From the Mouths of Women Today

Excerpts from Carol Lynn Pearson's The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy

The words of Carol Lynn Pearson:

“Polygamy?” says the church. “We gave that up long ago.” But on this we do not tell the truth; we do not even tell it slant. We tell it veiled and hope the story will not be examined closely. (p 6)

  

I was sixteen, very aware that I was developing into a woman, dreaming about being loved, being kissed, being married, very aware of where in the room the boy I had a crush on was sitting. And now— this! I must have known about polygamy of long ago, way back in the days of the pioneers, but I didn’t know about polygamy as our eternal destiny— forever and ever! It had to be true. My seminary teacher had borne his testimony to us. For the first time in my life, the ground split and there was a frightening divide between me and God, between me and his church. I would not have been able to articulate it at that time, but I had begun a painful journey toward an impossible goal, a journey that lasted a long time: how to love a God who hurts you. (p 13)

  

But I now know for myself that the idea that maleness is more important than femaleness is a sad relic passed from generation to generation throughout most of history, a relic that not only is false but profoundly harmful to all humans of both genders. And I am personally persuaded that the Ghost of Eternal Polygamy exists today from error, that plural marriage never was— is not now— and never will be ordained of God. (p 21)

  

Mormon plural marriage was enacted with the widespread understanding that the Saints were preparing for a heaven in which each man rules his family kingdom, a kingdom that is more potent and more prepared for eternal increase with every wife that is acquired. Such polygamy— whether fact or fear— becomes a sanctified plundering of the position of women and of the feelings of women, robbing us of our power, our dignity and our self-respect. How Mormon women were made to feel under the trial of past polygamy and feel still under the fear of polygamy future is something that we have never looked in the face. It is a sad face. It bears some resemblance to the face of Emma Hale Smith. We must look without flinching if institutionally we are to heal. (p 112)

  

I experience Mormondom to be a warm and beautiful and well-appointed home in which you suddenly find you’re in a Patriarchy Funhouse that features crazy, rippling distortion mirrors built to magnify maleness and diminish femaleness. It’s males who sit in the seats of authority, from God in his heaven on down to the leadership in Salt Lake City and out to every spot on the globe where Mormons congregate. It’s males we pray to and pray through. It’s males that preside at the pulpit. It’s males that pray over and pass the sacrament, the tokens of the Lord’s Supper, and officiate in all other ordinances. It’s males (nearly always) whose portraits hang on the walls of our chapels and whose faces appear on the covers of our class manuals. It’s males who pronounce every doctrine and policy from church headquarters. It’s males we read about in most of the Old Testament and in ninety-nine percent of the Book of Mormon. (Thank you, Jesus of the New Testament, for being such a radical revolutionary, violating tradition, speaking of and to women, treating them as fully human.) . . . .

  

These are the Mormon rooms that we live in, walk in, worship in. These are the mirrors of distortion in which we, women and men, girls and boys, catch glimpses of ourselves, see our gender magnified or diminished. . . .

  

But there is a room in our church home that is unique to Mormons. The polygamy room. We know it’s there, and we try not to talk about it, try not to even think about it. But something happens and we’re suddenly in it and we can’t avoid looking in those bizarre distortion mirrors: one man looming large— and two half-size women. Or maybe five very small women— one nickel and five pennies. (p 167)

  

Being treated with politeness, consideration, even respect is different from being treated as an equal. (p 170)

  

Long ago, humanity shifted scientific theory from the Ptolemaic system (the earth at the center of the solar system) to the Copernican system (the sun at the center of the solar system). I yearn for the paradigm shift that moves male-female relationship theory from the patriarchal system (the male at the center of the universe with the female orbiting around him) to the partnership system (male and female dancing in perfect balance at the center of the universe). No one is personally harmed by the fiction that the earth is the center point of everything, but this other fiction— the fiction that maleness is central and femaleness auxiliary— this affects the daily life of every woman and every man that it touches and leaves us disoriented, many of us displaced and disheartened, and some of us seriously abused. (p 175)

  

There are echoes of Nauvoo’s and early Utah’s double-speak around polygamy today. Plural marriage is routinely and officially dismissed as a thing of the past. President Gordon B. Hinckley said in essence on “Larry King Live”: “Polygamy? That has nothing to do with us. We gave that up long ago.” Well, actually we did not. It’s still active in our scripture, in temple sealings, and in the anticipation of what life will look like in the highest kingdom of heaven. (p 197)

