Origins of the LDS Church of Satan: Sex, Drugs, and Folk Magic

Sex: A Summation of Plural Marriage and Its Dynastic Effects

The problem of Latter Day Saints is simple enough: a sanitized history filtered through the self-serving lens of church leadership, which consists of men for whom church history is also family history. Nowhere is this more evident than in the issue of plural marriage. Latter Day Saint scholar Kathryn M. Daynes attempts to continue to the whitewashing of plural marriage in her book More Wives Than One: Transformation of the Mormon Marriage System 1840-1890. The book purports to examine polygynous marriages among Latter Day Saints from a scholarly perspective, one rooted in hard facts derived from a dataset centered on polygamist families in Manti, Utah.

Daynes engages the worn tropes familiar to anyone researching the Church’s narratives on the origins of plural marriage. First, she cites Danel Bachman, who claims that Joseph Smith probably began wrestling with the notion of plural marriage in 1831 while he was “studying and emending the Old Testament,” in that Smith encountered the issue of plural marriage among biblical patriarchs while he was revising the scriptural texts that dealt with the patriarchs and their plural marriages. Bachman’s New Light on an Old Hypothesis: The Ohio Origins of the Revelation on Plural Marriage cites Robert J. Matthews “A Plainer Translation”; Joseph Smith’s Translation of the Bible: A History and Commentary" as the basis for his claim that Smith was retranslating the sections of the Old Testament dealing with patriarchal plural marriage.

While the Church leadership insists that Smith was wrestling with the question of plural marriage as early as 1831, the reality is that Smith did not receive his revelation on plural marriage until 1843 in what would become Section 132 of the Doctrine and Covenants. This revelation would not be publicized until 1852, almost eight years after Smith was assassinated. It was not added to the Doctrine and Covenants until the 1876 edition. Matthews’s contention that Smith began wrestling with the issue of plural marriage in 1831 is speculative at best, and blatantly specious at worst. Nevertheless, because it provides a convenient basis for polygamy in the early LDS, Matthews’s claims are held up by others such as Daynes and Bachman.

The tendency of LDS academics and scholars to cite convenient speculation or outright fabrication is perhaps the single greatest obstacle to an honest recounting of history among Latter Day Saints. The testimonies which affix an 1831 date to Joseph Smith’s polygamist revelations all date to thirty or more years after 1831. W.W. Phelps wrote a letter to Brigham Young in 1861 detailing Smith’s alleged revelation that married missionaries were to take Native American women as wives.¹

In 1878, Orson Pratt cited Lyman Johnson’s claim that Smith had received the first revelations on polygamy in 1831, which made Pratt’s claim a third hand source at best. Despite the claims of pro-polygamy scholars that Smith began receiving revelation on polygamy as early as 1831, Smith’s own translations of polygamy referencing scriptures reveal otherwise.

2 Samuel 12:13 and 1 Kings 3:14 are the most prominent examples of this.

In both passages, the changes Smith makes in his retranslation condemn David for polygamy and adultery, rather than upholding him. These changes date to 1833, after Smith’s translation of the Book of Mormon left no doubt as to the church’s position on polygamy, which was referred to as whoredom.² At no point did Smith’s retranslation of the King James Version alter scripture to favor polygamy; instead, the retranslation altered the original text to condemn David for his sexual sins.

Eight years after Smith’s death, the Church publicly claimed that he had received a revelation in 1843 affirming polygamy, and in 1876 this purported revelation would be canonized in Doctrine and Covenants Section 132.

During the time period Smith was purportedly receiving his first revelations on polygamy according to Daynes, Bachman, and Matthews, who cite polygamists such as Orson Pratt and WW Phelps, Smith was re-translating the Bible to condemn King David for sexual immorality in the form of concubinage and adultery with Bathsheba. This would later be contradicted by Section 132, wherein Nathan was transformed into a prophet with the keys to turn polygyny from whoredom into a justified practice, excepting David’s murder of Uriah, which cost David his exaltation and a chance to inherit his wives in eternity.

Every reference to monogamy in the New Testament was unchanged in the Joseph Smith Translation. Most importantly, the Joseph Smith Translation does not alter the text of Matthew 22:29.

