The Desert News recently published an opinion piece called “Perspective: It’s time to push back against the glamorization of polyamory”. The subtitle was “Monogamous marriage maximizes happiness, child safety and the common good”
Does anybody think the writers of the article saw any irony pushing monogamous marriage as the only way for good marriage outcomes to Mormons? Are they completely tone deaf to what they are saying, or is this part of a larger effort in which they are just the foot soldiers? From the article:
And that has been of great benefit to the advancement of human rights: as McCants and her fellow researchers found, polygamous societies are more despotic, less scientifically and economically advanced, and more tribal than monogamous societies. Polygamy is particularly disastrous for women, and is “associated with the commodification of women at the expense of their health, wealth, education, and personal agency,” wherever it is practiced, McCants and her co-author, Daniel Seligson, write.
Let that sink in: “Polygamy is particularly disastrous for women“. Why didn’t anybody tell my Great Great Grandmother this? The authors then go on to citing study after study that shows monogamy is best for happiness in the marriage and for the children. I agree with everything they wrote. But it seems past Prophets in the Latter-Days do NOT agree:
Monogamy, or restrictions by law to one wife, is no part of the economy of heaven among men. Such a system was commenced by the founders at the Roman empire….Rome became the mistress of the world, and introduced this order of monogamy wherever her sway was acknowledged. Thus this monogamic order of marriage, so esteemed by modern Christians as a holy sacrament and divine institution, is nothing but a system established by a set of robbers…. Why do we believe in and practice polygamy? Because the Lord introduced it to his servants in a revelation given to Joseph Smith, and the Lord’s servants have always practiced it.
Brigham Young, Deseret News, August 6, 1862
Just ask yourselves, historians, when was monogamy introduced on to the face of the earth? When those buccaneers, who settled on the peninsula where Rome now stands, could not steal women enough to have two or three apiece, they passed a law that a man should have but one woman. And this started monogamy and the downfall of the plurality system. In the days of Jesus, Rome, having dominion over Jerusalem, they carried out the doctrine more or less. This was the rise, start and foundation of the doctrine of monogamy, and never till then was there a law passed, that we have any knowledge of, that a man should have but one wife
Brigham Young Journal of Discourses Vol. 12. page 262
Sounds like good old Brigham Young would have a bone to pick with the Deseret News, and by extension the current iteration of the church he once ran. Did anybody catch the the first quote is from the Deseret News, the same paper that is now completely throwing BY under the bus?
It wasn’t just Brigham Young, there are many quotes from other Church leaders that echo BY’s sentiments. I’ll include one below, but you can google more.
It is a fact worthy of note that the shortest lived nations of which we have record have been monogamic. Rome with her arts, sciences and warlike instincts, was once the mistress of the world; but her glory faded. She was a monogamic nation and the numerous evils attending that system early laid the foundation for that ruin which eventually overtook her.
Apostle George Q. Cannon, Journal of Discourses, Vol. 13. p. 202
I think the LDS Church would like its history of polygamy to just go away and be forgotten. I believe this article in the Deseret News is just part of an ongoing effort to make us completely forget that polygamy was once a requirement for exaltation, and now it’s of the devil.
What are your thoughts about this 180 degree change of thinking on polygamy?
Wheat & Tares 
My thought on this “180 change of thinking” is that it is a diversion piece that attempts to distance itself from history, as BB points out. I wholeheartedly agree that “*Polygamy is particularly disastrous for women”. *I also agree that the church no longer practices polygamy – in our current earthly existence.That said, it is most definitely still practicing it (or is planning to through earthly actions) on an eternal basis. Both the late RNM and current DHO have entered into polygamous eternal marriages. You can’t get more current than that.
One of the reasons given that we don’t know much about Heavenly Mother is that there are too many of them – indicating polygamous wives. While the church absolutely still believes in and practices polygamy, it doesn’t want to say the quiet part out loud and hopes most of the members don’t connect the dots. If, in our next existence, the concept of multiple partners is indeed an actuality, I hope the church got the details wrong. Instead of the polygamy the church practices, a man having more than one wife, (which is polgyny – I learned a new word today), I would hope that it would be polygamy where either partner can have multiple partners. I don’t know if I would want to practice that either, but I find it more palatable than the one sided current version. I personally am open to the idea that one is not tied to one person FOREVER. Perhaps as we grow and change, much like in life now, having new and different partners through the eternities will be the norm. It seems ridiculous that many LDS are tied forever to a partner who was quickly selected in the throes of hormonal yearning. For many, it is now more of a punishment than a reward. Not everyone chose wisely. Most people change.
