment Emma's resistance threatened to create a crisis. The timing is the timing of a man managing a domestic conflict, not the timing of a prophet recording divine law. - Emma destroyed the original manuscript of the revelation shortly after it was presented to her. Smith had it rewritten. Emma never accepted plural marriage and spent the rest of her life publicly denying that it had been practiced. (2) Smith violated his own revelation's rules in ways that serve no theological purpose but serve obvious personal ones. - The revelation explicitly requires virgin wives (D&C 132:61). Smith married at least eleven women who already had living husbands — a practice historians call polyandry (one woman simultaneously married to more than one man). His own revelation defines such unions as adultery regardless of whether they were consummated. This is not a question of what happened in private: the marriages themselves, on their face, violated the terms of the revelation Smith claimed to have received. - LDS scholar Brian Hales, who is sympathetic to Smith and argues the polyandrous marriages were non-sexual, nonetheless acknowledges evidence of sexual relations in at least nine of Smith's other plural marriages. This concession cuts against the claim that Smith was practicing purely spiritual, dynastic sealings. The apologist faces a dilemma with no clean exit: if the marriages to already-wed women were purely spiritual, Smith was still violating D&C 132:61 by entering them at all. If they involved sexual relations, his own revelation condemns him for adultery. - The angel-with-a-drawn-sword narrative, in which Smith claimed divine compulsion and used it to pressure women into marriages, appears in multiple women's accounts across different years and circumstances. This is not the behavior of a reluctant prophet obeying a hard commandment. It is the use of claimed divine authority as a tool of coercion. - The secrecy was total and sustained. Smith denied polygamy publicly while practicing it privately. He lied to Emma. He lied to his congregation. He lied to the public. Whatever theological justification he offered privately, he did not believe the revelation was defensible enough to acknowledge openly. A true divine revelation does not require systematic public deception by the man who received it. (3) The LDS Church ultimately abandoned the practice, then distanced itself from its theological roots. - In 1890, under pressure from the United States government threatening to dissolve the Church and confiscate its property, LDS President Wilford Woodruff issued Official Declaration 1, ending the practice of plural marriage. It was framed as a revelation. - D&C 132, which calls plural marriage an "everlasting covenant" and threatens women who do not comply with destruction, remains in the LDS scriptural canon today. The practice it mandates has been discontinued. The revelation mandating it has never been formally revoked. - The modern LDS Church does not teach plural marriage and does not publicly discuss it. LDS President Gordon B. Hinckley, appearing on Larry King Live in September 1998, stated: "I condemn it, yes, as a practice, because I think it is not doctrinal." A church whose founding prophet received a revelation calling plural marriage an "everlasting covenant" now has its sitting president declaring that same practice not doctrinal, while the revelation mandating it remains in the canon unrevoked. This is not a coherent institutional position. It is the residue of a practice that served its originator's purposes and outlasted its welcome.