Verse 29 becomes verse 30 due to Smith’s translation splitting verse 18 in the original King James Version into two verses. The substance of the verse remains unchanged, and explicitly rules out an eternal version of marriage that transmogrifies men and women into exalted gods rather than angels through temple marriage. The Joseph Smith Translation was the version of the Bible which removed errors and mistranslations, and yet it does not affirm polygamy, exaltation, or eternal marriage.

Despite what the proponents of polygamy allege, Joseph Smith’s own inspired translation of the King James Version leaves monogamy as the standard, consistent with the teachings of the Book of Mormon. Worse still, the original 1835 Doctrine and Covenants contained Section 101, which was removed from the 1876 Doctrine and Covenants issued a year before Brigham Young’s death. The concluding paragraph of Section 101 explicitly affirms monogamy as the standard of the Church:

All legal contracts of marriage made before a person is baptized into this church, should be held sacred and fulfilled. Inasmuch as this church of Christ has been reproached with the crime of fornication, and polygamy: we declare that we believe, that one man should have one wife; and one woman, but one husband, except in case of death, when either is at liberty to marry again. It is not right to persuade a woman to be baptized contrary to the will of her husband, neither is it lawful to influence her to leave her husband. All children are bound by law to obey their parents; and to influence them to embrace any religious faith, or be baptized, or leave their parents without their consent, is unlawful and unjust. We believe that husbands, parents and masters who exercise control over their wives, children, and servants and prevent them from embracing the truth, will have to answer for that sin.

The opening sentence is of the utmost importance, as it upholds marriage contracts predating baptism. Only death is sufficient to qualify remarriage, and the Section explicitly states that it is wrong “to persuade a woman to be baptized contrary to the will of her husband,” and that is is unlawful “to influence her to leave her husband.” Children cannot be influenced to embrace a religious faith, be baptized, or depart from their parents without their parents’ consent.

According to Daynes’s own research, as well as the research of other LDS scholars, all of these forbidden acts were the norm under polygamy in the Church. In fact, absent missionaries convincing teenage women to leave their families in Europe and in the Eastern states, polygamy was simply an impossible undertaking. Men outnumbered women in Utah. Only through an influx of immigrant females induced to leave their families was it possible for men in Utah to enter into plural marriage.

The influx of female converts from Europe fit the demographics specifically identified in the original Section 101: they were fatherless, having left their families behind in Europe to immigrate to Utah. Among the Manti dataset Daynes drew her statistics from, 65.3% of first or plural wives in polygynous marriages were fatherless female immigrants.³ Once they arrived in Utah, they were often drafted into households as servants, operating at an economic disadvantage.

These were impoverished women with few options, separated from their families, and therefore subject to the appeal of plural marriage from a strictly economic standpoint. When paired with the inundating messaging of the polygamist leadership, which stressed that the only path to exaltation was through plural marriage, such women were doubly vulnerable to the appeal of polygamist men. As Daynes notes, “[i]t was not uncommon for a single woman to live or work as a servant in a household and then become a plural wife of a husband.”⁴

Polygamist men were more likely to hold greater wealth and greater rank within the priesthood, which made them more attractive to impoverished single women who had recently arrived in Utah from other states and countries. These men could not only offer prospective plural wives greater economic security; they could also offer those women eternal security through their rank within the priesthood and the Church. D. Michael Quinn’s doctoral dissertation drove the former point home: those at the highest levels of the church hierarchy were ten times wealthier than other Latter Day Saints.

Daynes’s examination of the Manti pioneers confirmed this fact. The thirteen highest ranking church leaders in Manti had a mean wealth of $3,291.92, whereas all married men had a mean wealth of $1,135.71. Monogamist men in Manti had a mean wealth of just $719.50 versus the polygamist married men’s mean wealth of $2,092.02. Even excluding the top thirteen leaders in Manti, men in plural marriages held a mean wealth of $1,442.68.