Let’s be real – none of us really know what things look like after earth. It’s all speculation. That said, it would be nice if the church actually practiced what they preached. From a young age we’re taught: “we believe in being honest.” They should be honest about their beliefs regarding polygamy.
We were always at war with Eurasia.
The church wants to have its polygamy and deny it too. To modify an old saying. Certain “prophets” want to hang onto the delusion that they get to enjoy both wives’ company in the next life. But too much talk of *that* makes the church sound too much like our sister church that still practices one of the “twin practices of barbarism” that was always horrifying and unpopular in modern culture. So, they still say things that horrify modern women about how we don’t know much about our Heavenly Mother because God just might be a guy who practices such barbaric customs.
They are stuck between a rock and a theological problem. They know that if they openly said that God is a polygamist and other things that some previous guys with the title “prophet” said, that women and lots of men too would leave the church. Plus it would give the evangelicals even more to hate us for. So, they cannot claim that polygamy is still part of our official theology. But if they came out and said that polygamy was all a mistake, then Wendy would realize her claim for eternity with her husband is nonexistent. And Dallin doesn’t want to make his wife unhappy, so they pretend that polygamy doesn’t exist but men get to be with every wife they ever married and keep quiet about women don’t.
You really have to feel sorry for the poor old powerful-rich-white-cis-religious men. They can’t throw Brigham under the bus as making lots of mistakes, such as everything he said about marriage, women, and God., because that would cast doubt that everything they say is really straight from God. They don’t want to give up the idea of their own seventeen virgins in Jannah…opps, wrong polygamy. I mean the celestial kingdom, of course. They don’t want to hand ammunition to their enemies because the evangelicals don’t need more. They don’t want to have a mass exodus of women from the church. They don’t even want to admit that they have no good options for what to do about the p word. So, they keep quiet and hope we all don’t notice. Except when women get too upity about *one* Heavenly Mother. Then one of them gets scared they will have to explain things to their second wife and they open their big defensive mouth about we don’t know if God has a gazillion wives or only one. And all the female members get twisted into a knot over polygamy AGAIN, and they have to go back to pretending polygamy never happened. Poor babies. They really have a hard theological knot.
If it was entirely consensual and indeed women could take an additional husband too, it would be more moral and make more sense. However, I think most of us struggle just to manage one relationship with one person.
I do think people should be free to remarry (both sexes) without worrying about some previous sealing. The most important and influential part of our eternal lives is today. It’s better to be connected than alone, today. It’s better to work towards connection if you long for it, today. And it’s better to support other people to build respectful consensual connections, today. And it hurts me to imagine that God has no feminine aspect or form, and that I as a woman am somehow lesser with no feminine example for me to become like, whereas men have that example.
Today we over focus on an idealized male female monogamy which excludes many many people as not quite good enough for exaltation in the next life or full acceptance by the community in this life. In its own way, it’s no healthier or more Christ-like than polygamy. They are mirrors of each other, and neither is the whole and complete picture, which is something else entirely
I’m confused by the Cannon quote. Is he arguing that Rome fell because of monogamy? And that evidence of the weakness of monogamy is that the Roman era was short lived?
I’m baffled as to whether leadership thinks no one will notice the contradictions around polygamy (and other topics) or if they think no one will care or maybe that their explanations are working?
If we look at our closest animal relatives, the chimpanzee and bonobo, maybe there are some clues to how polygamy and monogamy could be handled in the afterlife. I Googled the difference between a chimpanzee and a bonobo, and this is the AI-generated summary I got back:
“Chimpanzees are generally more muscular and aggressive, with male-dominant societies, while bonobos are more slender, peaceful, and have female-dominant societies that use sexual behavior for social bonding. Physically, bonobos have a slimmer build, longer legs, pink lips, and a dark face, whereas chimpanzees are more robust, have longer arms, and their faces change color as they age. Socially and behaviorally, bonobos are known for their cooperative nature and use of sexual contact to reduce tension, while chimpanzees exhibit more lethal aggression, territoriality, and cooperative hunting.”
