The first cracks in my Mormon shelf

The first heavy item on my shelf was polygamy and I am sure that I will have to cover this topic in several articles. Growing up in the church you always vaguely knew about Brigham Young and his multitude of wives and I can remember my Mum saying that she didn’t really like Brigham Young, but you never heard about Joseph Smith and his polygamous affairs. I remember my Father in law asking me years ago if I knew that Joseph Smith had practised polygamy, Pa always had a problem with this subject and had even written several letters to the First Presidency about it. What he couldn’t understand were the contradictions about Joseph Smith’s wives, in some books he read about him having had more than 26 wives and in other sources he read quotes from Joseph Smith flat out denying that he had more than one wife. As an answer to his questions he received a copy of the list of women who testified in the Temple Lot case swearing that they were married to Joseph Smith, but this didn’t answer his real question, why the lies and the deceit, especially towards poor Emma. A major crack in my proverbial shelf came after Pa’s death when I read one of his many books about Joseph Smith, this one was by Donna Hill, ‘Joseph Smith: The first Mormon’. When I read the chapter about Fanny Alger, which Oliver Cowdery called “a dirty, nasty, filthy scrape” I was shocked to my core to learn that the Prophet of the restoration, whom we were taught to revere, had been caught by Emma, in a barn kissing their young 16 year old servant Fanny. This was definitely not the sort of behaviour that you would expect from a Prophet of God, and this same behaviour repeated it’s self many more times during Joseph’s life. Young girls who were taken into their home, were later propositioned by him with the story that he had been commanded by an angel with a flaming sword to marry them, and all this occurred behind Emma’s back and whilst he publicly denied practicing polygamy. There are so many more things which I want to talk about, but they will have to wait for my next blog.

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