Joseph Smith Polygamy: Tough Polygamy Questions with Dr. Brian Hales (Part 1)

Did Joseph Smith have any regrets about plural marriage? Like, with full hindsight, if he could go back and change anything about the way he implemented plural marriage, what might he do differently? Also, more and more people are denying Joseph Smith Polygamy (that Joseph Smith ever practiced polygamy) or that he lied about doing so. Is there even a shred of truth to either of these claims? Did Joseph ever send men on missions and marry their wives while they were gone? Were there any women who denied Joseph’s proposals for plural marriage? If so, what happened to them? What was Emma’s relationship to plural marriage after the Saints left Nauvoo for Utah? And is there any truth to the idea that plural marriage existed because there are more faithful women than men? In today’s episode of Church History Matters, we tackle all of these questions and more with Dr. Brian Hales. I’m Scott Woodward, and my co-host is Casey Griffiths, and today we dive into our sixth and final episode in this series dealing with plural marriage. Now let’s get into it. Hello and welcome to Church History Matters. I’m Scott Woodward, and I have some good news and some sad news. I’ll tell you the sad news first. The sad news is Casey Griffiths is not here with us today because he needed to be elsewhere. So Casey, you are missed. But the good news is we have as our guest today Dr. Brian C․ Hales, who, if you’ve been following along with us in this series, then you know that Casey and I have been referencing and quoting extensively from the research of Brian Hales. He is the author or co-author of seven books dealing with plural marriage, including the three-volume Joseph Smith’s Polygamy history and theology set. He is a retired anesthesiologist and is currently researching the origin of the Book of Mormon. And so I’m excited to dive into our discussion today. Brian, welcome. We’re excited to have you on the show today.

Scott Woodward:
Brian, maybe let me just ask you this. What led you down the path of researching polygamy so thoroughly? Like, why does an anesthesiologist become the world’s expert on polygamy in the Latter-day Saint movement?

Brian Hales:
Well, I appreciate the kind characterization. I’m not sure how accurate it is, but—

Scott Woodward:
I’m going with it.

Brian Hales:
My interest in polygamy began as a member of my family was excommunicated for joining the Allred group back in 1989.

Scott Woodward:
Now who’s the Allred group?

Brian Hales:
The Allred group is like the FLDS.

Brian Hales:
Just, it’s a fundamentalist polygamist group based in Draper, somewhere down that way. A lot of good people there, but they claim they have authority to perform plural marriages, and that was what this family member of mine entered into briefly. She left later, but—
That got me wondering about it, and in that context—I never was impressed with the fundamentalist claim to authority, and I believe Section 132 requires keys to perform a valid marriage. So I never was persuaded in the least, but my inquiry made it obvious to me that there hadn’t been a lot written on that topic, on fundamentalism. So I wrote a book, published by Greg Kofford Books in 2006. And then as people were asking me questions about polygamy, a lot of them had to do with Joseph Smith.
And we didn’t really have anybody who had looked specifically at Joseph Smith in his plural marriage history. And I, in 2007, hired Don Bradley to work for me by going out and going to every repository, every archive, to find anything to do with plural marriage in the Nauvoo period and to bring that together. And we were able to put together three volumes that were published in 2013 on that topic.

Scott Woodward:
Wow. So it was personal. It started out personal. You had a family member who was directly affected by this, and then from there the questions kept coming, and you just dove headlong into it.

Brian Hales:
Yeah. I had my own questions about it, and I think it’s probably on your list of questions here, but the one that drove me to really ask and inquire was the idea that Joseph Smith could be married to other women with legal husbands—you know, a plurality of husbands.

Brian Hales:
Every author to publish prior to my 2013 volumes portrayed Joseph as being a second husband to these women. And Romans, in the New Testament, 7:2-3 tells us that that’s adultery.

Brian Hales:
And section 132:41-42 tell us that is adultery.

Brian Hales:
But all of these authors were saying, “Oh, yeah. Yeah, Joseph was married to this woman, and she had a legal husband, therefore we’re sure that it was a, you know, a full conjugal marriage.” And that question just really bothered me. I was never comfortable with what they were telling me. And these are authors like Todd Compton and Michael Quinn and others.

