But, he doesn’t seem to be someone for whom evidence matters a great deal.

“Well, for arrogant Mormons who doesn’t want to see the truth that Joseph Smith Jr. has truly taken advantage of many women during his time especially those who are teen agers our works will be “abysmal” to them. I really can’t force them if that’s what they wanted to believe.”

“I knew that God will use our site to evangelize the Mormon people and plant a seed of truth in their hearts. Please continue to recommend our site. I believe they will eventually understand how Joseph Smith Jr really took advantage of those poor kids to have sexual relationship with him. Omigosh!!!”

“What will you do if a more than 30-year old man had sexual relations with your fourteen-year old daughter and this man was none other than the founder of your Church? Yup, that’s true. The Mormon founder, Joseph Smith Jr. had sexual relations with Helen Mar Kimball because of the formers practice of polygamy.”

He really is good for a laugh. It might be a waste of my time, but the other LDS following the discussions have expressed appreciation at my posting, so I’ll continue until he kicks me off of his board out of sheer frustration.

My response to the last one: “Well, if it came after a real marriage where all the parties and parents consented, and if the sexual relations were between a legitimate husband and wife, and if it was in the 1830s when this was considered perfectly normal, then probably none of us would feel at all bad about it. It would be… normal. But today it strikes us as a very bad thing. And this is your only point. You want us today to be upset about something that wasn’t upsetting back then.”

The fallacy of presentism is something that escapes many people looking at this topic.

The line that Keller wrote:

CONTROL: marinyr(2)

Should be

CONTROL: marrinyr(2)

but otherwise everything works.

But David, this guys will never “6) apologize to Paul.” This guy is extremely arrogant, absolutely close-minded, and will never, ever, under any circumstance admit to being wrong to a Mormon, no matter how wrong he is proven to be. If he claimed that Joseph Smith died in the WWII assault on Iwo Jima then from that point on he would dig in his heels and never admit defeat. Any evidence brought up would be challenged as false or unreliable. And when he couldn’t think of anything more to say, he’d start in about how great a job he is doing keeping people out of the cult of the 14-year-old-girl-abuser prophet. Like I said before, this guy is so bad and yet so confident that he provides hours of untended comedy.

Thanks for the extra info. Let us know when more becomes available on the topic!

You asked:

“Are you familiar with other, non-LDS studies on marriage ages that might hint that you and David are on the right track?”

I have been looking into this and starting a list. We may or may not use some of these papers depending on what the scope of our paper is. For example, I don’t know how much we want to bring Utah polygamy numbers into the paper. Not all of these will have direct bearing on confirming the 1850 census data. Some papers will be needed to show how much has changed in modern times (post birth control, baby boom, medical breakthroughs effecting life expectancies, increased educational and employment opportunities for women, etc.)

Here are Craig Foster’s references in the review cited in the original blog entry. I haven’t read any of these but they might be worth further study.

Peter Laslett, “Age at Menarche in Europe since the Eighteenth Century,” in Marriage and Fertility: Studies in Interdisciplinary History, ed. Robert I. Rotberg and Theodore K. Rabb (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 291.

Peter J. Gangné, King’s Daughters and Founding Mothers: The Filles du Roi, 1663–1673 (Pawtucket, RI: Quintin Publications, 2001), 1:17–23;

Silvio Dumas, Les Filles du Roi en Nouvelle-France: Étude Historique avec Répertiore Biographique, Cahiers d’Histoire 24 (Quebec: La Société Historique, 1972), 67;

Richard A. Easterlin, George Alter, and Gretchen A. Condran, “Farms and Farm Families in Old and New Areas: The Northern States in 1860,” in Family and Population in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Tamara K. Hareven and Maris A. Vinovskis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 39–40.

Michael Gordon, ed., The American Family in Social-Historical Perspective, 3rd ed. (New York: St. Martin’s, 1983), 16, and Fischer, Albion’s Seed, 674–75.

