Did Joseph Smith have 33 wives?

Compton documents 33 well-attested plural wives; Hales's fuller count is 35, and the Church's Gospel Topics essay concurs in range (30–40). About eleven were civilly married to living husbands at their sealings — and Hales, on the fullest documentary record, finds no credible evidence of sexual relations in any of those sealings, reading them as eternity-only covenants. Compton weighs some late testimony differently.

What does the author say about critics using his book?

When the Tanners built an attack piece from it, Compton replied that they 'merely excerpt passages... for sensational effect,' described his aim as a moderate but honest treatment, and wrote a book-length response rejecting misreadings from both critics and apologists.

Mormonism Explained

In Sacred Loneliness: What Compton's Book Really Says

Q: Is In Sacred Loneliness anti-Mormon?

No. It is award-winning scholarship (Mormon History Association and John Whitmer Historical Association Best Book awards) by Todd Compton, a believing Latter-day Saint historian, written to recover the lives of thirty-three largely forgotten women. Critics cite it precisely because it is careful and faithful — and its author has publicly objected to the sensational excerpting.

Q: What does 'sacred loneliness' mean?

Compton's name for the wives' condition: covenants they held sacred, lived at the cost of secrecy, absence, and solitude. His one-line summary of the institution — 'a tragic ambiguity' — holds both halves at once.

Todd Compton’s 1997 study of Joseph Smith’s plural wives is the most-cited book in the polygamy debate — quoted by critics as the scholarly kill-shot and dreaded by members who have only met it in memes. Here is what the book actually is, what it documents, what its own author says about how it gets used, where scholars contest it — and why the gap between the book and the internet’s version of the book is the real story.

By Todd Noall · July 15, 2026 · 17 minute read

The Short Answer

Is In Sacred Loneliness anti-Mormon?

In Sacred Loneliness is award-winning scholarship by Todd Compton, a believing Latter-day Saint historian — thirty-three biographies of Joseph Smith’s plural wives, written to recover forgotten women’s lives, not to prosecute the prophet. Its hard facts are real and this study states them: roughly 33 documented wives, about eleven sealed while civilly married to living husbands, the youngest sealed several months before her fifteenth birthday, amid secrecy and public denial — substance the Church’s own Gospel Topics essay now publishes. What the book does not support is the meme built from it: Compton describes deeply ambiguous sources, presents the wives’ own testimonies of faith uncut, calls the institution “a tragic ambiguity,” and has publicly objected that critics “merely excerpt passages... for sensational effect.” Scholars contest the book in both directions — whether “polyandry” is even the right category, whether the already-married sealings were eternity-only — which means the internet’s confident version claims what the field does not. The book documents sacred loneliness; the meme manufactures certain scandal.

Key Takeaways

The author is a believing Latter-day Saint historian — and the book won Best Book awards from both the Mormon History Association and the John Whitmer Historical Association. It is scholarship, not an exposé.
What it documents is real: 33 well-documented plural wives; about eleven civilly married to other men at the time of their sealings; the youngest sealed several months before turning fifteen; secrecy, denial, and heavy costs borne by the women.
The Church now publishes the same substance — the Gospel Topics essay on plural marriage in Kirtland and Nauvoo covers the counts, the already-married sealings, and Helen Mar Kimball’s age, on churchofjesuschrist.org.
The author objects to the misuse. Compton has publicly answered critics who strip-mine the book, writing that they “merely excerpt passages... for sensational effect” — and describing his own aim as moderate, honest treatment.
Scholars contest it — in both directions. Some (Foster; Hales) argue “polyandry” is the wrong frame and many sealings were eternity-only; others think Compton too cautious. The contested points are exactly where the meme version claims certainty.
The women are the book. Its title refers to the wives’ loneliness, its heart is their own words and faith, and any use of it that erases the women to prosecute the prophet is a misreading of the text — by the author’s own account.

The Critics’ Reading vs. the Record

The Critics’ Reading

“A faithful Mormon scholar proved the worst parts.” Compton’s documentation of 33 wives, married women, and a fourteen-year-old settles the character question, from a source the Church cannot dismiss.

The Record

“Read the whole book — including the worst — read his own book.” Hard history the Church itself now publishes; sources the author calls deeply ambiguous; women whose own testimonies of faith the excerpts delete; and an author on record against the sensational use.

The book documents hard things. The question is whether the excerpts document the book.

Know the Source

The Book and Its Author: What This Actually Is

In Sacred Loneliness: The Plural Wives of Joseph Smith (Signature Books, 1997) is a collective biography: thirty-three chapters of women’s lives, reconstructed from their diaries, letters, blessings, and reminiscences, many quoted at length in their own voices. Todd Compton — a classicist by training, a Latter-day Saint by conviction — came to the subject through Eliza R. Snow and her circle, not through Joseph Smith; the polygamy entered because it entered the women’s lives, and he judged that honest biography could not route around it. The result won the highest book awards in the field from both the Mormon History Association and the John Whitmer Historical Association, and drew respect across the spectrum — including, tellingly, from evangelical counter-cult ministries who recommend it precisely because it is not anti-Mormon rhetoric but verified history from a believing scholar. That dual reception is the first thing to understand: the same pages are shelved as devotional women’s history and as ammunition. The pages did not change; the use did.