Scott Woodward:
Mm. Excellent. And I’ve got to say this before we dive in, just one more thing. I have always admired your fearlessness, Brian, in approaching any church history topic and your tenacity to stick with the subject until you have explored it in its totality. Your example reminds me of Alexander Hamilton. There’s this quote, and you’re going to blush at this, but there’s this quote that Alexander Hamilton says, “Men give me credit for some genius, but all the genius I have lies in this: When I have a subject in hand, I study it profoundly day and night it is before me. I explore it in all its bearings. My mind becomes pervaded with it, and then the effort that I have made is what people are pleased to call the fruit of genius, but it’s the fruit of labor and thought.” Brian, some people might call you a polygamy genius, which is probably true, but we know that underneath that is just a whole lot of hard work and careful thought, and so thank you for being willing to come on the podcast and respond to some of our listeners’ questions.

Brian Hales:
That is extremely generous and surely an overstatement, I think, at least as it applies to me. But I can say this, that I have found as I’ve researched several topics in depth—but only a few. I mean, I have expertise that’s deep on very few subjects, but—

Brian Hales:
I have found that when we get into the primary documents with transparency, the door for faith and belief opens widely.
It’s only when we hear what the documents are supposed to have said through the interpretations of, say, unbelievers—that that door on faith seems to close. It shouldn’t.
But when you get into those primary documents, the ability to believe, at least for me, has just been very easy to do.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah, and I think you’re just a great example of showing us that we can dive headlong into all the original historical documents, even on a topic like polygamy, and still come out the other side with our testimony strengthened. You just, you show us that we don’t need to be afraid of church history.

Scott Woodward:
All right, ready for our first question? Let’s begin with polygamy denying.
Brian, I’ve noticed there’s a startling number of church members who are denying that Joseph Smith even practiced plural marriage at all. They say Brigham Young was the real source and that he later disingenuously pinned it on Joseph Smith to give it more legitimacy. And this trend seems to be growing and not shrinking. So one listener asked it this way: “What do you think about the theory that Joseph Smith wasn’t a polygamist? I saw a YouTube clip,” this questioner says, ”of a female church historian, can’t remember her name, share the theory that the affidavits of the women who testified that Joseph practiced polygamy had a clear motive to help the church win the temple lot case.” So there you go. There seems to be a lot of people that have that kind of question, and given the mounds and mounds of data that you and others have found that soundly refute this idea, it’s just bananas to me that a growing number of people are getting on board with this.

Brian Hales:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
So what’s your response to this polygamy denial phenomenon going on among some church members today?

Brian Hales:
Well, I think it’s a combination of two or three things.

Brian Hales:
And I agree with you that it’s growing. Yeah. Which is counterintuitive to me.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. It’s wild.

Brian Hales:
Yeah. But the topic of polygamy is hard. In speaking with some church historians a while ago, they commented that, you know, if you get to—into some of the controversies, and you learn more and you learn more and you learn more, you generally feel better about what’s going on, because the facts start to lay out, and you understand it, but polygamy isn’t that way. The more you learn about it, you don’t start to feel better. And I think part of that is that men can do it, women can’t. It’s an unfair practice.

Brian Hales:
And then there’s the whole sexual overlay. You know, anything that has to do with sexuality, you’re going to naturally assume libido is driving the process, so people worry about, consciously or unconsciously, that Joseph wasn’t told by an angel or commanded by God, that this is really just hormones working their way out, which is not uncommon. Charismatic males form a religious group. We can think of David Koresh or Jim Jones. 

Brian Hales:
These are charismatic males, who, after a time, are sleeping with their parishioners.

Brian Hales:
And it’s a common pattern. And so you’ve got to jump past that presentism idea to even entertain the notion that something other than libido is driving this process. And so as members have to confront all of these ideas, an easy out could be to say, “Well, no, it was Brigham.” “It wasn’t Joseph.” And they reduce it to very simple terms, like, “Who do you believe, Emma or Brigham?”
Or, “If Joseph did it, he was a liar.” And of course those are not accurate statements. They’re—we call them reductionist statements. They try to reduce something that’s complex into a very sound-bite thing, which works for today’s audiences a lot of times, but when you get into it, it can’t be reduced to that. It is a complex process.

But as I’ve studied Joseph Smith and his motives, there’s good evidence he didn’t want to do it, that he dragged his feet. The angel stories are corroborated in—I’ve accumulated 22, I think, from nine individuals who knew Joseph Smith, recounting how an angel came and commanded him to do it.
And in the last visit of three, he had a sword that he said—because Joseph was dragging his feet. And we could talk more about what that meant. But the point is, there’s lots of evidence that Joseph didn’t want to do it, but he did it.
And when it comes to the polygamy deniers, and they kind of fall into two categories: There are those who say Joseph didn’t do it. 

There’s another group who say Joseph did it, but he shouldn’t have.