Michael Grossberg, Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 106.

S. N. D. North, comp., and Desmond Walls Allen, ed.,
Marriage Laws in the United States, 1887–1906 (Conway: Arkansas Research, 1993), 2.

Craig has also brought the following to my attention:

J.D.B. DeBow, “Statistical view of the United States, 1850″ . . (Washington, DC: A.P.O. Nicholson, 1854), xli,

A partial list of what Greg or I have found:

William R. Bytheway, “The Variation with Age of Age Differences in Marriage” Journal of Marriage and the Family, Vol. 43, No. 4. (Nov., 1981), pp. 923-927.

Maxine P. Atkinson; Becky L. Glass, “Marital Age Heterogamy and Homogamy, 1900 to 1980″ Journal of Marriage and the Family, Vol. 47, No. 3. (Aug., 1985), pp. 685-691

L. L. Bean; G. P. Mineau, “The Polygyny-Fertility Hypothesis: a Re-evaluation” Population Studies, Vol. 40, No. 1. (Mar., 1986), pp. 67-81

Lee L. Bean; Geraldine P. Mineau; Douglas L. Anderton, “High-Risk Childbearing: Fertility and Infant Mortality on the American Frontier” Social Science History, Vol. 16, No. 3. (Autumn, 1992), pp. 337-363.

Bruce Burgett, “On the Mormon Question: Race, Sex, and Polygamy in the 1850s and the 1990s” American Quarterly
Volume 57, Number 1, March 2005

Charles A. Cannon, “The Awesome Power of Sex: The Polemical Campaign against Mormon Polygamy” The Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 43, No. 1. (Feb., 1974), pp. 61-82.

M. Skolnick; L. Bean; D. May; V. Arbon; K. De Nevers; P. Cartwright “Mormon Demographic History I. Nuptiality and Fertility of Once-Married Couples” Population Studies, Vol. 32, No. 1. (Mar., 1978), pp. 5-19.

G. P. Mineau; L. L. Bean; M. Skolnick, “Mormon Demographic History II: The Family Life Cycle and Natural Fertility” Population Studies, Vol. 33, No. 3. (Nov., 1979), pp. 429-446.

Tim B. Heaton, “How Does Religion Influence Fertility?: The Case of Mormons” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Vol. 25, No. 2. (Jun., 1986), pp. 248-258

James E. Smith; Phillip R. Kunz, Polygyny and Fertility in Nineteenth-Century America Population Studies, Vol. 30, No. 3. (Nov., 1976), pp. 465-480.

Here some resources I have found today, but haven’t read yet.

Z. Wu, K. H. Burch, R. Hart, J. E. Veevers, “Age-heterogamy and Canadian unions” Social Biology, Fall 2000

C. Shehan, F. M. Berardo, H. Vera, S. M. Carley, “Women in Age-Discrepant Marriages” Journal of Family Issues, Vol. 12, No. 3, 291-305 (1991)

Kalmijn, Matthijs. 1998. “Intermarriage and Homogamy: Causes, Patterns, Trends.” Annual Review of Sociology 24:395-421.

Lichter, Daniel T., Robert N. Anderson and Mark D. Hayward. 1995. “Marriage Markets and Marital Choice.” Journal of Family Issues 16:412-431.

Qian, Zhenchao, and Samuel H. Preston. 1993. “Changes in American Marriage, 1972 to 1987: Availability and Forces of Attraction by Age and Education.” American Sociological Review 58:482-95.

Qian, Zhenchao. 1998. “Changes in Assortative Mating: the Impact of Age and Education, 1970-1990.” Demography 35:279-292.

Oppenheimer, Valerie Kincade. 1988. “A Theory of Marriage Timing.” American Journal of Sociology 94:563-591.