(C) Therefore, the practice and circumstances of Joseph Smith's plural marriages are not consistent with a genuine divine command obeyed under difficulty. They are consistent with a man using prophetic authority to pursue personal ends, violating his own revelation's rules, and systematically deceiving his wife, his congregation, and the public. + (1) The internal contradictions are not survivable. - D&C 132 condemns polyandry as adultery. Smith practiced polyandry. D&C 132 requires virgin wives. Smith sealed at least one wife who was already pregnant by her husband. D&C 132 requires Emma's opportunity to consent. Emma was deceived for years. D&C 132 calls this an everlasting covenant. The Church ended it under government pressure. - Each of these is an internal contradiction between Smith's stated divine command and his actual behavior. Taken together, they form a pattern that fits one explanation well: Smith shaped the revelation to serve his purposes and violated it whenever inconvenient. (2) The OT patriarchs present no parallel that rescues Smith's behavior. - Smith appealed to Jacob, David, and Solomon as biblical precedent for plural marriage. But a Christian apologist does not need to concede that God approved those marriages. Jesus himself addressed this directly in Matthew 19:4-8: when asked about marriage, he pointed back to the creation order, "from the beginning it was not so," explaining that Moses's allowances reflected human hardness of heart, not God's design. God's pattern from creation was one man and one woman. The OT departures from that pattern are documented human failures, not divine endorsements. It is worth noting that Abraham does not actually belong on this list: his relationship with Hagar was Sarah's idea born of impatience with God's promise, the text nowhere endorses it, and his later marriage to Keturah came after Sarah's death -- sequential monogamy, not plural marriage. The examples that remain (Jacob, David, Solomon) are precisely those your own Book of Mormon condemns. Smith appealing to Jacob, David, and Solomon is an appeal to examples his own earlier scripture called an abomination. - Smith's own Book of Mormon confirms this. Jacob 2:24 calls David and Solomon's many wives an "abomination." Smith's scripture from 1829-1830 condemned the exact practice he would later claim divine authorization for. This is not a minor inconsistency. It is Smith contradicting himself across a twelve-year gap. - None of the biblical patriarchs received a specific, rule-laden revelation governing exactly how plural marriage must be practiced and then violated every rule in it. Abraham did not publicly deny his marriages while living them. Abraham did not use threats of angelic destruction to pressure reluctant women. The problem is the contradiction between Smith's claimed divine mandate and his actual behavior. (3) The self-authenticating loop reveals the pattern. - What the full record shows is a system in which Smith was simultaneously the source of the law, the sole witness to the divine compulsion to obey it, the primary beneficiary of its terms, and the sole channel through which the threat against Emma was delivered. Consider the sequence: the revelation authorizing polygamy was delivered through Smith. The angel-with-a-sword compulsion was witnessed only by Smith. The authority to marry minors came through Smith. The justification for polyandry came through Smith. The divine ultimatum threatening Emma with destruction for resisting was delivered through Smith to Emma. The Heavenly Father justified the prophet, as communicated by the prophet himself. - This is not the structure of a man reluctantly obeying a hard divine command. It is the structure of a self-authenticating theological loop, in which the prophet cannot be morally questioned because the law, the justification for breaking the law, and the punishment for those who resist all flow from the same single source. - The Emma ultimatum captures the irony most sharply: Smith was positioned as a mere messenger for a decree that mandated his own domestic expansion, delivered to the wife he was expanding away from. (4) This argument is supported by the LDS Church's own documentation. - The LDS Gospel Topics Essay on plural marriage acknowledges Smith's marriages to women already married to living husbands. It acknowledges that the denials of polygamy were "carefully worded." It acknowledges that the youngest wife was sealed before her fifteenth birthday. It acknowledges that Emma was not aware of most of the marriages. These are not anti-Mormon claims. They are the Church's own admissions. See also: • Mormonism: Fraudulent Prophetic Claims • Mormonism: Failed Prophecies

Doctrine and Covenants 132 (LDS scripture, recorded July 12, 1843). LDS Gospel Topics Essay, "Plural Marriage in Kirtland and Nauvoo." ChurchofJesusChrist.org. Richard Bushman, Rough Stone Rolling: A Cultural Biography of Mormonism's Founder. New York: Knopf, 2005, p. 323, 437-38. Todd Compton, In Sacred Loneliness: The Plural Wives of Joseph Smith. Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1997. Brian Hales, Joseph Smith's Polygamy, 3 vols. Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2013. Joseph Smith, public address, Nauvoo, May 26, 1844, as cited in History of the Church, Vol. 6, p. 411 (denial of polygamy while practicing it). Oliver Cowdery description of Fanny Alger incident, as cited in Bushman, Rough Stone Rolling, p. 323. Gordon B. Hinckley, interview with Larry King, Larry King Live, CNN, September 8, 1998. Full transcript confirmed by Deseret News and Church News coverage of the same date. (Hinckley stated: "I condemn it, yes, as a practice, because I think it is not doctrinal.")

+ Joseph Smith was a reluctant participant who found plural marriage deeply difficult. He practiced it out of obedience, not desire. The record shows him wrestling with the command, not eagerly pursuing it. True prophets are sometimes asked to do hard things.

1. The "reluctant prophet" narrative is contradicted by the pattern of behavior. A reluctant prophet compelled by God to practice plural marriage would be expected to follow the rules of the revelation carefully and to be honest with his wife and congregation. Smith did neither. He practiced polyandry, which his own revelation defines as adultery. He concealed his marriages from Emma across a decade. He publicly denied practicing polygamy while actively expanding his circle of wives. He used the threat of angelic destruction to pressure women who were hesitant. None of these behaviors are consistent with reluctant obedience to a painful divine command. They are consistent with a man who wanted what he wanted and was managing the consequences of it. 2. The timing of D&C 132 undermines the reluctant compliance narrative. If Smith received the plural marriage revelation in 1831 and reluctantly obeyed it, why did he wait until 1843 to write it down, and why did he write it down specifically because Emma was threatening the stability of his household? A man reluctantly obeying a divine command has every motivation to document that command immediately, to use it as justification, and to be transparent with his wife. Smith did the opposite. The revelation was written in crisis management mode, not in the mode of careful documentation of a divine mandate. 3. The specific selection of wives reflects personal preference, not random divine assignment. Smith's wives were disproportionately young, attractive, and socially or economically dependent on him through household employment or family relationships with his inner circle. He repeatedly proposed to women who worked in his home. This selection pattern matches personal preference, not divine assignment. If God were assigning specific women to Smith as plural wives, the resulting group would not be expected to cluster around youth, physical proximity, and social dependence. If Smith were selecting women based on personal preference, the resulting group is exactly what we would expect.