The title is the thesis, and it is about the women. “Sacred loneliness” names the condition Compton found across the thirty-three lives: women who accepted what they understood as a commandment carrying eternal promise, and who then lived its earthly cost — secrecy, absent husbands, social isolation, poverty, and after the martyrdom, decades of widowhood inside a system that promised them everything in the next life while delivering solitude in this one. Compton’s own summary of the institution is that it was “characterized by a tragic ambiguity” — sacred in its claims, lonely in its living. He presents the women’s spiritual experiences — visions, testimonies, lifelong faith — uncut, which is why believing readers finish the book moved rather than shattered. And the frame itself is an authorial reading, not a finding: the same thirty-three lives include two future Relief Society general presidents (Eliza R. Snow and Zina D. H. Young), temple matrons, a frontier physician, and the era’s most prolific women writers — careers of leadership and stated conviction that reviewers have noted a loneliness-organized biography necessarily underweights.

Nothing Flinched

What It Documents — Stated Without Flinching

Here is the hard core of the book, in this page’s own voice and without euphemism. Joseph Smith was sealed to approximately thirty-three well-documented women (Compton’s count; other careful counts run from about thirty to forty, and the Church’s essay says “between”) beyond Emma. About a third of them — Compton counts eleven — were civilly married to living husbands when sealed to Joseph, and none had divorced; Zina Huntington, whose story our Brigham Young teachings material treats in its own right, is the most examined case. Several wives were teenagers; the youngest, Helen Mar Kimball, was sealed to Joseph at fourteen — as the Church’s own essay puts it, “several months before her 15th birthday” — at her father’s initiative. The practice was contradicted in public denials, hidden from most of the Church, and partially hidden from Emma, whose anguish the sources record. The women bore real costs, and some of their late-life words ache on the page. None of this is a critic’s invention, and a faithful reader gains nothing by pretending otherwise: the Church’s Gospel Topics essay on plural marriage in Kirtland and Nauvoo now states the same substance — the counts, the sealings to already-married women, Helen Mar’s age, the secrecy — on churchofjesuschrist.org, with the historical scholarship footnoted. The facts are not the contested territory. What the facts mean is.

And the meaning is where the book itself counsels caution that its excerpters delete. Compton writes as a historian of fragmentary sources: reminiscences decades late, sealing records without commentary, ceremonies whose earthly-versus-eternal scope the participants themselves described differently. On the question modern readers most want answered — the nature of the already-married sealings — the documents are thin and contested, and Compton’s own inferences (he leans toward some conjugality) are exactly the points other scholars have pushed back on hardest. What the sources do establish, on essentially all sides of the scholarship, is the religious frame: these were sealings performed as ordinances, understood by the participants in covenant terms, entered by women who overwhelmingly testified — early and late, including after leaving Utah, including with nothing to gain — that they acted on spiritual conviction. Their testimonies do not settle the theology for a modern reader. They do settle what the excerpts erase: that the women were witnesses, not merely victims, and the book’s whole architecture exists to let them speak.

The Author, on the Record

What the Author Says About How It Gets Used

Compton has watched both camps mine his book for a quarter century, and he has answered both in print. When Jerald and Sandra Tanner built a “review” from its most sensational passages, he replied that his aim had been “a moderate, but honest, treatment of a difficult subject,” that he began from the women and not from a brief against Joseph Smith, and that the Tanners “merely excerpt passages about Joseph Smith for sensational effect” — reading for ammunition rather than reliving the lives of, in his phrase, thirty-three fascinating, remarkable women. When FARMS reviewers attacked from the other side, he answered at book length, rejecting both the apologetic pressure to soften the record and the characterization of himself as hostile. He is equally plain about his heterodox judgments — he does not regard polygamy as an eternal principle — worth stating because honesty about a source includes its author’s position: a self-described moderate, claimed by neither camp. That profile is what makes the book durable — and the meme version, which needs him to be prosecutor or traitor, a misreading of the man as well as the text.

Live Scholarship, Both Directions

Where Scholars Contest It

Serious reviewers have contested real things — and the disagreements run in both directions, which is the signature of genuine scholarship rather than a settled indictment. The “polyandry” frame: Lawrence Foster — a non-Latter-day-Saint historian of the movement — argued the term itself is wrong: nothing in the sources suggests Joseph Smith or his circle understood these sealings as wife-sharing; the era’s participants framed them in patriarchal, levirate-like covenant categories. Foster likewise doubted the Fanny Alger relationship was a marriage at the time — a doubt Don Bradley’s 20-source analysis has since answered in the marriage’s favor: better evidenced as a marriage than an affair, most plausibly dated spring 1836, after the Kirtland Temple sealing keys. The conjugality question: Brian Hales — who, with Bradley as his primary researcher, assembled the fullest documentary record on the subject — found no credible evidence of conjugality in any of the fourteen already-married sealings and reads them as eternity-only, a conclusion that persuaded even D. Michael Quinn on the best-documented case; across the whole roster his tally finds evidence of marital relations in twelve of thirty-five sealings. Compton weighs some of the same late testimony differently. From the other side, reviewers in secular venues have pressed that Compton is too generous — too willing to credit spiritual framing, too restrained in judgment.

The honest summary: the counts and dates are stable; the nature of the already-married sealings is where the field’s deepest record and Compton’s inference part ways — and every internet paragraph stating it flatly is claiming what the documents do not.

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