A Speculative Explanation Found Wanting
Increasing the number of children born in the gospel covenant is given as one reason for God to command members of the Church to practice polygamy and polygamous men in the early Church did have more than the average number of children. However, women in plural marriages gave birth to fewer children, so did it accomplish its purpose? (See this study). Regardless, plural marriage likely resulted in lower Church membership by repelling countless potential converts and, despite distancing itself from this principle, it remains the Church’s largest public affairs problem.
Polygamy is similar to a Ponzi scheme—the first investors are paid with money invested by later investors. The first men investing in polygamy take multiple wives, including those much younger than themselves, but the generations of later investors have already contributed their potential wives, so the multiple wives scheme is doomed to collapse. To keep this Ponzi-like scheme afloat today, a large proportion of boys must be kicked out of religious sects who use D&C 132 as the basis for their faith as explained in this BBC article:
“ . . . if some men take multiple wives, others can’t have any. In the FLDS, a large proportion of men must be kicked out as teenagers, shrinking the gene pool even further. ‘They are driven to the highway by their mothers in the middle of the night and dumped by the side of the road,’ says Amos Guiora, a legal expert at the University of Utah who has written a book about religious extremism. ‘Some estimate that there may be up to a thousand so-called ‘lost boys’.”
With females as the funds, this principle may function like a Ponzi scheme on earth, but what about in the eternities?
Among the more common speculations to justify eternal polygamy is that women are more righteous and will outnumber men in the highest kingdom, thus plural marriage will be necessary. However, Elder Dallin H. Oaks said:
“…final judgment is the Lord’s and that mortals must refrain from judging any human being in the final sense of concluding or proclaiming that they are irretrievably bound for hell or have lost all hope of exaltation.”
In other words, we are counseled against making final judgments about anyone’s ultimate eternal destination, which I would assume includes the overall eternal destination of most women as compared to most men.
The final, troubling conclusion that results from the need for eternal polygamy is that these presumed lopsided-celestial-numbers suggest that an all-powerful, all-knowing God miscalculated the male to female ratio for His highest kingdom. Hence, plural marriage is necessary to solve His mistake.
Addendum, September, 2023: I saw this post that cites the 1880 Census showing significantly more men than women in Utah. So not only were fewer children born to these polygamous wives, but fewer men could marry. The solution today is to kick the boys out of these communities, in the Old Testament castration solved the problem.
This is part of an essay that first appeared on SquareTwo