Do Mormons Have Multiple Wives? No, and No New Plural Marriages Since 1904

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No, Mormons today do not have more than one wife. A member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints may have one spouse, and one who enters plural marriage is excommunicated. The church practised polygamy for more than half a century. The 1890 Manifesto told members to stop, and in 1904 the church forbade new plural marriages outright.

So the answer has two halves: no today, yes in the nineteenth century. Both halves lead back to the same words. When Jesus was asked about marriage, he did not begin with the patriarchs and their households. He began at the beginning: “he which made them at the beginning made them male and female,” and “they twain shall be one flesh” (Matthew 19:4–5). Latter-day Saints also hold one man and one woman to be the rule. The church teaches that God may command exceptions, as it believes he did for the patriarchs, and that “the Lord commanded the adoption—and later the cessation—of plural marriage in the latter days.”

One. The church teaches that the marriage of one man and one woman is “the Lord’s standing law of marriage,” and it applies that rule everywhere, even in countries whose laws allow more. Gordon B. Hinckley, then President of the Church, put it as plainly as anyone could at the church’s general conference in October 1998: “I wish to state categorically that this Church has nothing whatever to do with those practicing polygamy. They are not members of this Church.” He went on, “If any of our members are found to be practicing plural marriage, they are excommunicated, the most serious penalty the Church can impose.”

The rule reaches people who want to join, too. Under the church’s General Handbook, “An adult who has encouraged, taught, or been involved in plural marriage must receive approval from the First Presidency before he or she may be baptized.” The First Presidency is the church’s highest governing council.

“Mormons” is a nickname. Members prefer to be called Latter-day Saints, and the church’s style guide says, “We ask that the term ‘Mormons’ and ‘LDS’ not be used.” The old name is still the one most people know. The difference between the two names is explained in Latter-day Saints vs. Mormon.

Yes. Joseph Smith, the church’s founder, taught that God had commanded plural marriage. The church says “fragmentary evidence suggests” he married his first plural wife, Fanny Alger, in Kirtland, Ohio, in the mid-1830s; the first plural marriage in Nauvoo, Illinois, followed in 1841, and he taught the practice privately to a small circle. The church’s own history puts the number of his wives, by careful estimates, “between 30 and 40.” Those who entered these marriages pledged to keep them confidential, and when rumours spread, church leaders issued what the church now calls “carefully worded denials that denounced spiritual wifery and polygamy but were silent about” the plural marriage they believed God had commanded. “Spiritual wifery” was the name for an unauthorised practice a few men used to seduce women. By June 1844, when Joseph Smith died, about 29 other men and 50 women had entered plural marriage; by the time the Saints reached the Salt Lake Valley in 1847, at least 196 men and 521 women had.

Church leaders announced the practice publicly in 1852, in Utah. Even then, most members never lived it. The church’s history says that “two-thirds of polygamist men had only two wives at a time,” and that at the practice’s peak in 1857, “perhaps one half of all Utah Latter-day Saints experienced plural marriage as a husband, wife, or child.” After that the share fell, decade by decade.

For Emma Smith, Joseph’s first wife, it was, in the church’s own words, “an excruciating ordeal.” She accepted some of his plural marriages for a time and denounced the practice at other times, and after his death she stayed in Illinois rather than go west. Brigham Young, who led the Saints to Utah, said that when he first learned of plural marriage, “it was the first time in my life that I had desired the grave.”

They believed God commanded it. The revelation on marriage, written down in 1843 and printed as section 132 of the church’s Doctrine and Covenants, grew partly out of Joseph Smith’s study of the Old Testament in 1831. According to the church, he “prayed to know why God justified Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David, and Solomon in having many wives,” and was told that God had commanded them. The Saints saw themselves as living in the last days, when ancient things would be restored, and they counted the marriages of the patriarchs among those things.

The church’s own scripture gives one reason. The Book of Mormon forbids plural wives in plain terms, “there shall not any man among you have save it be one wife; and concubines he shall have none” (Jacob 2:27), and then makes an exception: “For if I will, saith the Lord of Hosts, raise up seed unto me, I will command my people” (Jacob 2:30). The church says today that it does not understand all of God’s purposes in commanding plural marriage, but that it “did result in the birth of large numbers of children within faithful Latter-day Saint homes,” made marriage available to “virtually all who desired it,” and drew a scattered immigrant people together.

Those who lived it did not find it easy. The church’s history speaks of women and men who “attested to challenges and difficulties but also to the love and joy they found within their families,” and notes that divorce was open to women who were unhappy in a plural marriage.

