confronting polygamy

we don't always have to fit God to doctrine

We were driving home from my in-laws’ one Sunday evening, and I told my husband that if I ever died I didn’t want him to get remarried. We were maybe a year or two into our marriage at that point, and polygamy was already haunting me. I don’t know if I saw that fear as a confrontation with polygamy at the time, but there’s no other way to interpret that conversation.

Since then I’ve personally disavowed polygamy and refuse to believe it was ever commanded by God. But that conclusion is not an easy one for many of my fellow Mormon women. Today I want to examine why that is and turn the kaleidoscope of theology just a bit to see this incongruence differently (and perhaps a little bit more like a mystic).

Before I get into where polygamy falls for me within the mystic faith stages, I want to look at why polygamy is such a common shelf-breaker for so many Mormons, women specifically.

Photo by Susan Jones on Unsplash

The obvious reason is that the capital-C Church obfuscated its own history until it couldn’t. Transparency was never in Salt Lake’s interest, and when members discovered less scrubbed accounts of church history, they bounced. (That in itself is another essay and conversation, but I wish that collectively we could learn from church history more instead of revere it.)

Polygamy is also just the first domino in a pattern of unrighteous dominion, spiritual abuse, and religious objectification of women that has trickled down into modern Mormon practice. Because we’re taught that the prophet speaks for God, critiquing what a prophet says at any point in history can make people (and the institution) skittish.

But here’s where I introduce the crux of pretty much all my mystic Mormon engagement: God is not the church, and it’s our opportunity and responsibility to discern the nature of God and use that to interact with church and its history accordingly. And the best part is that once you’ve disentangled God from church, whatever choice you make about how you participate in church is 100 percent yours.