Earlier this month I wrote a post detailing seven admirable things about Islam. Though the actual idea was my colleague Mike Parker’s idea, I thought it necessary for several reasons:
1. True Latter-day Saints know that there is good in every religion.
2. I wanted to show that LDS opinion on Islam was knowledgable and even-handed. Most Latter-day Saint I know are not willing to accept the worst of Islam just because some loudmouth says so.
Over on Jeff Lindsay’s blog, Mormanity, he examines Gary Swank’s confusion about the differences between LDS and FLDS beliefs, and Swank’s serious use of Jeff’s satirical web site MormonCult.org as a source.
Check it out:
http://mormanity.blogspot.com/2008/05/hilarious-anti-mormon-attack-from.html
I have lived for some time among Muslims in the Middle East during the 1980s and 1990s–and taught many of them here in the USA since the late 1990s. This contact has begotten enormous admiration for them. My colleague, Mike Parker, suggested that I post some reasons why I admire them. I thought that this was a grand idea. The only problem I have is choosing only seven reasons (Mike suggested five.). I won’t have space for many more. This list is in no particular order:
A recurrent criticism cropping up in the discussion on Egan’s New York Times article is that polygamy inevitably creates “Lost Boys.” These are young men that get kicked out of a polygamous community to reduce competition for a resource in short supply –that of marriage partners. One commenter put it this way:
A simple polygamous example involves 6 people:
one man has 3 wives
two men have none
In this model, one man’s gain is another man’s loss. I would like to explore, through some preliminary statistical analysis, why this isn’t an adequate model for 19th century Mormonism, but it may be relevant to contemporary FLDS. I say “may” because I do not have enough data about the FLDS to make a judgment. I can, however, address whether the criticisms lobbied at them apply to 19th century Mormonism.
This week New York Times blogger Timothy Egan made a sophomoric attempt to connect the modern FLDS church’s practice of polygamy to that of early Mormon leaders Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. Excerpt:
[Mitt Romney's] faith was founded in 1830 by Joseph Smith Jr., an itinerant treasure-seeker from upstate New York who used a set of magic glasses to translate a lost scripture from God. His personality was infectious, the religion very approachable.
It would have been just another Christian faith had not Smith let his libido lead him into trouble. Before he died at the hands of a mob, he married at least 33 women and girls; the youngest was 14, and was told she had to become Smith’s bedmate or risk eternal damnation.
Smith was fortunate to find a religious cover for his desire. His polygamy “revelation” was put into The Doctrine and Covenants, one of three sacred texts of Mormonism. It’s still there – the word of God. And that’s why, to the people in the compound at Eldorado, [Texas,] the real heretics are in Salt Lake City.
As his biographer, Fawn Brodie, wrote, Joseph Smith “could not rest until he had redefined the nature of sin and erected a stupendous theological edifice to support his new theories on marriage.”
It is hard for me to imagine more factual errors and loaded language that could be squeezed into four short paragraphs.
Imagine this dispatch from the New Yuck Times:
“Tumbleweed, NV, April 21st: Government officials raided an offshoot Baptist compound yesterday following an alleged 911 call from a 16-year-old girl claiming that her husband had beat her with a one-inch-thick stick. In all, 500 women and children were evacuated.
“Said Mustangranch County Sheriff Darius Dust, ‘We had to move. The founder was already convicted of statutory rape and incest. We just couldn’t afford to have any more abused kids.’
“Dust was referring to the founder/pastor of the First Redneck Baptist Church, Reverend Jerry Lee Lulu, convicted last month of marrying his 13-year-old first cousin. Lulu founded the Church because he was concerned that the Redneck traditions of the Old South in Appalachia was becoming lost in the rapidly-modernizing world. Lulu’s group fled their original settlement in Lorettalynn, WV, after local authorities announced a probe of illegal activities. In addition to allegations of statutory rape and spousal and child abuse, Coaldust County, WV District Attorney John B. Goode claimed that there were credible charges of “moonshining,” or making illegal alcohol. However, the group fled the jurisdiction before charges could be filed, and Goode declined to press the matter further. ‘I just figured that it was now Nevada’s problem,’ Goode explained.
“At the request of state authorities, the Tumbleweed Ward of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints assisted in the evacuation by providing a caravan of busses and cars, and housing the evacuees in their Mustangranch Nevada Stake Center. Said Bishop Harry Dingy, of the Tumbleweed Ward, ‘What a wonderful opportunity to minister and show hospitality to our non-LDS neighbors!’”
If the details of the above story disturb you, maybe you can see why this article disturbs me.
Introduction
Since Mike Parker’s blog post on plural marriage has garnered more comments than all our other threads combined, my keen market research skills have told me that polygamy posts are traffic gold.
One of my research interests at FAIR is plural marriage, and I’ve been reading as much of the primary and secondary literature as I can get my hands on.
I thought our readers might be interested in a periodic look at a few of the things that I’ve found interesting, weird, or different from the common portrayals of plural marriage. In particular, primary sources that may have been misread or misrepresented, are also worth looking at. I hope that readers will spot things that I haven’t, or correct some of my own blind spots.
I’ll try to post at least once or twice a week, until people get bored, I run out of material, or FAIR tells me to stop so this doesn’t become the All Plural Marriage, All the Time blog.
The Church has a problem.
We are caught between the Scylla of our long history of practicing — and strongly defending — plural marriage, and the Charybdis of having given up that practice and now having to disassociate ourselves from modern polygamous groups.
From the standpoint of defending the Church, how should we navigate that strait? Read the rest of this entry »
This Jarom 1:8 phrase is used throughout the Book of Mormon and appears to borrow its language from the Abrahamic covenant in Gen 17:2 and elsewhere. It appears to be an apt description of the early Utah Saints, who saw themselves as modern heirs of the covenant. Mormon women welcomed many more children into their homes than their national counterparts, a phenomenon I attribute largely to polygamy.
As a disclaimer, I realize that this blog entry is not in good taste, especially from a feminist perspective. Some of the quantitative analysis that follows will no doubt feed into Mormon stereotypes that we like to keep our women barefoot and pregnant.
Graph by Gregory L. Smith. Used with permission.