He kind of lost it in Nauvoo. And this is kind of the opinion of—maybe the Community of Christ has taken, and others, that the Book of Mormon and the Kirtland theology is good, but the Nauvoo theology was Joseph going off the rails, and I don’t see that at all. I think this is just one practice within his zenith teaching, which is eternal marriage. I think the greatest teaching he ever restored was eternal marriage because it reaches beyond the veil. It’s beyond mortality, and one practice, one principle associated with that is polygamy. And God had commanded them to enter into it, and he never told us why he wanted it. We can make guesses, but the reality is that there are dozens and dozens of signed affidavits. And the questioner was talking about the temple lot case.

And we do have three of Joseph’s wives who acknowledged that they had carnal relations with Joseph during the depositions there, but I should point out how rumors get started. The church was not involved with that lawsuit in any formal way. They were not plaintiffs, they were not defendants. They were helping the Church of Christ Temple Lot show that the RLDS church was not a natural successor to Joseph Smith’s church because Joseph Smith’s church did practice polygamy, and the RLDS didn’t.

So this is just how these rumors can get out there, and they destroy faith even though the person doesn’t realize it at the time, and they don’t seem willing to get the facts correct for themselves. So the data is conclusive. I don’t know of anybody, any trained historian, who believes Joseph didn’t introduce and practice plural marriage, but there are lots of untrained—I call them propagandists or opinionists. These are just people who want to grab on to a little bit of history here and a little bit of history there. Scott, you understand this.

Yeah. This kind of shoddy approach of cherry-picking sources that agree with your preconceived narrative, right? Or what you want the narrative to be—rather than looking at all the documents and letting them tell the story, or at least form the crux of the narrative that we sort of flesh the story out of. I mean, we all come at history with bias, right?

Scott Woodward:
I mean, we can’t deny that. But disciplined historical work means looking at all the documents rather than only those that conform with the story that we want to tell, and to ignore those documents that conflict with our narrative, or worse, challenge their legitimacy as part of a coverup or a conspiracy. That’s not just a bad historical approach, right? Like, that feels downright dishonest.

Brian Hales:
Yeah. And just for the audience, I hope it’s OK. Saints Unscripted did a 40-minute interview with me a few weeks ago.And I’ve put up several of my own videos that you can access through my Facebook page. It’s a public page, but it’s my own name. Where I address the specific claims of these people, but they’re not persuaded, you know? They just hold on to these ideas that are clearly, I think, in error. They’re entitled to their opinion, but it gets to a point where we just have to say, “Well, if that’s how you want to believe it, go ahead. But the data and the science, everything is not supporting this.

Scott Woodward:
It kind of feels a little bit like COVID deniers to me, you know? There’s people that are like dying from COVID, and there’s still people that would say, “I think this is a hoax. I think this is not real.” And you ask, “Well, but, like, what about the science? What about the data? What about all the people that are, like, actually dying?” “Well,” they say, “you can’t really trust them because they’re part of the system.”
Even with mountains of evidence, and there’s—it’s bizarre. It’s this human tendency that some of us have to just care more about, I don’t know, how should we say this? To care more about the comfort of our conclusion than the discomfort of the data. I don’t know. I’ve seen some eerie comparisons with COVID deniers and Joseph Smith polygamy deniers.

Brian Hales:
Well, I was going to use that example because I think it does hold, but my experience is that what you do is that they become set in an idea. And if you bring in more evidence, more science, more historical documentation, they just dismiss that as further evidence of a conspiracy— against what they’ve already accepted. And it’s a no-win situation. It’s just a time for people to, you know, part. And not talk about anymore, because nothing is going to change that, including dozens and dozens of affidavits and recollections and a revelation that was penned and is well documented with a very strong provenance. I’m talking about section 132.

None of that is going to be persuasive because they’ve already made up their minds and any new data will just be seen as part of the conspiracies, so.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. Mm. Well, thank you. I will link in the show notes your presentation on Saints Unscripted. Did you say it’s a presentation, it’s like a video presentation people could watch to go into depth on that topic?

Brian Hales:
That’d be great. If you go to my Facebook page and scroll down, I’ve got a response, a 40-minute response to Rob Fotheringham and Karen Horning, and then there’s some other—anyway.
You can find that, if you want. I go through more with details, but they aren’t interested in details I’m convinced so.

Scott Woodward:
Interesting. Well, if any of our listeners are interested in those details, we will link that in the show notes, and you can go have a—have 40 minutes of a good time with Brian Hales on this question. A related question about the Joseph Smith Polygamy Timeline is some people are convinced that Joseph Smith was lying in Nauvoo, that he was practicing polygamy, but then when he was confronted about it, he would lie and say that he wasn’t practicing polygamy. And some people kind of snarkily comment that he’s lying for the Lord. Did he do that, Brian? Did Joseph Smith lie for the Lord? Did he cover this up in Nauvoo? I know you’ve written extensively about this particular question as well, which we’ll link in the show notes, but what do you want to say kind of as a brief response to that?

