D&C 132 - Intro

The issue of polygamy is pretty wild and people get VERY upset about it, but I think it’s important to start out by saying what I do every time I talk about this issue. In Jesus the Christ, James E. Talmage teaches us that Jesus Christ is the ultimate champion of women and womanhood. We know that through the atonement Christ felt all of our pain and sorrow and heart ache, we know that the Lord counts our tears. He knows that deep down every woman wants a man who loves her and is devoted to her and cherishes her, He knows how vital and important that is to women. He feels everything we feel and cries with us, he only wants our absolute happiness, and he doesn’t want us to suffer. He knew what asking his saints to practice polygamy would do to his daughters and it only caused him pain and suffering, so why did he do it? The Lord has told us that it is not his will that polygamy should be practiced unless he commands his people to do it so that he can raise up righteous seed unto himself. My personal belief is that when polygamy was first commanded the Church was growing but in order to take the gospel to the whole world we couldn’t convert people fast enough to grow the missionary force we have today. By commanding polygamy the Lord was able to raise up righteous seed unto himself. I have a theory that much of the church leadership today is the result of polygamist families but that’s only because all of the generational LDS families that I know have polygamist backgrounds, I know that my family has polygamy on both sides, so it clearly worked.

I went to a fireside once a couple of years ago called “Joseph Smith and Polygamy.” The speaker said that that was the first fireside he’s ever done on the subject and he didn’t know if they were ever going to let him do another one. He was an anesthesiologist from Utah who had spent thousands of dollars of his own money hiring a professional researcher, who, interestingly enough had been a member of the Church and then either left the Church or was ex-communicated. He told the researcher to bring him anything that had to do with Joseph Smith and polygamy, good, bad, or indifferent, he said “let’s get all the information that we can and then sort it out from there.” They spent years researching and sorting through any and all information that they could get their hands on and what resulted was an incredible understanding and a deepened love of the Prophet and the Lord. They created a website called www.josephsmithspolygamy.org and it’s absolutely incredible.