Sassler, Sharon, and Frances K. Goldscheider. 2004. “Revisiting Jane Austen’s Theory of Marriage Timing: Changes in Union Formation Among American Men in the Late 20th Century.” Journal of Family Issues 25:139-166.

Vera, Hernan, Donna H. Berardo and Felix M. Berardo. 1985. “Age Heterogamy in Marriage.” Journal of Marriage and the Family 47:553-556.

Xie, Yu, James M. Raymo, Kimberly Goyette and Arland Thornton. 2003. “Economic Potential and Entry into Marriage and Cohabitation.” Demography 40:351-367.

This pre-published paper abstract looks like it is looking into some of the same ideas that Greg and I are.

Karen Rolf, Joseph Ferrie, “The May-December relationship since 1850: Age homogamy in the U.S.” September 19, 2007 see: http://paa2008.princeton.edu/download.aspx?submissionId=80695

Greg has done a masterful job about where our data comes from. The only thing I would have to add is to give your discussion partner some hints on how he can reproduce the IPUMS data.

1) go to: http://usa.ipums.org/usa/sda/
2) In the “Analyze one year at a time” table click on “1850″
3) Fill out the “SDA Frequencies/Crosstabulation Program” edit boxes with the following:
ROW: age
COLUMN: sex
CONTROL: marrinyr(2)
WEIGHT: none selected
4) Push the button labeled “Run Table”
5) read the table produced
6) apologize to Paul

Extracting couples is a little more tedious. I had to make tables based on household serial numbers and eliminate data where the number of individuals married in the last year did not equal exactly 1 male and 1 female.

This particular preacher is one of the least capable anti-Mormons on the web today.

My, that is saying something.

Are you familiar with other, non-LDS studies on marriage ages that might hint that you and David are on the right track?

I’m not aware of specific studies per se. But, I haven’t looked super hard. It’s part of what we need to do to write these ideas up.

The impetus for this work was the fact that as one reads history, one (or at least, I!) certainly gets the impression that women married younger, and that age gaps were often significant. It was more of a gestalt than anything. A hunch.

But, that’s kind of anecdotal, and critics might rightly protest that this doesn’t reveal any larger trend, even if there are plenty of individual examples.

Differences in mortality rates from the present, and the fact that marriage was much more an economic necessity (for both men AND women) at the time would tend, I think, to encourage older men (who have more resources) to marry younger women more on average.

Plus, different ideas about appropriate age of marriage, and appropriate differences in marriage age probably did too.

So, I would have frankly been surprised if our stuff didn’t show what it did. That would really require explanation, and not what we actually found, which seems pretty intuitive.

As far as I know, no U.S. census data included information on marriage until the 1850 census. So, I suspect that good cross-sectional data is fairly hard to come by for the earlier periods of interest for LDS history.

There are probably going to be differences between the frontier (i.e., the Mormons) and the more established East. And, what happens when people from the East, like many Mormons, moved west to the frontier? How did this affect their decisions?

So, if anyone has any pointers to other studies or data, we’re listening. Shout out in the published version a distinct posiblity.

Greg

Thanks for the info. This particular preacher is one of the least capable anti-Mormons on the web today. He is essentially identical to the anti-Mormons of the 1970s, but without the knowledge or the reasoning skills that most had. It could be that his work is so bad because he is trying to attack a dozen or more cults all at the same time. He is without a doubt in the bottom 20% in terms of knowledge and capability. It is disturbingly fun to interact with him, though frustrating at times.

If we could think of a way to get him to debate a moderately knowledgeable LDS apologist on TV or radio, it would give the Church more positive publicity than a 1000 TV ads.

His primary ministry technique is to call people names and to hint at their evil character, so I’m not sure he’ll have much to say about your response other than you are just a lying Mormon. What a hoot!

Are you familiar with other, non-LDS studies on marriage ages that might hint that you and David are on the right track?