Plural marriage was the means by which men achieved rank within the Church from the 1850s onward, and with that rank came a concomitant rise in mean wealth. This was confirmed by the extreme stratification of wealth in Utah during the period between 1850 and 1870, when the Gini coefficients were 0.69 and 0.74 for the state as a whole.⁵ This was despite the early efforts by the Church to prevent a consolidation of wealth in the hands of a few, which Doctrine and Covenants 51:3 explicitly addressed when it commanded the apportionment of wealth according to family size, as “every man [was] equal according to his family.” The rise of United Orders decreed that wealth should be gathered and redistributed as appropriate by the bishop of the Church when a member generated an excess beyond what was necessary to sustain his family.

Members voluntarily consecrated their property to the Church, but the resulting disagreements and conflicts proved fatal to the execution of the United Orders and the underlying Law of Consecration. Brigham Young would eventually abandon his attempts to reinstitute the Law of Consecration after the U.S. government cited the practice as a justification for grants of land ownership in Utah. It was replaced by the law of tithing.⁶

The reality was that the leaders of the Church lived off of the contributions of members, and those who were closest to the centers of power within Utah had greater wealth than those who were not. Daynes found that those who lived in Salt Lake County, where the Church was headquartered, tended to be wealthier than other Saints outside of the county.⁷ Analogously, those men who rose to positions of power in their local wards and stakes were more likely to be wealthy than those who remained outside of the highest ranks.

Polygamy in Utah was hypergamic rather than egalitarian. The leadership of the Church became more explicit and more strident over time with regards to the requirement of plural marriage for those men who would lead. In 1882, John Taylor told the assembled members of the First Presidency, the Twelve Apostles, and the stake presidents that men “obeying a lower law” were not qualified “to preside over those who keep a higher law.”⁸ This was followed by Wilford Woodruff and George Q. Cannon stipulating that men in leadership were to enter into plural marriage or resign their positions.⁹

A mere fourteen of the General Authorities appointed from 1845 to 1888 were drawn from monogamists; their tenures were short.¹⁰ Plural marriage was the means by which men could advance their station socially, materially, and sexually within the Church. Both temporally and eternally, plural marriage was the path forward for Saints who sought to advance in their faith. Without plural marriage, exaltation was impossible, according to Orson Pratt, who taught that the ordinance was “necessary for our exaltation to the fulness of the Lord’s glory in the eternal world.” Erastus Snow taught that monogamist men might obtain the Celestial Kingdom, but they would not “enter into the order of the Gods” via exaltation through polygamy.

Brigham Young was even clearer; those men who insisted on remaining in monogamous marriages were analogized to the servant who hid his talent in the earth, only to have his master take that talent and give it to the other servant who had doubled his talents. In Young’s view, the monogamous man would arrive in the Celestial Kingdom to find himself without any wife, and he explicitly taught that the “only men who become Gods, even the Sons of God, are those who enter into polygamy.”

As time wore on, the impracticality of Young’s teachings on polygamy became apparent. Men outnumbered women in Utah, and as a practical matter, only a few men could have multiple wives in plural marriage.¹¹ There simply were not enough women to go around. Young taught that one could be polygamist in his faith if he desired with all of his heart to obtain the blessings of Abraham, while Wilford Woodruff cited Young as saying that a man might “embrace the law of celestial marriage in his heart and not take a second wife and be justified before the Lord.” As Daynes summarizes: “ …entering plural marriage might not be essential for salvation, but believing that it was a righteous principle ordained of God was.”¹²

This requirement of belief was confirmed by Orson Pratt’s stern warning that those who rejected plural marriage would be damned. Brigham Young told Saints that if they denied plural marriage “in [their] feelings” they would be damned. Joseph F. Smith state that the law of celestial marriage required every man “who has the ability to obey and to practice it in righteous” had to enter into plural marriage or be condemned to damnation. George Q. Cannon contended that he was “perfectly satisfied that there are men who will be counted worthy of that glory who never had a wife; there are men probably in this world now, who will receive exaltation, who never had a wife at all, or probably had but one.”

The belief in the validity plural marriage and the willingness to enter into it if given the opportunity were the paths to exaltation in the eyes of men like Cannon, Pratt, Snow, and Young. The rejection of the principle of plural marriage was sufficient to damn individuals to hell, as was the lack of willingness to enter into plural marriage when the opportunity presented itself.

