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Polygamy was about the sealing of multiple women to an individual man, period. These sealings were/are seen as a “divine” version of marriage and were set up to provide supports to a man in this life and in the next life in the guise of “coverture” aka “covering for” women. This structure hasn’t necessarily gone away. Temple language set up that the women’s focus was her husband. An ongoing debate is “preside [over]” in family structure – what that actually means in practical family-level authority and “final say”.
I wonder sometimes if the lure of polygamy is that the promises to be the means to provide the capital for being taken care of rather then paying for it. If you have enough wives, they will handle your sex drive, raise the children to handle working your fields and the like, and take care of you in your old age for whatever you put out during the course of years before you need to be tended to and and can split the load amongst them – and it might be cheaper then outsourcing all those different functions (and you having the final say because you “preside” means that you have more control over the situation).
When I was a missionary, we had a mission president who had been in the insurance industry of some sort and he taught us about “closing the deal” as a tactic of sorts. It was when I was looking into sales jobs many years post-mission that I realized that he was a mission president because he was really good at sales and he taught a lot of sales basics to us. I may have shuddered quite a bit while processing putting together these random pieces together at the time. Missionary work’s purpose is in “perfecting the Saints” and “proclaiming the gospel”. There is an unstated understanding that the “perfection” happening is that the missionary’s life is what is being perfected for the most part in the process of serving a mission to proclaim the gospel.
The church has sold the concept of “most correct church (and by extension teachings, policies, dogma, traditions, reasoning)” to members with varying degrees of success. This concept is the main reason why other church organizations feel antagonized, and why our organization is so interested in “selling” the gospel to varying degrees. Our church also grew by word-of-mouth and with a fair amount of “persecuted underdog” generational trauma that still percolates around a bit in the culture (depending on local composition).
I will use “raised Mormon” if the church comes up outside close friends and family and I feel that my disclosure is helpful in the conversation. I stay here at “StayLDS” because I have friends here and it helps me to stay connected to friends and family that are “staying” with LDS values, culture, etc.
Adding onto Nibbler’s example: My daughter goes through phases where she needs something on the top of her head to go through life in a more normal, care-free way. Last summer, it was a hideous, matted multi-color monstrosity of a cheap wig that we had bought the previous fall. I tried to get it off of her head, tried to find a replacement (this was before we bought a cheap pink baseball cap that probably would have worked), and nothing would get her out the door to her doctor’s appointment except for that headgear. My daughter was the star of the show that day as the office staff complimented her and smiled or laughed at her wig and the doctor joined in her headgear enthusiasm.
I personally wouldn’t have ever been caught dead in wearing a wig – especially that wig. But the cost of my parenting skills being condemned (“She let her daughter wear
thatto the appointment” in a disdainful tone)rather then approved (“It’s cool that her mom supported her and let her change things up”) was a risk I was willing to take to make the transition out into the world to the doctor’s office a little easier on the both of us. This year, we have the more socially expected pink baseball hat and my daughter actually doesn’t need anything on top of her head as much. And I sometimes miss the hideous wig…
I think that the “competition” between men and women for post-WW2 jobs and job security hasn’t left our culture yet and shows up in a preference for men being paid for their labors and women not. Women At The Pulpitincluded commentary that most congregations were not comfortable with hiring a female pastor initially, but that when they did so, there was no longer a resistance to doing so in the future. I bring this up because church leadership at the local level is a prime example of “influencer” for a congregation – that is why the bishop or branch president is charged with leading the young men programs (primarily) and provides a measure of support and presence for young women programs. It also ties into the “soft power” of persuasion brought into the forefront of culture by social media which is normally held by women and was more localized to women-centric spaces of various “parties” where women gathered to talk aka tupper ware parties, makeup gatherings, and baby showers (for connection not sales).
I think that we collectively draw the line based on what we are comfortable spending money on (at least on an intellectual level). And, in general, our culture is focused on not spending money given half-a-chance. I also think that we spend money on situations we want to control or have controlled. Our government pays election staff for their services (poll workers and inspectors to provide site supervision) in part to standardize the election format and to rally qualified individuals to the cause. The amount itself wasn’t insane (125 for the inspection post in CA a good 25 years ago I think), but it justified the additional state training meetings and other duties I had to the election site I was running.
Lastly, I think the LDS church has shifted expenses into “volunteer work” and “reimbursement” to the point where church fundraising isn’t a requirement and we don’t talk about the local religious community self-funding (except for mild girls camp funding and Boy Scouts of America activities – which took up a lot of budget talk and funding at the time the church was affiliated to the BSA). It is telling that the joint, more equalized youth program for individuals 7-18 is cheaper and more locality-directed because of some changes.
