Part of Our History, Our Eternities, and Perhaps Our Lives Again

My devoted husband, our children, and now our grandchildren, are among my greatest blessings—an earthly family, allowing me to imagine a heavenly family. That is, unless I accept the Section 132 version of a family.

When we talk about the eternities and the highest kingdom in the afterlife, we often use the following phrases: worlds without number, immensity of space, eternal lives. Since we use words like multiple and plural to describe wives, would men’s wives be unending also? This seems to be what the early prophets, particularly Brigham Young, had in mind.

Eternities aside, it is hard to forget the early Church families who lived this principle, to forget the pain of Emma and other plural wives whose true feelings cannot be accurately documented because…

“Polygamy was lived out mostly behind closed doors and unseen inside human souls. The documentation in most cases simply was never created.” (BYU Studies Quarterly, Mehr)

Today Church members striving to obey what is commanded in D&C 132:3 are excommunicated. Here’s the verse…

“Therefore, prepare thy heart to receive and obey the instructions which I am about to give unto you; for all those who have this law revealed unto them must obey the same.”

Plural marriage ended because statehood was denied to Utah, but with same-sex marriage now the law of this land, polygamy’s legalization may not be far behind.  As a result of its foreseeable legalization and this mandate recorded in the scriptures, would Church members, like the early Saints, be asked to comply with Section 132 and live this law?

In a 2011 SquareTwo post discussing this question, Valerie Hudson Cassler concluded the Church’s answer would be no, but conceded that the membership is conflicted.

“It is the doctrinal issues surrounding polygamy that stir the LDS soul. For example, when the state of Utah passed its own law defining marriage as heterosexual, there was actually considerable debate about whether to define marriage as between ‘one man and one woman,’ or as ‘a man and a woman,’ so the Lord would not be in violation of Utah law if the practice of polygamy was once again commanded. It says something about the LDS mindset that the second formulation was the one ultimately adopted—it says the mindset is deeply conflicted.”

This is part of an essay that first appeared on SquareTwo