The anonymous voices of other women: 

My father is currently sealed to three living women. He is divorced from the first two and married to the third. He freely claims them all as wives sealed to him, and also claims the children from my mother’s non-temple remarriage. He seems very pleased about this. (p 25)

 Perhaps if the church did not have such a limited position on families, perhaps I might have been able to feel of some eternal worth growing up. Perhaps today I would not have such deep resentment to overcome and such a lot to forgive— feeling rejected for not fitting in, for not being in a “sealed” family, feeling looked down on by various bishops I have had to interact with. I don’t believe Jesus ever intended for the souls of man, the hearts of children, to be wounded through his church. In fact, I believe it saddens him when his children are made to feel less worthy or less important to him because they are a woman or are a child in a dysfunctional family. (p 28)

 It makes me sad to think about an eternity in which I live in complete fidelity with my husband, but he does not live in complete fidelity with me. It is confusing to me to think that that would be a “higher” state of marriage. The issue of eternal polygamy has caused me deep pain since I first came to understand it as a ten year-old. I’ve spent three decades seeking to reconcile my soul to it, or trying to “put it on the back burner.” Inevitably, that pot ends up boiling over and I have to consider, again and again, the implications of what this doctrine represents and what it says about my value in the economy of the Gods. (p 47)

  

I wish today’s church leaders would take seriously the message about polygamy in Jacob 2: 35 of the Book of Mormon: “Ye have broken the hearts of your tender wives... and the sobbings of their hearts ascend up to God against you.” Polygamy is still with us. The sobbing of women’s hearts is going on all over the church, and our leaders don’t seem to care. (p 47)

  

My mother was petrified of dying because she was the second wife of my father and knew she would have to live polygamy forever. It broke my heart to watch her trying so hard not to die. (p 47)

  

Polygamy in heaven has caused me pain that cannot be quantified. It is the only reason that I fear death. It inhibits my ability to trust in a loving and just Heavenly Father. Its effects have been corrosive to my marriage and my soul. My husband loves me deeply, but he does not understand why I feel so much pain over something that may or may not happen. Whether it happens to me or to someone else, it is a principle that is alive and active in the church and causes pain that is very real. I have this vague terror of being erased, like I am just an interchangeable cog, and that terror keeps me awake late at night. (p 49)

  

My great-grandmother killed herself because of polygamy. My grandmother was raised by the first wife. (p 52)

  

As I went to college and discovered I had a brain, I simply could not reconcile the LDS Church’s past and current doctrine with my own growing sense of self-worth as a woman. As painful as it was to leave all of the other incredibly wonderful things about LDS culture behind, there was simply no way, for me personally, to “get ok” with the behavior of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young as it relates to women. Furthermore, while no one in my own LDS family practiced polygamy, sexism endured and has been very destructive to every relationship between family members: parents, children, siblings. Sexism is the root of LDS polygamy. And sexism lingers on. (p 73)

  

Polygamy is my heritage, but, as a child, young adult, and then a wife and mother, I always knew that it could also be my future. When I began studying the history of my pioneer Mormon ancestors, I had to face head on all of my fears surrounding polygamy. I also had to face that, despite a few public statements to the contrary, plural marriage is still very much a part of LDS doctrine. Recently, I heard with my own ears one of the Twelve Apostles proclaim that he fully expected to have with him for eternity the wife he currently lives with as well as the one who passed away. I felt overcome with grief. I had always believed in a loving Father in Heaven, who cared for his daughters as much as his sons, but everything about polygamy yelled out to the contrary. Mormon heaven would be hell for me. Soon I began to see all of the other ways the church devalues women, and I ceased to believe. I hope that someday the church will officially disavow the concept of plural marriage and fully embrace women as equal partners with men. Until then, I find much greater peace outside the LDS Church. (p 76)

  

When I read in the Doctrine and Covenants about how Emma Smith was threatened that God would destroy her if she did not accept polygamy, I realized that if God didn’t care about Emma’s feelings, he certainly wouldn’t care about mine. This led to depression and anger. I secretly hated God. (p 86)