(1) you have used “fake data”
(2) the results are “invented”
(3) Mormons are “liars” about this issue

The Kirtland data is from:

Kirtland marriage data from David Keller, “Summarized from an appendix in a book that compiled Zion’s Camp vital statistics available in the SLC FHL.”

A profile of Latter-day Saints of Kirtland, Ohio and members of Zion’s Camp 1830-1839 : vital statistics and sources / compiled by Milton V. Backman Jr. with the assistance of Keith Perkins and Susan Easton and in cooperation with the Department of Church History and Doctrine, Brigham Young University.

The Nauvoo data is from:

Susan Easton Black, “Marriages in the Nauvoo Region 1839-1845,” on-line database, using sources: Lyndon W. Cook, Civil Marriages in Nauvoo and some outlying areas (1839-1845) (Liberty Publishing Co., 1980); with additional data from Times and Seasons, The Wasp, Nauvoo Neighbor, and “A Record of Marriages in the City of Nauvoo,” located at the Historical Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

David gave me the raw data, and of 883 married individuals, there were 219 men and 201 women with exact birth and marriage dates. Of these, 180 marriages were identified in which the husband and wife’s birth date was known. I matched these couples for data analysis. Since it is not clear how many of these marriages were first marriages, these data represents a conservative estimate of teen-age marriage in Nauvoo in the early 1840s.

I suppose they might skew somehow, in which by some unknown process the birth dates of young brides and older men were preferentially recorded, but I don’t see how.

The 1850 U.S. census data is from:

Using a 1% random sample of individuals, 989 men and 962 women indicated they had been married within the last year.
Steven Ruggles, Matthew Sobek, Trent Alexander, Catherine A. Fitch, Ronald Goeken, Patricia Kelly Hall, Miriam King, and Chad Ronnander, Integrated Public Use Microdata Series: Version 3.0 [Machine-readable database]. Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota Population Center [producer and distributor] (2004), accessed 14 July 2007.

The Joseph Smith wives data is from Compton, In Sacred Loneliness. I included all 33 of the wives he considers proven or likely, and if the dates were uncertain I used the earliest possible marriage date, and chose the LATEST possible birth date, so the estimates are conservative: the women are as YOUNG as possible, and married as SOON as possible, consistent with the evidence.

So, those data are again a low end; the reality may skew slightly higher.

There was no alteration or massaging of the data. David gave me the raw files, and I used MS Excel to plot them.

What would be the point in faking the data? Someone would run the numbers, and then we’d have egg on our faces and be revealed as people who lied. Better to just keep quiet.

I suppose I should be surprised that a Christian minister would ignore the instruction to “judge not, lest ye be judged,” and declare without evidence, or without even discussing the matter, that we faked the data and invented the results, but my experiences with the “counter-cult” have diminished my capacity for surprise.

Fortunately, such people do not represent the majority of creedal Christians, or even the majority of their denominations.
==

As for the techniques:

It ain’t rocket science–it’s not like we’re doing multivariate analysis here. You just take all the marriages, sort them by wife’s date, and then plot them by groups of age. It’s essentially just percentages and stuff, pretty basic math: e.g., # of women of this age divided by total women in marriage cohort.

So, I can guarantee that we didn’t use fake data, and we didn’t invent the results. I suppose their could be some counting error somewhere, but all the data sets match so well that I think that unlikely. And, the spreadsheets let you cross-check numbers, and I used formulas to count the number of individuals of each age, so that’s unlikely.

We also did a convolution analysis for the census data to adjust for errors in the reporting of dates, but it didn’t change how the graphs looked at all.

After we publish in a more traditional venue, I’m sure we’d be happy to make the spreadsheets available for anyone who wants to check our results or do further work on the datasets. (I can’t speak for David, but I can’t see that he would care at all. It’s standard scientific practice, I believe.)

And, that’s no lie.

But please, save the message board discussion, and e-mail it to us at FAIR. It will be another amusing illustration of anti-Mormon dishonesty to add to our files.
Greg