Many monogamous Saints found their workarounds to the requirement of plural marriage by being sealed to dead women. ¹³ Daynes identifies five separate purposes for marriage among nineteenth century Saints:

1. to rearrange the relationship between a man and a woman and hence their rights and duties to each other;

2. to give rights of sexual access;

3. to rear children and transmit material goods and culture from one generation to another;

4. to reorder the relationship between the kin groups of the husband the wife as they acquire a common kinship with the children of the couple;

5. and to achieve one’s eternal salvation and exaltation through plural marriage.

Daynes also classifies different types or forms of marriage within these contexts. First, there were eternity only marriages, which were unaccompanied by any earthly rights or obligations. These marriages enabled men to be sealed to women for eternity without ever consummating the marriage or upsetting their first wives via plural marriage. Nominal marriages entitled the wives to adopt their husband’s surnames and receive support, while proxy marriages for previously sealed wives whose husbands were deceased conferred a right of sexual access but no eternal obligation. Proxy marriages might also seal women to a living spouse for time only, while simultaneously sealing her to a predeceased bridegroom for eternity with her living spouse standing in the proxy position of the dead groom. This gave rise to sealed husbands and wives who never lived with each other nor had any other contact evincing a marriage beyond the record of their temple sealings.

The convoluted ties that were generated by such a system gave rise to divisions within families, as Daynes notes when she cites Kimball Young’s Isn’t One Wife Enough?, which reveals that Brigham Young’s grandchildren who were sealed to him “felt superior to Young’s other biological grandchildren who would be in Joseph Smith’s family in heaven.”¹⁴ The sealings created class systems within the families who were divided via proxy sealings to deceased men, who would inherit the temporal issue of their wives procreation with other men they were sealed to for time only.

Daynes identified an additional form of marriage among Saints, the convenience marriage. She specifically cites the example of Edmund and Mary Ann Darrow Richardson, who joined the Church in 1854. The couple had two children, but Edmund had, in the words of his wife, “become a eunuch.” For Mary Ann, the issue of her husband’s impotence was one of eternal significance: her exaltation was on the line. She wrote to Brigham Young, who told her that she could be sealed to Edmund for eternity while taking on an additional husband named Frederick Cox to father additional children. Mary Ann gave birth to two sons by Cox, Charles and Sullivan.

In short, while scholars such as a Lawrence Foster argue that Richardson’s marriage was not polyandrous due to the patriarchal nature of LDS marriages, the reality was that the marriage was in fact polyandrous. Mary Ann Darrow Richardson had sons from two men in overlapping marriages, one for eternity, and the other for convenience. This was sanctioned by Brigham Young himself, who gave Mary Ann a list of three polygamous men to choose from.

Daynes goes to great lengths and contortions to classify the marriages as anything other than what they are: polyandrous marriages where a woman has two husbands, one for time and one for eternity, and in certain cases overlapping in the temporal timeframe. Daynes classifies seven forms of marriage out of the aforementioned five purposes for marriage:

1. Civil marriages, performed by civil or local church authorities;

2. time and eternity marriages, which were typical of most Latter Day Saint marriages;

3. proxy marriages, whereby a husband had sexual access to and responsibilities for his wife and their biological offspring but no rights in eternity to either;

4. marriages for eternity only with no earthly rights or responsibilities;

5. nominal marriages which conferred limited rights on the couple for life and sealed them for eternity;

6. marriages with delayed rights involving sealings for time and eternity where the bride did not live with her husband due to her youth;

7. convenience marriages that conferred sexual access but no rights to the children and limited responsibility for his wife. ¹⁵

What is and was a conspicuously absent in polygynous Utah was the concept of a romantic marriage. In fact, romantic marriage was explicitly ruled out by church leaders and polygamous wives.

"A successful polygamous wife must regard her husband with indifference, and with no other feeling than that of reverence, for love we regard as a false sentiment; a feeling which should have no existence in polygamy."