+ Jacob, David, and Solomon all had multiple wives. God permitted or used these men despite their polygamy. If the God of the Bible permitted plural marriage among the patriarchs, there is no principled reason why He could not restore that practice through Joseph Smith.

1. The biblical patriarchs did not receive a formal revelation establishing rules for plural marriage and then violate those rules. The argument from biblical precedent assumes Smith was doing essentially what Abraham did. But this fails on multiple levels. First, a Christian apologist does not grant that God endorsed OT polygamy. When Jesus was asked about marriage in Matthew 19:4-8, he pointed straight to the creation order: "from the beginning it was not so." He explicitly explained that Moses's allowances for marital departure from God's design reflected human hardness of heart, not divine approval. God's design from creation was one man and one woman. The patriarchs' plural marriages are examples of human failure that Jesus himself addressed when restoring the original standard, not examples of divinely sanctioned practice Smith could legitimately appeal to. Second, and more specifically, Smith's situation differs from the patriarchs in a critical respect: he claimed to receive a detailed revelation laying out the precise rules for plural marriage, and then he violated those rules. Abraham did not receive a revelation requiring virgin wives and then marry pregnant women. Abraham did not publicly deny his marriages while practicing them. Abraham did not use threats of angelic destruction to pressure reluctant women. The problem is the contradiction between Smith's claimed divine mandate and his actual behavior. 2. The New Testament context Smith claimed to be restoring does not endorse polygamy. Smith claimed to be restoring the original Christian church. The New Testament is clear that bishops and elders are to be "the husband of one wife" (1 Timothy 3:2, 3:12). Paul's letters describe marriage in terms of one husband and one wife. If Smith was restoring the primitive church, the church he was restoring did not practice plural marriage. The appeal to Old Testament patriarchs as justification for a New Testament restoration is a selective reading of scripture that contradicts the very tradition Smith claimed to be recovering. 3. The Book of Mormon, which Smith produced first, explicitly prohibits polygamy except in specific circumstances. Jacob 2:24-27 in the Book of Mormon calls David and Solomon's plural marriages an "abomination" and states that men shall have one wife, with an exception only if God commands it "to raise up righteous seed." If plural marriage was part of the original restoration from 1831 onward, why does the scripture Smith produced in 1829-1830 call David and Solomon's marriages an abomination? Smith's own earlier scripture directly contradicts his later practice, creating a tension that the "God authorized it before" argument does not resolve.

+ When Joseph Smith and other LDS leaders denied "polygamy," they were denying the unauthorized practice of spiritual wifery, not the divinely sanctioned celestial plural marriage. The denials were technically accurate, directed at a different and condemned practice.

1. The LDS Church's own essay calls these "carefully worded denials," which is a euphemism for deception. The Gospel Topics Essay acknowledges that the denials were designed to be technically defensible while conveying a false impression to the public. A statement crafted to make listeners believe something false, even if technically parseable in a narrow sense, is a lie. The audience hearing Smith deny having "seven wives" when he had approximately thirty did not understand him to be denying only unauthorized spiritual wifery. They understood him to be denying plural marriage entirely. Smith knew this and said it anyway. That is deception regardless of the technical construction of the sentence. 2. This defense requires the public to have been deceived, which it was. The entire point of the "carefully worded" framing is that the denials successfully misled the public, the congregation, and Emma for years. Even if one accepts that the statements were technically distinguishable from the actual practice, the result was that thousands of people were led to believe Smith was not practicing plural marriage when he was. A prophet of God who uses rhetorical cleverness to systematically mislead the people he leads about his own behavior is not practicing careful theological distinction. He is lying to the people who trust him. 3. The denials became unambiguous at times, eliminating even the technical defense. On May 26, 1844, Smith stated publicly: "What a thing it is for a man to be accused of committing adultery, and having seven wives, when I can only find one." This is not a carefully worded technical distinction between celestial and spiritual marriage. This is a flat denial of having multiple wives, made while Smith had approximately thirty. The LDS essay's "carefully worded" framing does not apply here. This is a plain, direct falsehood spoken publicly by a man who claimed to be a prophet of God.

