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zaffiroborant
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It also flies in the face of the LDS teaching that everyone has to be married to get into the highest level of heaven.
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oneofmany
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Well this debate also brings up incest since we are all suppose to come from one man and one women. Did siblings marry for a time and when did that become sinful?
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DaveBj
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There was no Law on marriages between near relatives until Mount Sinai, and where there is no Law, there is no sin.
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manualman
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Maybe Mormon theology sees morality as the arbitrary commands of a God with a consistency problem, but Catholicism doesn’t! Sins aren’t sins because they were arbitrarily placed on a list. Sins are things that objectively damage the human soul and disrupt our capacity to commune with God. Either polygamy does that or it doesn’t. It’s incoherent to assert that it was morally fine until some point at which it became immoral unless you are asserting that it is a mere disciplinary measure God imposed at a point in time for reasons other than the innate moral character of polygamy.Whether polygamy is acceptable NOW is the OP question: when was it, as a practice, specifically forbidden by God? A time…a declaration…something…that one can point to and say 'you could do it then and still be in good shape with God, but if you do it after this point, you are sinning?"
Well, as a Mormon I can tell you when it was.
God revealed himself in the OT progressively. The longer the people knew him, the more they got to know. At the time of David and Saul, they simply didn’t know him well enough to recognize the incompatibility of polygamy and God’s character.
This progressive comprehension of God’s character hasn’t really ended. It’s just in our own lifetime that the people of our nation got through our thick heads that something as trivial as skin color can’t change the innate dignity and worth of a human being as having been created in the image and likeness of God!
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BornInMarch
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I already said that I should have done more research on the question, thereby admitting fault. Why do you still feel the need to bite my head (so to speak)?
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Sarcelle
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Great post.
My thoughts exactly.
I notice that the people who approve of polygyny are usually men, mostly single men.
Maybe the married ones know better?
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manualman
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My apologies, I didn’t mean to bite. I meant to point out that the question revealed an underlying fundamental assumption that needed examining rather than just an answer to the question asked. It didn’t seem like that issue had been raised elsewhere. I just tend towards blunt because I like clarity. Sorry!
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BornInMarch
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That’s okey, I understand. And you did have a good point.
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andrewstx
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Is it not true that Woodruff did not abolish the Mormon principle of plural marriage but only set it aside to get statehood for Utah? If the law changes would not mormons begin to practice the “new and everlasting covenant” once again?At the time, it was both. One may indeed argue that the topic was the kingship, but the wives and concubines were explicitly mentioned here. I don’t think anybody can argue that God disapproved of polygamy in the OT, when pretty much every single prophet and leader that He spoke to had more than one wife. It would have been very simple for Him, for instance, to tell Abraham (and Isaac, and everybody else) to stop it. He certainly gave plenty of other instructions that the folks back then had a tough time swallowing. What’s this one?
But then He came right out and used polygyny as an illustration of the transfer of the kingdom; one would think that the use of a problematic practice would not be a really good example of the transfer of a solid thing; rather like the cop telling the speeder “Of course I can give you a ticket for this! Didn’t I just let you get away with running the stop light?”
Doesn’t make sense.
Whether polygamy is acceptable NOW is the OP question: when was it, as a practice, specifically forbidden by God? A time…a declaration…something…that one can point to and say 'you could do it then and still be in good shape with God, but if you do it after this point, you are sinning?"
Well, as a Mormon I can tell you when it was.
In 1890, when Wilford Woodruff issued the 'Manifesto" saying that it was no longer to be practiced.
There was a whole bunch of resistance to it at the time, mind you, and there are quite a few breakaway Mormon sects that still practice it, but the quickest way to get excommunicated, if you are a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day saints, is to try it.
I MIGHT be willing to look at the NT verses about marriage, but even those still work if the man has more than one wife to 'cling to."
Just sayin’, is all, since y’all brought the Mormons into it.
I guess the point is, all during the OT (and among the NT Jews) polygamy was practiced. God did not ever, once, say that it was a sin and not to be practiced. He even used it…giving Saul’s wives over to David…as an example of the transfer of kingship. One generally does not use an illicit practice as an example of proving a licit one.
So…as the OP asks, when, precisely, did God say no, specifically? That is, if you aren’t going to use the Manifesto, and of course I do not expect you to do that.
Did not many Mormons flee the US to continue polygamy? Mitt Romney the former Republi candidate for the Presidency descended from mormons who fled to Mexico so they could continue to practice polygamy. There are still pockets of Mormons in Mexico who still continue to live in polygamy.
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PaulDupre1
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Terms like “everlasting” and “true” are very fluid in Mormonism. What was “everlasting” 130 years ago is “provisional” now. What was “truth” just 40 years ago is “opinion” now.