-Zina Jacobs Smith Young¹⁶

The point of polygamous marriage according to Zina Young was simple: reverence for a husband, centered around a sense of eternal duty. For Saints in polygamy, the point of plural marriage was to raise up a seed for eternity, whereby they would be exalted as gods in the Celestial Kingdom. Romance was secondary to this concern. Everything was penultimate to the goal of becoming gods, and wives accessed the Celestial Kingdom through their husbands. Husbands accessed the Celestial Kingdom through their wives as well, for without additional wives, their progress into exaltation and concomitant godhead was not assured.

It was a brutal reality that provides some insight into today’s polygamy, including that of the Church of Satan. For the couples who hearken back to the days of polygamy in their purportedly originalist view of the LDS, romantic love is subordinated to eternal power. This context could help explain why a wife and mother could stand by and watch as her husband raped their daughters. Her only duty under Zina Young’s calculus would be indifferent reverence for her husband, unquestioning loyalty to him as a priesthood holder in the pursuit of her own godhead. That same wife would look to her husband’s rank within the Church, as well as his future potential within the Church, to ascertain his suitability as a mate. His family lineages would be of utmost importance.

Polygamy as a hypergamic concept driven by the status of males in competition was an explicit reality of life in the 1850s within Utah. In his October 8, 1861 Discourse on Marriage at General Conference, Brigham Young identified two ways for a woman to be freed from her husband for time and eternity without a divorce:

1. A husband who is unfaithful in the priesthood forfeits his sealing to his wife, who does not require a bill of divorce to escape the marriage or the sealing. The sealing is null by virtue of the husband’s failure to uphold his obligations as a priesthood holder. The second way is far more telling as to the institution of polygamy within the early Church.

2. “If a woman can find a man holding the keys of the priesthood with higher power and authority than her husband, and he is disposed to take her, he can do so, otherwise she has got to remain where she is. This is the second way in which a woman can leave her husband to whom she has been sealed for time and all eternity. In either of these ways of separation you can discover there is no need for a bill of divorcement.”¹⁷

In the simplest terms, any man who questioned the teachings of Church leaders would forfeit both his temporal claim to a wife and his eternal claim to a wife as someone who had been unfaithful to his obligations as a priesthood holder. Even if the man in question were an upstanding priesthood holder and member of the Church, his claim to his wife in both time and eternity was tenuous at best: a higher ranking priesthood holder could take his wife without the necessity of a divorce. Young qualifies this by saying that the higher ranking priesthood holder would need the consent of the first husband, but the reality is that a lower ranking male whose wife had already expressly made her lack of respect for him and her desire for another man clear would have little recourse. Under Brigham Young’s own teachings, his wife would not have to formally divorce him for time, and his claim on his wife for eternity would be null. A husband would have no leverage whatsoever in that scenario.

A husband in the first scenario would feel extraordinary pressure to adhere to whatever church leaders taught or commanded, lest he be declared a heretic and lose his wife or wives, and with his loss of mates he would also lose his exaltation. His cuckoldry would not merely be for time; it would be for eternity. A husband in the second scenario would have no leverage at all; his wife would have expressly declared her lack of reverence for him, as well as her reverence for a higher ranking male within greater priesthood power than his own.

This system would incentivize men to pursue greater status within the priesthood at all costs, and greater status necessitated unquestioning obedience and submission to Church leadership. When Church leaders declared that those men in monogamous relationships were unfit to lead men in polygamous marriages, they signaled to men that the order of power within the Church was oriented around plural marriage. Those men who entered into plural marriage had a path to greater rank within the priesthood. Those who did not would proceed at the peril of their marriages as their wives coveted higher ranking males to ensure their eternal exaltation and the eternal exaltation of their children.

Those higher ranking males could also afford the wives of lower ranking males a higher temporal existence as well. Heath and Hadley found that the system produced predictable effects: wealthy males had more wives than poorer males, at 3.2 to 1.4 wives.¹⁸ The brutal reality of polygamous Utah was simple enough: males who had arrived first in Utah, who were higher ranking in the Church hierarchy, had more wealth and higher rank than later arrivals, and as such they were more likely to take greater numbers of wives and even have success taking the wives of lower ranking males.