The United States government made it impossible to continue. Congress passed its first law against plural marriage in 1862. In 1879 the Supreme Court, in Reynolds v. United States, ruled that religious belief was protected but religious practice was not. The Edmunds Act of 1882 made “unlawful cohabitation” punishable by six months in prison and a $300 fine, and the Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887 dissolved the church as a corporation and ordered its property over $50,000 forfeited to the government. Between 1885 and 1889, most of the church’s apostles and stake presidents were in hiding or in prison.

In May 1890 the Supreme Court upheld the Edmunds-Tucker Act, and the church’s temples were in danger of being seized. Its president, Wilford Woodruff, prayed over the matter and later said, “The Lord showed me by vision and revelation exactly what would take place if we did not stop this practice.” In September 1890 he issued the statement known as the Manifesto: “I now publicly declare that my advice to the Latter-day Saints is to refrain from contracting any marriage forbidden by the law of the land.”

The end came slowly. For more than a decade a small number of new plural marriages were still performed, mostly in Mexico and Canada and some in the United States, until the Senate hearings over the apostle Reed Smoot forced the question. In April 1904 President Joseph F. Smith issued what is called the Second Manifesto: anyone who performed or entered a plural marriage would be “liable to be dealt with according to the rules and regulations thereof and excommunicated therefrom.” That is the rule the church has kept ever since.

Marriages already made did not simply end. Joseph F. Smith told the Senate committee in March 1904 that he had lived with his wives and fathered children with them since 1890, and the church’s history says that many couples married between 1890 and 1904 “quietly cohabited into the 1930s and beyond.”

They belong to separate groups. Some members who refused to accept the Second Manifesto were excommunicated, formed independent movements and, in the church’s words, “are sometimes called fundamentalists.” The church rejects the fuller label; Gordon B. Hinckley said, “There is no such thing as a ‘Mormon fundamentalist.’” It says these groups “are not affiliated with or supported by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” The best known is the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, whose history and split are told in FLDS vs LDS.

Yes, after the death of a wife. The church believes that a marriage “sealed” in a temple can last beyond death. Under the General Handbook, if a sealed wife dies, her husband “may be sealed to another woman if she is not already sealed to another man.” A widow, though, “may not be sealed to another man unless she receives a cancellation of the first sealing.” After death the rule widens for women: “A deceased woman may be sealed to all men to whom she was legally married during her life,” though if she was sealed to one husband while living, all of them must have died first. So a living man may be sealed to more than one wife, and a living woman to only one husband at a time.

Section 132 remains part of the church’s scripture. It is the revelation on plural marriage, and the church says it is “embedded within a revelation about eternal marriage—the teaching that marriage could last beyond death.” Historic Christian teaching looks at the life to come differently. When Jesus was asked whose wife a woman married seven times would be in the resurrection, he answered, “in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven” (Matthew 22:30). What we hope for is to see the Lord himself: “we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2).

The Bible records polygamy without commending it. Abraham, Jacob, David and Solomon all had more than one wife, and the stories do not hide what followed: rivalry between Leah and Rachel, and Solomon’s “seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred concubines: and his wives turned away his heart” (1 Kings 11:3). The Law had already warned Israel’s kings, “Neither shall he multiply wives to himself, that his heart turn not away” (Deuteronomy 17:17).

Jesus set the pattern back at creation, and Paul asked that a bishop be “the husband of one wife” (1 Timothy 3:2). Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant churches all teach that Christian marriage is one man and one woman. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says simply that “polygamy is not in accord with the moral law.” The full case is in Is polygamy a sin?

Here the Book of Mormon and the historic churches stand closer than many people expect. The same chapter of Jacob says, “David and Solomon truly had many wives and concubines, which thing was abominable before me, saith the Lord” (Jacob 2:24). Where we still differ is over whether God ever commanded plural marriage in the latter days. The historic churches hold that he did not, and that the pattern Jesus named was never set aside.

That pattern is older than every law and every manifesto. Paul saw in it more than a household rule: “they two shall be one flesh. This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church” (Ephesians 5:31–32). One husband, one wife, one Lord and one bride. “What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder” (Matthew 19:6).

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• Is Polygamy a Sin? What the Bible and the Churches Say
• FLDS vs LDS: What the FLDS Is and How It Split From the Latter-day Saints
• Are Mormons Christian? Latter-day Saints Say Yes, Most Other Churches Say No
• Latter-day Saints vs. Mormon: Understanding the Terms
• Will There Be Marriage in Heaven?
• What Do Mormons Believe? Latter-day Saint Teaching in Their Own Words

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