As the old Soviet Union joke goes: “The future is known. It’s the past that keeps changing”.
Yes. All true.
Paul (formerly LDS, now happily Catholic)
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SteveVH
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Best post on this thread so far. Talk about hitting the nail on the head. :clapping:
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PaulDupre1
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oneofmany
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What happened at Mount Sinai?
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DaveBj
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God gave Israel the Torah, which included prohibitions against marriages with near relatives (including half-sisters, which law would have invalidated Abraham’s marriage, but since that law hadn’t been given in his day, his marriage was okay).
(Did you really not know what happened at Mount Sinai?)
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Theo520
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Matthew 19 is about divorce not polygamy!It was always condemned by God.
Matthew 19 is a pretty good scripture about this. It explains that Polygamy and other things ie… divorce were always condemned by God since the beginning but because of the hardness of the peoples hearts, regulations were put on.
It is very clear in the old testament that God did allow polygamy** but I don’t think he ever approved of it**. Polygamy was never a commandment, it was like divorce, regulated. But thankfully its been mostly abolished. If only we could put the same annotation on divorce. Since divorce is basically another form of polygamy, instead of multiple wives at the same time, you decide to space them out ever other year…
Are you claiming revelation to support your opinion in knowing what God approved of (since you aren’t citing scripture).
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SteveVH
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I think the Catholic position would be that God is not inconsistent and objective truth is not inconsistent, therefore it doesn’t change from one period of history to another. If a behavior is sinful then it is always sinful. From the beginning God created us male and female with the intention that we become one flesh. One cannot be one flesh with more than one person. Jesus reminded the Jews of this reality, he didn’t all of a sudden make what was not sinful, sinful. As manualman so eloquently stated: “Sins are things that objectively damage the human soul and disrupt our capacity to commune with God.” If polygamy is wrong now then it was wrong in the past as well. It wasn’t just arbitrarily added to a list.
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TheIrishman
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commenter
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Given that the secularists are on the attack to eliminate any Christian ideas of marriage from the public square, I wonder how long it will be before they legalize polygamy in the USA? Because polygamy usually appears as “sexist”, the argument will be that one woman can now have two husbands, if she and they agree, with birth control and paternity verification now in place. Legal restrictions on this, and incest, will disappear within a decade I predict. And I could guess the same denominations that jumped on the gay marriage badwagon will jump on this one, too.
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SteveVH
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Nothing would surprise me anymore.
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dianaiad
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It was abolished, not set aside temporarily. That said, It looks like it was done for the purpose of getting statehood from the outside, yes. Certainly Utah tried several times to gain statehood before this, though the biggest problem was the size of the proposed state. Deseret would have taken up most of the west, including part of California.
But yes, Utah is the only state in which polygamy is actually against the constitution. On the other hand, polygamists in Utah are not, by law, prosecuted.
There’s just something about the federal government sending half the armed services of the USA, taking over both the government AND the church leadership, and passing a law that allowed the government to confiscate all church property as well as all the private property of any church member that was said to approve of polygamy that would make an onlooker think that the church was caving to political pressure.
Whether it was so or not is debatable. I will say this: true courage isn’t holding fast against severe opposition. True courage, and true honor, is doing the right thing even when one’s enemies will see it as a ‘win’ for their side.
For instance…why did it take the Catholics over three hundred years to ordain a black priest in the USA…and even then had to do it in Rome? Why did it take another two decades to ordain a second one? Do YOU think that this was the result of political pressure? If so, which was the action taken due to political pressure; the ordination…or the years in which no man of African descent in the US WAS ordained?
Doesn’t really matter, in other words, what the church (yours or mine) does; someone is going to criticize. Someone is going to call it 'caving into pressure."
In other words, it doesn’t matter what anybody else thinks about why this was done. It was done.
Mormon women gave up the right to vote in order to get statehood. It was a federal requirement. Mind you, they got it back at the state constitutional convention. Polygamy? Not so much.
As to whether Mormons would go back to practicing polygamy? Many Mormons never stopped. Certainly the members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day saints would not go back to practicing polygamy…that’s the biggest, by far, group. You know, the folks based out of Salt Lake City? The ones most people identify as “Mormons?”
However, there are quite a few offshoots, such as the FLDS, who still practice it. Even in Utah.
Yep.
Why, how about that. Want to know another secret?
I am descended from polygamists, too. In fact, three of my four sets of great grandparents were polygamists. Quite happy in their family life, too…until the government stepped in and tore them apart.
I am not a polygamist. I am the widow of a husband who had one wife; me. My parents have been married to each other for sixty seven years, and both sets of grandparents were married for over fifty years…to each other, no extras.
Will the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day saints begin practicing polygamy again, should the law be struck down (or held to be unconstitutional, which it may will be)?
Probably not.
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