+ The Fanny Alger situation occurred in the mid-1830s, before D&C 132 was formally recorded in 1843. It is not fair to judge a practice by a revelation that had not yet been written down. The formal rules of D&C 132 apply to the mature institution of plural marriage, not to an early, pre-revelation episode.

1. The LDS Church's own position is that the revelation was received in 1831, not 1843. D&C 132 was recorded on July 12, 1843, but it was not received on that date. The LDS Church's own Gospel Topics Essay on plural marriage states that Joseph Smith "received a revelation on plural marriage as early as 1831." The formal recording in 1843 was prompted by Emma's resistance -- it was the writing down of a revelation Smith claimed to have held for over a decade. By his own account, the Fanny Alger relationship in the mid-1830s occurred squarely within the period of claimed divine mandate, not before it. The rules of D&C 132 governed what Smith was doing with Alger whether or not those rules had been committed to paper yet. If Smith received the revelation in 1831 and the rules were already binding, he was violating them. If the revelation had not yet been received, then the Alger relationship was not a divinely sanctioned plural marriage at all, but simply the adulterous affair Oliver Cowdery called it. 2. The recording date argument creates a dilemma with no good exit. The apologist faces an unavoidable choice. If D&C 132 governs the Alger relationship, its rules apply and Smith violated them. If D&C 132 does not govern the Alger relationship because it had not been recorded yet, then the Alger relationship had no divine authorization at all, which is precisely what Cowdery said. Either the rules apply and were broken, or there were no rules and the behavior was unauthorized. Neither option supports the claim that Smith was operating as an obedient prophet under a coherent divine mandate. 3. Oliver Cowdery's charge falls within the period of claimed revelation on any timeline. Cowdery confronted Smith about Alger and called it a "dirty, nasty, filthy affair." He was excommunicated in 1838. By the time of the excommunication, Smith had been claiming for years -- if the 1831 date is accepted -- to be operating under a divine revelation about plural marriage. The fact that Smith's closest associate, one of the Three Witnesses, saw the practice as plain adultery rather than obedient compliance with a divine command is significant regardless of which date one assigns to the revelation. The most informed observer in Smith's own inner circle was not persuaded that this was a case of reluctant prophetic obedience.

+ Emma Smith was not simply deceived and steamrolled. In May 1843 she gave written approval for four of Joseph's plural wives. She participated in some sealing ceremonies herself. The picture of Emma as a passive victim ignores evidence of her active, if complicated, participation.

1. Emma's brief acceptance was extracted under direct pressure and retracted within days. Emma's written approval of four plural wives in May 1843 occurred during a period of intense domestic conflict and followed the presentation of D&C 132 specifically designed to compel her compliance. The revelation as recorded includes a direct divine ultimatum to Emma: accept the practice or be destroyed. Her approval, given in that context, is not the free consent of a woman who has come to believe in a divine principle. It is a coerced response to a theological threat delivered by her own husband in the name of God. Her approval was short-lived. Within days she had retracted it. The brief episode of written consent does not survive scrutiny as genuine acceptance. 2. Emma's entire subsequent life contradicts the picture of a woman who came to accept the revelation. After Smith's death in 1844, Emma joined the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a movement that formally rejected polygamy and denied that Joseph Smith had ever taught or practiced it. She spent the remaining three decades of her life publicly and repeatedly insisting that Joseph had never practiced plural marriage. She told her son Joseph Smith III, who led the RLDS Church, that his father had never been a polygamist. Her deathbed statements maintained this position. A woman who had genuinely come to accept plural marriage as a divine principle does not spend thirty years denying it was ever practiced by the man she married. Her entire post-Nauvoo life is the strongest possible evidence of what she actually believed about the practice. 3. The consent argument, even if granted, does not rescue the broader case. The argument being addressed is not only about Emma. It is about the dozens of women who were not Emma: the women who were told an angel with a drawn sword would destroy Smith if they refused, the teenagers sealed to him without public acknowledgment, the wives of faithful missionaries sealed to Smith while those men were away serving the Church he led. Emma's complicated position in one season of their marriage does not address the systematic pattern of coercion, secrecy, and violation of D&C 132's own stated rules that the full record documents.

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