  

For me personally, the doctrine of polygamy reduces me as a woman to nothing more than breeding stock, little more than an animal. It raises the deepest fears of my heart about why we don’t know more about Heavenly Mother, and means that our doctrine of “heavenly parents” is nothing more than lip service. (p 144)

  

I can only assume that my eternal future, as defined by the LDS Church, is to be a nameless, voiceless mother whose only job is to be one of many, one who produces offspring and is cut off from her children so they do not defile her name as they do God’s. I think this doctrine is emotionally abusive. It tortures many women. It is not of God. It is of man. I ache for the thousands upon thousands of women who have suffered and still suffer under this doctrine. (p 145)

  

I was taught that because men preside over women, women only become goddesses under their husband’s and father’s rule. They don’t own their divinity. This was supposedly why we never hear about Heavenly Mother— because (1) she was one of many, and (2) she was only a demigod, having power only through her husband. I was taught that polygamy was in place because it would help men progress and if women refused, they would be punished. (p 146)

  

I met my husband when we were fourteen years old. . . . He fills up all the empty places in my heart and always knows the right thing to say when I am down. . . . My husband is my best friend, my soul mate, the one person on this planet who knows me and appreciates and loves me anyway. He is my greatest source of happiness.

Despite this, there has always been a lingering pain in my heart that makes me hold back. There is always a piece of me that wonders...'If I die first, will he marry again and be sealed to another woman, making us eternal polygamists?”

 That thought has made me cautious, wondering if there would be a place in the universe far enough away for me to hide if I were on the other side of the veil and my dear love was having another woman sealed to him forever. Practically speaking, this has had an impact on intimate aspects of our eternal love. As my marriage has grown closer over the past seven years, the pain of this issue has only worsened. Could God break my heart forever and call that heaven? (p 153)

  

Women have no power in our church, no voice and zero authority. No wonder there’s so much depression among my Mormon sisters. (p 158)

  

Polygamy was a doctrine that haunted my lasting happiness, the “worm at the core” of peace and love that I otherwise felt from the gospel. A culture that teaches men to acquire women for their own exaltation treats them like chattel, something to be owned or possessed, not valued as respected persons. That women’s feelings on this doctrine have been so routinely ignored is reflective of how little we value women as humans. We may say we value women, but what we mean is we love their service, we want their sacrifice. We don’t want their wholeness and their perspectives and their humanity. (p 176)

  

Polygamy in the eternities is the church’s elephant in the room, in the chapel, in the temple. That teaching, along with other things that treat women as though they are less than men, was the major factor in my leaving the LDS Church. Mormon polygamy would never have been practiced, and would not be expected in eternity, if there always were six female and six male apostles. (p 182)

  

Women have an unequal standing with men in our family hierarchy. The ongoing legacy of polygamy in Mormonism breeds sexism, shame, confusion, fear, feelings of deep inadequacy in many women, and feelings of entitlement in men. I’m not sure how much longer I can be in a church that perpetuates this idea of women as property. (p 182)

 The inequality of gender roles in the church clouds almost everything for me right now. Male privilege nearly always trumps female need. Am I to play second fiddle not only in this life but in the life to come? Polygamy and the church’s sealing practice suggest that. My dissatisfaction seems to increase as my husband has more time-intensive callings (he is currently serving as the bishop of our ward). I have flat-out told him that if there is polygamy in the next life, and we are supposed to be a part of it, I’m gone. I would choose hell. And he believes me. (p 184)

  

The leadership of the church would do well to fully disclose the reasons for the sealing practices and acknowledge that they absolutely imply eternal polygamy. As a current “Mission President’s Wife,” I felt like a liar last week when I told an investigator that the blessings of the temple are the same for everyone. They are not. (p 184)

  

I am fifteen years old. I have struggled a lot in church for the past few years because I have conflicting feelings toward temple marriage and sealing. My stomach churned the first time I heard about eternal polygamy. And you know what? I refuse to believe it. The thought is disgusting and outrageous, and I refuse to believe that a loving Heavenly Father would have anything to do with something so unjust, so sexist, so unequal and objectifying as polygamy. I believe that if we push for this to stop, we can make it stop. Please be brave, and never stop fighting for equality. (p 186)

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