Brian Hales:
Well, this is one of the reductionist questions they want to reduce it to, “If Joseph was a polygamist, he lied. Joseph wouldn’t have lied, therefore, he wasn’t a polygamist.” It isn’t a strong argument.
I wrote an article, it was published in 2015-16 in the Journal of Mormon History, where I went through and tried to find every alleged lie or denial from Joseph Smith, and there weren’t very many, so I expanded it to Emma and to Hyrum.
When did these people deny polygamy, and what did they say? Provide some context. And the take-home message is that Joseph Smith denied a community of wives that the church was accused of in 1831.
He denied spiritual wifery, which John C. Bennett was secretly practicing in Nauvoo. He denied unauthorized polygamy. In other words, you can’t read the Bible that Abraham was a polygamist and go off and be a polygamist. That would be adultery.

Brian Hales:
He denied that as well. He never denied celestial eternal marriage, including celestial plural marriage, as he believed it could be practiced. And that denial is something that people will assume based on language that is very ambiguous and generalized. And that’s the response. He never denied that. He just denied these other things. And then the polygamy deniers are trying to recruit that language to cover what they want to believe, but the language doesn’t allow that, and that’s the problem.

Scott Woodward:
This article is the one called “Denying the Undeniable,” correct?

Brian Hales:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
So, yeah, we’ll put that in the show notes. It’s called “Denying the Undeniable: Examining Early Mormon Polygamy Renunciations.” It’s a great article. And you also point out, as I think—your fifth category of polygamy denials is denying polygamy through technicalities. Do you think there is something to this idea that Joseph Smith was in a rock and a hard spot, like legally, socially? That if he said, “Well, it’s not polygamy, it’s actually called celestial plural marriage, and let me explain to you what—” He could say, “I don’t do polygamy” because he saw plural marriage as something different, correct?

And therefore, he kind of was comfortable saying he didn’t do the one while he was doing the other. I mean, how would you explain that to a church member who’s, who fully believes and is just trying to work through this and trying to say, “OK, so how do—how do I process Joseph saying that—” You know, there’s an accusation where, “You have seven wives,” and he says, “Seven? I can only find one.” Almost, like, kind of dodging a little bit. Do you see him dodging? You know what I’m saying? Like do you see him doing a little bit of dodging in order to, I don’t know, save face, avoid the law? I mean, what—how would you characterize that in full transparency?

Brian Hales:
Well, I think if we try to get inside Joseph Smith’s head at what’s going on here, he’s been giving the sealing authority, and he’s been commanded as part of that process to practice plural marriage, or Joseph Smith Polygamy.
Now, that’s kind of a big deal for him, and it’s very different from John C. Bennett’s spiritual wifery, so he can slam that with vigor. And it’s not unauthorized polygamy.
Because Hiram Brown in Nauvoo went off, and I don’t know if they had a ceremony, but it wasn’t authorized by the keys that Joseph Smith had.
And he was practicing polygamy, and he [Joseph] condemned it. And as well he could have, and if we read section 132, we learn that all of these eternal marriages, whether they’re plural or monogamous, have to be authorized by the one man holding the keys. God’s house is a house of order. That’s repeated twice in section 132, and it’s—that order is maintained by the keyholder, the one man who holds the keys. So in Joseph’s mind this is a very different process and he never denied it, but he easily denied these other things.
But the language that you repeated, and it’s great. “People have accused me of having seven wives. I can only find one.” Well, that’s hardly a blanket statement against plural marriage in any setting at any time, but what it really is is the language of somebody who doesn’t want to lie, but also can’t divulge to the audience all of the details. You know, he’s not looking very hard. He’d been sealed to at least a couple of dozen women at that point. Maybe they weren’t in the audience, and—or maybe he wasn’t looking, but yes, he—you know, there is some coded language there, and this is something that carries on that others use later on.
I don’t think any of us are comfortable with it. I don’t think he was either. But I would be bothered if Joseph had made a blanket statement against any form of polygamy and then secretly he was practicing a form of polygamy. And this he didn’t do. This is the language of somebody trying not to lie. At the same time, he’s not divulging what actually has happened.

To listen to the full podcast episode, visit https://doctrineandcovenantscentral.org/podcast-episode/qr-tough-polygamy-questions-with-dr-brian-hales%e2%80%8b.

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