Mormon leaders have acknowledged for the first time that the church’s founder and prophet, Joseph Smith, portrayed in church materials as a loyal partner to his loving spouse Emma, took as many as 40 wives, some already married and one only 14 years old.

The church’s disclosures, in essays online, are part of an effort to be transparent about its history as church members are encountering disturbing claims about the faith on the internet. Many Mormons, especially those with polygamous ancestors, say they were well aware Smith’s successor, Brigham Young, practised polygamy when he led the flock in Salt Lake City. But they did not know the full truth.

“Joseph Smith was presented to me as a practically perfect prophet, and this is true for a lot of people,” said Emily Jensen, a blogger and editor in Farmington, Utah, who often writes about Mormon issues. She said the reaction of some Mormons resembled the grief stages of denial and anger: “This is not the church I grew up with, this is not the Joseph Smith I love.”

Smith probably did not have sexual relations with all of his wives, because some were “sealed” to him only for the next life, according to the essays posted by the church. But for his first wife, Emma, polygamy was “an excruciating ordeal”. The four treatises on polygamy reflect a new resolve by a church long accused of secrecy to respond with openness to the kind of thorny historical and theological issues causing some to become disillusioned or even to abandon the faith.

Contentious topics

Elder Steven Snow, the church historian and a member of its senior leadership, said: “There is so much out there on the internet that we felt we owed our members a safe place where they could go to get reliable, faith-promoting information that was true about some of these more difficult aspects of our history. We need to be truthful, and we need to understand our history,” Snow said. “I believe our history is full of stories of faith and devotion and sacrifice, but these people weren’t perfect.”

The essay on “plural marriage” in the early days of the Mormon movement in Ohio and Illinois says polygamy was commanded by God, revealed to Smith and accepted by him and his followers only very reluctantly. Abraham and other Old Testament patriarchs had multiple wives, and Smith preached his church was the “restoration” of the early, true Christian church.

Most of Smith’s wives were 20-40, the essay says, but he married Helen Mar Kimball, a daughter of two friends, “several months before her 15th birthday”. A footnote says that according to “careful estimates,” Smith had 30 to 40 wives.

The biggest bombshell for some is that Smith married women who were already married, some to men who were Smith’s friends and followers. The essays held nothing back, said Richard Bushman, emeritus professor of history at Columbia University and author of the book Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling. Bushman said of church leaders: “Somewhere along the line they decided they were just going to tell the whole story, not to be defensive, not to try to hide anything. And there’s no single fact that’s more unsettling than Joseph Smith’s marriage to other men’s wives.

“It’s a recognition of maturity,” said Bushman, a Mormon. “There are lots of church leaders who say: ‘We can take anything, just let us know how it really happened. We’re a church that is secure.’”

The younger generation of Mormons will benefit from this step, said Samantha Shelley, co-founder of the website MillenialMormons.com in Provo, Utah. She said she knew of Smith’s polygamous past, but “it’s so easy for people these days to stumble upon something on the internet, and it rocks their world and they don’t know where to turn”.

In 1890, under pressure by the US government, the church issued a manifesto formally ending polygamy. The church’s essay on this phase admits that some members and even leaders did not abandon the practice for years. But the church did renounce polygamy, and Mormons who refused to do the same broke away and formed splinter churches.

There remains one way in which polygamy is still a part of Mormon belief: the church teaches that a man who was “sealed” in marriage to his wife in a temple ritual, then loses his wife to death or divorce, can be sealed to a second wife and would be married to both wives in the afterlife. However, women who have been divorced or widowed cannot be sealed to more than one man.

Disturbing for women

Dialogue: a Journal of Mormon Thought

“These are real issues for Mormon women,” Haglund said. “And because the church has never said definitively that polygamy won’t be practised in heaven, even very devout and quite conservative women are really troubled by it.” – (New York Times)