How do we describe Mormon polygamy? I’ve often seen it said that 19th century Mormons “practiced” polygamy. For example, here’s President Hinckley on Larry King Live in 1998:

The figures I have are from — between two percent and five percent of our people were involved in [polygamy]. It was a very limited practice; carefully safeguarded. In 1890, that practice was discontinued.

There’s lots to criticize here, but what I’m concerned with is his use of the word “practice.” The word is used to minimize how central polygamy was, to demote it to just a minor incidental thing that some Church members did.

Listening to Lindsay’s excellent “Year of Polygamy” on the fMh Podcast has really driven home for me just how misleading calling polygamy a “practice” is. Polygamy was really in the central core of how the Church defined itself. It was seen as essential for exaltation. It was the thing that the Brigham Young-led sect did that many of the other sects that followed Joseph Smith’s restoration (most notably the RLDS) didn’t. The LDS Church wasn’t a church that “practiced polygamy.” It was a polygamous church.

There are many ways you could show how central polygamy was to the Church. One that stands out to me because it’s easy to see is that the process of ending it was painful and difficult. It took two manifestos and apostles being kicked out of the Quorum of the Twelve and decades of infighting that finally led the people who didn’t want to give polygamy up leaving to form new sects. Contrast this with changes the Church has made that genuinely do involve mere practices. When Sunday meetings were consolidated into the three-hour block, were multiple attempts required because people stubbornly kept to their old meeting schedule? When the Church started building smaller temples in the 1990s, did holdouts leave the Church because they thought only the older bigger temples could be true? When the missionary age changes were announced, was there infighting where some groups insisted that the old ages were the correct ones, and that faithful Church members should refuse to serve at the new ages?

Calling polygamy a “practice” not only minimizes how central it was to the Church in the past, it also sidesteps the issue of how much the idea remains alive in the Church today. We still have sealing rules that are designed for polygamy and GAs who are clearly planning to live polygamy in the next life. And of course the idea doesn’t stop with GAs. Even with curricula that are intentionally vague, teachers continue to teach that heaven will include polygamy. As a result, many women in particular have understandable anxiety about how heavenly heaven could really be if it includes the possibility (or the requirement!) that they share their husbands. President Hinckley said (in the same interview quoted above) that polygamy is “behind us.” That’s unfortunately clearly not true.

Polygamy was absolutely central to the Church in the past, and the idea that it is a higher law that will be brought back in the future or will exist in the next life is strong in the Church today. The Church didn’t “practice” polygamy. It was—and in many ways still is—a polygamous church.