If we look at the whole of humanity, we have societies that are like one or the other, but primarily, we live in a more chimp-like world prone to violence and male dominance. I wonder if that’s the world I really want to live in? Like lws329 said, “It’s better to be connected than alone, today.” I think it will also be better in the afterlife. When people talk about polygamy/monogamy, it’s another way of talking about sex. Sex is viewed and treated as a sin and something to be exclusive, and I agree that in our society, it’s probably the way it needs to be viewed because there is so much violence when people act outside the norm. But, in another context, if it were looked at as a way to build stronger relationships universally and not as a way to mark territory, things could be very different.
Since we don’t really know what the afterlife will be, we need to ask ourselves a couple of questions: 1. Do you have the energy to have multiple relationships and 2. Do you have the emotional bandwidth to have them and let those you love also have theirs? If it’s an either/or between polygamy and monogamy, it’s at the expense of one sex/gender (male/female) over another. Personally, I wonder if God wants it that way or if God values a more equal way of relationships.
Bishop Bill: I wanted to run screaming from the room when I read those misogynistic quotes from Brother Brigham and Brother Cannon. Not that they surprise me, but how openly egregious they are. Yeah, yeah, one could say they come from another time, but that doesn’t cut it.
It was the combination of smoke and mirrors around polygyny, absence of female deity, and male-only ordination to priesthood offices (and all the implications of that practice) that finally formed the crater in my previously well-constructed certainty in the Church’s teachings and claim to exclusive authority. They can’t fix one of those without upsetting the apple cart. While I don’t presume to know their thinking or motivation, I think this may be another reason why current top leadership is playing it the way it is regarding monogamy and polygyny.
I just want to be there (peering safely from the window of a lower kingdom) when Brigham and his buddies show up at the gates of the Celestial Kingdom expecting their wives to come rushing out to greet them (preferably with freshly made doughnuts in hand), only to find that the women walked away, taking their health, wealth, education, and personal agency with them (along with the doughnuts).
Anna is right. The church wants to have its polygamy and deny it, too. They’ve really painted themselves into a corner with this one.
I just want to be there (observing from my cozy apartment in a lower kingdom) when Brigham and his buddies arrive at the gates of the Celestial Kingdom expecting their wives to rush out to greet them—preferably with freshly baked doughnuts in hand—only to find that the women have walked away, taking their health, wealth, education, and personal agency with them (along with the doughnuts).
Anna is right. The church wants to have its polygamy and deny it, too. They’ve really painted themselves into a corner with this one.
Ok, well, somehow while I was signing in my comment vanished, I rewrote it, and then both appeared. Aargh.
Fascinating hypocrisy there! I read the opinion piece, and it supports monogamy with one of the exact arguments that women have used to condemn polygamy — you can’t love more than one person that completely. It sounds to me like the article is conflating polyamory with “open relationships” and taking the worst of both.
From the article: “Maybe the problem is the diagnosis: advocates for Western polyamory presume the most important component of a married person’s satisfaction is sex. Sexual health certainly impacts a marriage. But research suggests it’s actually the quality of friendship and commitment, the attachment, between a husband and wife that most profoundly influences their marital satisfaction. No one can truly feel safe inside a marriage whose vows have an asterisk. And it’s exactly these components — the friendship, trust and commitment — that polyamory devours.”
Open relationships are ones in which a couple goes off to have other sexual partners. The husband has a girlfriend; the wife has a boyfriend. They’re in search of sexual fulfillment.
Polyamory (the way I’ve heard it used in queer discussions) is about a committed relationship with more than two people. A long-term stable threesome (or foursome or fivesome or …) is polyamory. All three people are best friends, trust each other, live together. They aren’t having sex with anyone outside of their threesome.
Polyamory is also (ideally) an equal relationship. Polygamy is one man marrying women as breeding stock. A woman in a polyamorous relationship chooses whether or not to have children, and whether or not to join the relationship or stay in the relationship. Men make the same choices, as equals, not as the presiding authority directing the family’s breeding.
Instereo asks the important question: how much emotional bandwidth do you actually have to balance a relationship? Two people can create a lot of drama. Adding more people to the mix, with all the risk of playing favorites, and more drama, adds up. I have no personal experience in this, but I would imagine polyamorous groups have breakup rates higher than monogamous divorce rates, just because there are more people involved.