Polygamy gave rise to networks of power among men who used marriage as a means of dynastic intertwining. In their article Evolutionary Speculations on the Oligarchic Development of Mormon Polygyny, Steven Faux and Harold Miller found that ten of the twenty nine leaders in Joseph Smith’s time were so-called trailblazers in polygamy, with eight of the ten being directly related to Smith. The conclusion reached by Faux and Miller was that leadership appointments depended largely on a candidate’s biological relationship to Joseph Smith. This in turn “may have contributed to the solidarity of the hierarchy.”¹⁹

For females, marrying a higher status male within a polygamous hierarchy ensured increased reproductive advantages for their sons. There was nothing random about the lineages of church leaders in Joseph Smith’s time; women would have perceived this and pursued mates accordingly for their own benefit and the benefit of their future generations. Marrying a monogamous male would not have carried the same advantages as marrying a polygamous male connected by blood or marriage to the founding prophet, either for the wife or her offspring.²⁰

Within the Church of Satan, the emphasis on the royalty of the Anderson-de Jong and Hamblin-Adams bloodlines would have hearkened back to this hypergamic legacy of polygamy. Mating and marriage were strategic and tactical rather than romantic matters. For males, compliance with the dictates of leaders was necessary to ensure one’s temporal and eternal standing, as David Hamblin found out when his father in law raped his daughter in front of him during his Church of Satan excommunication proceedings, a rape which ended with Richard Lloyd Anderson commanding David Hamblin to lick up his semen after he had ejaculated on his granddaughter. It was not enough to merely excommunicate David Lee Hamblin; the Church of Satan had to utterly humiliate him.

The dynamic within polygamous networks was hypergamic from the onset, rooted in hierarchies of dominance that carried over into the heretical groups of fundamentalist Mormons and ritual abuse cults such as the Church of Satan. Polygamy was not the norm for Utah in the 19th century; instead, it was the signifier of temporal and eternal rank. At most, 28 percent of male Utahns were polygamists, but over two-thirds of Utah’s territorial officials were polygamists.²¹²²

Polygamy was limited by the mathematical reality that men outnumbered women in Utah, even with a concerted effort to recruit female converts from Europe and Eastern states. As a result, most men who entered into plural marriage only married one additional wife, with 66.3% of polygamist men marrying a single additional wife, while less than 6% of polygamist men married more than five wives. Many of the wives of those men in the latter category were taken from other men, generated what Philip Kilbride characterized as “serial polygyny” for women, who could trade up for higher ranking husbands within the priesthood, whose proximity to ecclesiastical power had also generated temporal wealth.²³

David Lee Hamblin was a shining example of this reality in the modern era. Within his own group, he was able to seduce the wives of other CS members with impunity. His daughters spoke of hearing their father engaged in sexual intercourse with Chelom Leavitt, the wife of David Leavitt, a scion of a prominent political family that had produced a state governor. Hamblin was from a bloodline prominent enough to marry into the de Jong-Anderson bloodline, with ties to the pioneers of Utah. He was David Leavitt’s distant cousin.

For Hamblin and his father in law Richard Lloyd Anderson, as well as other men within the CS councils in Provo and Spring City, the hypergamic nature of polygamy and the polygynous nature of CS polygamy was obvious. Roselle Stevenson would walk around her Spring City home during the day naked in front of open windows, luring Joe Bennion. When her estranged husband lost his membership in the CS, Roselle Stevenson was able to publicly date James Arrington and other men, even though her lack of discretion upset her father Richard Lloyd Anderson.

Hamblin’s daughters were chattel to be offered up in polygamous sealings to men like Joe Bennion and James Harmston, as well as the sons of other prominent CS families. In this way, Hamblin could obtain dynastic ties similar to those outlined by Faux and Miller in their survey of the twenty-nine leaders from Joseph Smith’s time. Hamblin was utilizing the resources at his disposal to reinforce and forge familial ties for his temporal and eternal benefit. Those resources happened to be his daughters.