Because we have a volunteer clergy (and that is a serious selling point for the battle-sore parish board member), we don’t have to pay for organization administration human resources expenses for the most part (insurance and salary primarily) up until our full-time GA’s. This reinforces a gender divide about what labor is worth paying for.
One of the things I have thought about is that humans have an assumption that “true = always true” for statements and that those statements don’t always hold true as different pieces of reality shift. EXAMPLES:
My teenager is going into 10th grade in a few weeks. They will 100% be a 10th grader for as long as they are enrolled and/or the school year lasts – June 2026 according to our school district calendar. The fact that at different time-anchoring points, they weren’t a 10th grader or won’t be a 10th grader anymore doesn’t invalidate that for the time period August 2025 through May 2026, they are a 10th grader.
My baby is going to 9 years of age later on this month. In our state, they “graduated” away from a mandatory car seat/booster seat because they hit specific age, weight, and height requirements to sit in the back seat safely about 6 months ago. It was “true” that my child needed a car seat as a baby and in other phases of their lives. It is questionable that they wouldn’t be safer in a big kid booster seat still, but my child and the state agree that the “truth of the matter” is that my child can be safe enough in the back seat of my car without one.
CONCLUSION:
I choose to see previous testimonies and “truths” as what younger me understood and valued while recognizing that older me has had different experiences and has come to different “truthful” conclusions. I think that all humans are like that.
Minyan Man wrote:
I have a hard time understanding why religion (LDS Church specifically) & the designs of a Heavenly Father wouldn’t make the plan of salvation as clear & understandable as possible. Instead, we have from time to time, discussions, topics & speculation about issues like this. And then introduced and presented by a GA (and others) once again.
On days when I am in a benevolent mood, I see it as people (GA and others) talking about what generates motivation for thinking about, exploring/processing through, or interests them. Most denominations have a simpler Plan of Salvation – that is one reason that our “Celestial Glory” reward is talked about so much.
Minyan Man wrote:
I thought that the focus was Jesus Christ. His role, His mission, His teachings & His sacrifice on the cross. This life is very short. I am still having difficulty FULLY understanding Jesus.
The focus generally has been on “following Jesus Christ through what has been restored” via additional scripture and other individuals to follow. But while we “believe Jesus Christ”, our theology doesn’t fit the majority perspective of “Christianity” – including a belief in the Trinity. There is a bit of needle-threading going on to be a “Christian religion” like the other denominations out there without losing too much of our “Mormon” restoration theology that has vastly different interpretations of the Fall, “Salvation”, the nature of God, and the role of Jesus Christ being a few topics.
It is inconvenient that serial monogamy becomes polygamy or polyandry once mortal space-time restrictions are lifted. The push to make “temple marriage” the cultural priority to legitimize priesthood authority and motivate members to engage more with the church organization (and “obey the rules”) drove up the desire for a “temple marriage sealing” over a “this life marriage/civil marriage” made the impacts of these inconvenient truths more apparent, in my opinion.
So why would he say it at all? And if it need to be said (debatable), why in a small gathering? It is easier for me to believe it was a “slip of the tongue”, a blurb in the moment based on his personal recollection, maybe a phrasing based in the lack of information on eternal relationships rather then the expansion of an official doctrine.
I think it depends on if/how it is talked about in the October General Conference for a sense of the fallout from the comment itself.
I have been sitting with this thread for awhile now – and the related polygamous implications. The thing is that it almost seems sometimes that our leaders treat “Heavenly Father” as an individual with specific characteristics and “Heavenly Mother” as a role/class of individuals (existing as support NPC’s [Non-Player Characters who exist in video games to be interacted with] for Heavenly Father) and then sprinkles spiritual fairy dust over the whole theological bundle. It would not surprise me at all if Elder Oaks framed his perspective of human and non-human individuals in terms of “roles” in terms of what they do, and that his focus was to define the roles and pay little to no attention of how those roles interact with each other.
I just think that he was ad-libbing his thoughts and at that time he thought about the numerous woman in his life who had “Mothered” him – and this came out sloppily as “singular man, multiple women” in his language. I don’t think he was trying excavate theology (at least any more than usual) and I don’t think he meant what he said the way it is being taken in terms of theology.