My favorite subject;
Sex exists in order to preserve diversity in the species. Virtually all living organisms on the earth have some sort of sexual reproduction because, in a world of changing circumstances, diversity promotes survival of the species.
What good is sex in heaven where survival is guaranteed? As far as I can tell, it has no real purpose, except, perhaps, for old times’ sake. Or do we have spiritual DNA that gets mixed and, then, the offspring get sorted out in a lethal environment on an Earth? This Earth, then, is God’s trial by fire for the operation of Darwinian selection by the survival of the fittest?
Barring that, women are, evolutionarily, substantially more important than men since they actually bear the children, raise them, and protect them. Men, meh, off hunting. If we were seals, the females would be off hunting. Male seals’ hunting does nothing for the offspring, much, except preserve the males to mate again next year. All we need are Amazon women with spears.
So, in the eternities, I cannot imagine females taking a back seat to anyone. There, the need for aggression for survival in a dangerous world, and the need for upper body strength, go away. The male God, I imagine, is just a good story to give men some hope.
What a weird piece in the DN – in context, as others have noted, it was really trying to argue against polyamory; but used polygamy as justification for why monogamy is ideal. Were they just unaware of the other point they were proving beyond the primary goal of hitting at polyamory? Or do they perhaps, themselves, take a stand personally against polygamy? Or yes, it could be a more cynical ploy to further dilute association of polygamy with the church. Odd formulation of an argument in the piece, and odd for it to show up in DN.
I don’t think I could answer the question about the 180 degree change – is it of the writers, or of the church, etc? Would be nice to better understand the second-order goals of the writers first.
To get to the question of is there any real difference between the old word for polygamy and the new word for calling it polyamory? Well, legally there has never been a system that allows polyamory, with all modern spousal benefits. So what worked in ancient cultures where there was women as chattel that allowed polygamy, we just don’t have that world. And I sure don’t want it. The article doesn’t answer questions about the modern way polyamory might work, or rather not work.
But like the confusion in the article between polygamy and polyamory, is there really any difference to worry about? I see the same problems with old fashioned polygamy and this new invention renaming it polyamory.
Janey says she doesn’t have personal experience in a polyamorous relationship, but I was very close to one. Close enough that when we saw evidence that it was not just a roommate to help with rent, we tried to warn them that polygamy does not work out because it is not balanced. They explained, like teens do to their behind the times parents, that this will work because it is “polyamory.” New modern invention that has nothing in common with those old fashioned things done in the past 🙄. I said, that I don’t care if you rename it. “polygamy” just means more than one in the marriage, so renaming it doesn’t change the problems inherent. Polygamy doesn’t say two women or two men, but is just multiple spouses and rebranding doesn’t change it. More than one spouse is *inherently* unequal if one part of it is legally married. Another way it might be unequal is new people always have the advantage of new. Those two facts make it inherently unequal. It was a married couple, mixed orientation marriage, bringing in a partner for the lesbian wife to share with the man. So, triangle with three way sex. I told the one I had a parental type relationship with that it cannot last. Either the husband equals two women, like old fashioned polygyny or the husband&wife have more power, like Utah’s Mormon polygyny where first wife has status, or the lesbian connection becomes stronger, or the husband forms an alliance with the new woman. But triangles are really really hard to balance and keep balanced. And it is not any one’s nature to love two people perfectly equally and one of this threesome is going to be unhappy within about six months to a year. Someone WILL get hurt. The only way these things work is if the wives can’t leave or someone is willing to stay in a loveless relationship knowing they are not favorite. This one blew up in the worst way and everyone got hurt.
So, I didnt really want to argue that polyamory is just a new generation reinventing the old polygamy because anyone who doesn’t think polygamous wives didn’t have sister wife sex is just not thinking. Why do they think some women liked polygamy? Either so they could have married status with spinster career or married status with lesbian relationship. But by giving unmarried women *human* status we solved the one problem and by allowing same sex couples to marry we solved the other.
There are legal issues that make three in a partnership not really viable. Who is legal “next of kin” with spousal rights to insurance, decisions in case of incapacity, inheritance? Which one of multiple spouses gets the right to spousal rights?