In much the same way, the men around Brigham Young forged familial ties and built networks through the sealing power, adopting individuals into their eternal families who were not part of their biological bloodlines. This reinforced the hierarchical networks, built loyalty, and ensured compliance by offering men outside of the familial lineages a path into the elite circles of the Church. The legacy of polygamy was multifaceted, with temporal and eternal effects designed to reinforce dynastic lineages into the future.

There is no denying that such efforts were successful. Many of the current leaders of the Church, like many members of familial groups within cults like the Church of Satan, can trace their genealogies back to those marriages and sealings which took place in the mid-nineteenth century. Those lineages were cited time and time again as the basis for claims to a royal lineage within both the LDS and the Church of Satan by the Hamblin sisters’ parents and grandparents. The repercussions of polygamy outlived the abolition of the practice in ways that we are only beginning to understand as it pertains to the Church of Satan and other fundamentalist groups who purport to be engaged in a restoration of the originalist Restored Church.

1. Lawrence Foster, Religion and Sexuality: The Shakers, the Mormons, and the Oneida Community, pg. 135 available at: https://books.google.com/books?id=aPrEwTzypR0C&pg=PA135&dq=About+three+years+after+this+was+given,+I+asked+brother+%7CJoseph,+privately,+how+%E2%80%9Cwe,%E2%80%9D+that+were+mentioned+in+the+revelation%22&hl=en#v=onepage&q=About%20three%20years%20after%20this%20was%20given%2C%20I%20asked%20brother%20%7CJoseph%2C%20privately%2C%20how%20%E2%80%9Cwe%2C%E2%80%9D%20that%20were%20mentioned%20in%20the%20revelation%22&f=false

2. Jacob 1:15 And now it came to pass that the people of Nephi, under the reign of the second king, began to grow hard in their hearts, and indulge themselves somewhat in wicked practices, such as like unto David of old desiring many wives and concubines, and also Solomon, his son.

Jacob 2:23-24: But the word of God burdens me because of your grosser crimes. For behold, thus saith the Lord: This people begin to wax in iniquity; they understand not the scriptures, for they seek to excuse themselves in committing whoredoms, because of the things which were written concerning David, and Solomon his son. 24 Behold, David and Solomon truly had many wives and concubines, which thing was abominable before me, saith the Lord.

3. Daynes, pg. 123.

4. Daynes, pg. 122.

5. Daynes, pg. 133.

6. Arrington, Leonard J. (1993). Great Basin Kingdom: An Economic History of the Latter-day Saints, 1830-1900. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. pp. 145–148.

7. Daynes, pg. 133.

8. Daynes, pg. 72.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid,, cf. Quinn, Mormon Hierarchy: Extensions of Power, pp. 180-82.

11. George Q. Cannon acknowledged as much: “the males outnumber the females; it [plural marriage] cannot therefore be a practice without limit among us.”

12. Daynes, pg. 74.

13. Daynes, pg. 76.

14. Daynes, pg. 79.

15. Daynes, pg. 83.

16. Richard Van Wagoner, Mormon Polygamy: A History, pg. 101.

17. Brigham Young Discourse on Marriage, General Conference, October 8, 1861 Salt Lake City Tabernacle, Brigham Young Papers, MS 12341 Box 49, Folder 8 Church History Department, available at: https://ia803009.us.archive.org/21/items/brighamyoungdiscourseonmarriage/Brigham%20Young%20Discourse%20on%20Marriage.pdf 

18. Heath, Kathleen and Craig Hadley, Dichotomous Male Reproductive Strategies in a Polygynous Human Society: Mating versus Parental Effort. Current Anthropology 39(3): 369-374.

19. Faux, Steven and Harold Miller, Jr. Evolutionary Speculations on the Oligarchic Development of Mormon Polygyny, Ethology and Sociobiology 5: 15-31

20. Ibid.

21. Smith, James and Phillip Kunz, Polygyny and Fertility in Nineteenth-century America. Population Studies 30:465-480.

22. Sarah Barringer Gordon, The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America, 109.

23. Philip Kilbridge, Plural Marriage For Our Times: A Reinvented Option? Bergin and Garvey: Westport, Connecticut. 1993.