Yup. As a thought exercise, I sometimes posit that “being a Creator in the afterlife” is a lot like middle school class projects where you have to team together to complete the project – with the students banding together to determine what the team composition is before even understanding the scope of the project itself. The bad part of that scenario is that I would in general prefer to work with a trusted female colleague over a male colleague any day – and I am easily not the only one if the “bear-choosers” are an accurate representation of dynamics.
100+ years from now when there are artificial uteruses, historians will have a tough time making sense of this ongoing debate and “teams” will be larger as genetic diversity is a huge selling point for being more inclusive – that will be interesting. Or maybe in a few thousand years, we will have re-written our DNA so that we have specific breeding seasons that are utilized instead of the free-range system that we currently have that spans decades.
I was raised in the church and I haven’t done a ton of investigation of other churches for reasons. The way my faith transition landed actually pushed me outside of organized religion in general. On some levels, it would be more harmful to my spouse if I shifted commitment to another church then just my current perspective of no church engagement.
I fully believe that some people are more discerning of these types of questions when choosing church affiliation. These questions come from a position of privilege where one has the capacity to choose where to go and all choices are relatively equal (maybe they haven’t set up roots in a new city for example).
I think that part of it is that on some levels, our time is more prioritized for productivity (hence checklist shortcuts). I also think that church engagement (especially at the family level) has some intense competition that may not have existed to the degree it does previously. Churches have to sell the members more on “this is the best use of your time” against media (video games, TV, social media), hobbies (kid sports included), care tasks (with 2 people income meaning that there is less time to do more), “going out into the world” aka nature stuff or tourist stuff, and work (including continuing education tasks and side hustles).
If I was going to look into a different church, I would be most interested in the doctrines, how their organization is set up to transfer power to the members. I would also be looking for a church where there is a strong woman pastor (and not a decorative one). I would also be asking questions about how sexual transgressions are handled (member to member and leader to member specifically).
Is the line a generational thing where the younger social media guru or staff writer for the leader is the “paid influencer” and the leader is just a leader with the name that motivates attendance and attention? During an intense season in our marriage, I dragged my husband to a Marriage Encounter run by the Catholic church (highly recommend actually). It was interesting seeing marriage treated so sacredly – we sanctify our marriages by location (temple) and degree of unity between the spouses (not necessarily accurate).
They were more upfront about how much it would cost and talked about how it was funded with some passing-the-plate going on.
What was most illuminating for me was the way that community sales events (spaghetti dinners, bake sales, etc.) subsidized their funding as it was casually mentioned during meals by interested parties (mostly women) basically treating it as a stake-level networking experience and reporting meeting.
Inclusiveness is not a normal mindset for an exclusionary theology and organizational structure. We have a theology that excludes the interests of minority groups in the population (women – even if there are actually more women then men in the pews, racial minorities, and “liberals” who may or may not have an education). We aren’t that far off from those who run the church organization and receive revelation (in theorY0 from seeing the main threats to the church organization as “women, gays, and intellectuals”. On some levels, it feels like telling a carnivore to “eat more rice” and expecting that to actually work.
TANGEANT: We got a puppy [Beagle-German Shepherd mix] recently after a multi-year no-pet-hiatus and I am now reading labels in the pet aisle of shops. The amount of cheaper grains that go into various meaty creations is a testament to the care that pet owners have as well as some nutritional creativity and magic in the pet food creation department.
But it actually goes beyond that. Not only are we looking at the carnivore “eat more rice” scenario, but the creative nutritional geniuses aka “nurturing, faithful women” are leaving their posts [and Jarod Halvorsen noticed last year].
According to the Pew Research group, Generation Z women are leaving church engagement more then Generation Z men – and women leaving church engagement in general is more common then it used to be.
https://www.americansurveycenter.org/newsletter/young-women-are-leaving-church-in-unprecedented-numbers/ ” class=”bbcode_url”> https://www.americansurveycenter.org/newsletter/young-women-are-leaving-church-in-unprecedented-numbers/ Quote:Studies show that women tend to contribute
much more time and energy to community building and volunteer efforts in places of worship. Without this dedicated source of volunteer labor, many congregations will be unable to serve their membership and their communities. What’s more, research finds that mothers play an instrumental role in passing on religious values and beliefs to their children. Americans who were raised in religious households credit their mothers more so than their fathers for leading in their religious upbringing, and children who are raised in mixed-faith households are more likely to adopt their mother’s faith in adulthood. None of this is good news for America’s places of worship. Many of these young women are gone for good. Studies consistently show that people who leave religion rarely come back, even if they hold on to some of their formative beliefs and practices.
NOTE: The bolding is mine.