This is why polygamy changes marriage even more than same sex marriage. Going from two to three is a bigger change than just making it all gender neutral. And to be equal marriage has to be gender neutral. But it hasn’t been up until about 1970, so many couldn’t stand same sex marriage because they still think in terms of gender rolls being inherent instead of equality. When women were legally nothing but chattel, polygamy wasn’t a legal problem. But being chattel IS. Now, there is a huge legal problem with polygamy/polyamory. Who has legal spouse standing? The person who lacks that legal spouse standing is not really married.
And because of children, and things women give up having children, I still think marriage is still a necessary protection for women.
SVBob
” Virtually all living organisms on the earth have some sort of sexual reproduction” Um, depends on what you’re counting and how you’re measuring. Bacteria and Archaea might to be wanting a few words to say. What with all that fission and horizontal gene transfer goin’ on.
And there’s a whole lot of them there tiny things. like, everywhere.
So yes, what good is sex(or sexes) in heaven? If Celestial entities engage in sexual reproduction, and the Red Queen hypothesis is correct, then there needs be in all things,–exalted parasites.
Instereo
Sidestepping chimps and bonabos, consider this paper from april 13, 2004, “Emergence of a Peaceful Culture in Wild Baboons”. (Also Robert Spolsky has many lectures on this on youtube) The dominant males died from eating bad meat at the tourist lodge. The female baboons were now the majority. And this troop started doing things differently, even as new males migrated into the troop.
I remember when the movie. 2001 came out, that awesome shot of the bone being thrown into the air to be replaced with spaceships. That’s the mythology, the story being told. Society progresses because virile men engage in war. Message wise I prefer 2010 and “Something Wonderful”
I do not want to live in a chimp world. Not in the afterlife or this one. I favor cooperation and empathy. The way most humans lived throughout our long prehistory.
Personally I have little energy. It totally exhausting thinking of going into a arena to watch a sporting event. I can watch, alone, on the tv in the privacy of my living room. Much better and way less stressful.
Polyamory is gaining traction as an idea amongst our young people, I have daughters in their 40s and it has ruined relationships and left them alone and confused as they have faced these new justifications for infidelity. Polyamory is the new excuse for doing whatever you want and justification for complete selfishness and cruelty.
It is only a matter of time before the church is going to have to respond to these powerful and seductive ideas. But as this article illustrates, we don’t have a leg to stand on, other than self respect, boundaries and self esteem. Buckle up, parents.
I’m a little late to the party, but I have a couple of points that nobody has brought up yet. First, history shows us that polygamy (specifically polygyny) may have a theological mask, but it always emerges as a secular sign of elitism, wealth and power in highly patriarchal societies. It is an almost inevitable byproduct of the most patriarchal societies because it sees and treats women as not only property, but as valuable signs of being “highly desirable” and having social power–for men. By extension, their wives sometimes also gain cachet through association. Here’s a Brigham Young quote I expected to see but didn’t: “Do you think that I am an old man? I could prove to this congregation that I am young; for I could find more girls who would choose me for a husband than can carry any of the young men.” It points directly to the problems created by a polygynous society–the “elite” men get more than their share, and it creates a sub-class of unattached men who can’t partner up because the status-seeking women become the property of the most powerful men, often by choice because their options all suck. Hence, the “lost boys” of the FLDS. Their marriages aren’t sanctioned and they are cast out of the community because they pose a temptation to the girls of their same age range. The older, more powerful men don’t want them as competitors.
The other thing I will mention that I thought someone might bring up is that there is a movie coming out in November called Eternity in which Elizabeth Olson dies after living a long and loving life with her husband, and in the afterlife, she discovers that her first husband (who apparently died very young in a war) has been waiting for her this whole time, planning to spend eternity together. She of course has loved both men. She is given one week to decide which one she will stay with, consiging the other one to an eternity without her. My first thought was “Holy crap, some Mormon has written our polygamy nightmare into a rom-com,” but I’m not sure that’s true. It’s just an obvious question. It was even asked in the New Testament regarding a hypothetical woman who was widowed seven times. Jesus says she will be with NONE of her husbands in the afterlife because in that place people neither marry nor are given in marriage. But nobody likes the anti-marriage rhetoric in the New Testament, and there’s quite a bit of it, so we keep asking these same questions.