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DOCTRINE- POLYGAMY - LYING FOR THE LORD
Excerpt from Carmon Hardy's essay "Lying
for the Lord":
"Given the mobbings, dispossessions,
and murders that were so often the lot of
the Saints, there is good reason for tendencies
toward enclosure. We earlier remarked on
the sense of insecurity and the formative
significance of such things in early Mormonism
generally. This undoubtedly explains why
the prophet laid such store by loyalty and
friendship. Joseph's instruction to the Quorum
of Twelve Apostles in 1839, born of cruel
experience, was, above all else, "do
not betray your Friend." A connection
between secrecy and friendship was made in
1841 when he said that the reason more "secrets
of the Lord" were not revealed was because
so few could keep them. This was followed,
once more, by emphasis on the need to observe
and honor friendship even to death. Justus
Morse told how, as a Danite in Missouri in
1838, he and others were directed to assist
each other when in difficulty by lying, "and
to do it with such positiveness and assurance
that no one would question our testimony."
The greatest of evils, Joseph said in his
1839 address to the apostles, were "sinning
against the Holy Ghost and proving a traitor
to the brethren." Mosiah Hancock remembered
that the prophet spoke on the subject in
Nauvoo, lamenting that he had been betrayed
by some who were closest to him. Given the
perils and social complexities involved,
it is easy to understand why dissimulation
was used in protecting the church's polygamous
affairs.
Neither Mormon nor Gentile, it was sometimes
said, was able to absorb a full disclosure
of the truth. Not only had Saint Paul indicated
that new converts must be fed a modified
doctrinal diet, but Joseph Smith, in an early
revelation, referred to his followers as
"little children," unable to "bear
all things now." On other occasions
he spoke of the inexpedience of telling all,
of the non-written nature of some of his
revelations, and the great difficulty he
had in teaching things contrary to tradition.
Brigham Young remembered that, as early as
in Kirtland, the prophet told him that if
he was open about what he had received from
heaven, "not a man or woman would stay
with me." And Levi Hancock recalled
that Joseph once remarked to him that if
he were to reveal all God had shown him,
his own followers would seek his life. The
sense of peril, if all were made public,
extended to a concern for the entire Mormon
community."What would it have done for
us," asked Orson Hyde later, "if
they had known that many of us had more than
one wife when we lived in Illinois? They
would have broken us up, doubtless, worse
than they did!"
Mormon leaders undoubtedly found the deceit
involved an onerous condition. This may be
why the prophet counseled the Female Relief
Society not to be overzealous in their search
for wrongdoing and to be charitable toward
the accused. He was especially aggravated
by stories about adultery and the taking
of spiritual wives. Discomfort with holding
a curtain to the eyes of Mormons themselves
prompted Joseph to attempt, on more than
one occasion, a cautious unveiling of the
practice...
Polygamous activities by the leaders, and
the deceit considered necessary to shelter
them, contributed directly to the assassinations
of Joseph and Hyrum Smith. During the city
council debate over allegations in the Expositor
concerning his doctrines and behavior toward
women, Joseph found it necessary to double
back upon himself, declaring he had not kept
the doctrine secret but had taught it openly.
It was nearer the truth a few months later
when, raging against the proposal that it
was yet necessary to hide things about the
church, the prophet's widow told William
Clayton that "it was secret things which
had cost Joseph and Hyrum their lives."
Dissimulation did not cease when the Saints
moved west. Although greater freedom existed
as early as their stay in Iowa, there was
still reticence about their marriage philosophy,
and secrecy was enjoined on participants.
In a well-known 1850 debate with Protestant
ministers in France, Apostle John Taylor,
although the husband of ten wives, denied
that polygamy was practiced in the church,
saying that it was a thing "too outrageous
to admit of belief." Orson Pratt, on
call to publicly champion the practice, bent
facts about it. And many years later Charles
W. Penrose admitted that, after the prophet's
death, some things about him were deleted
from church publications "for prudential
reasons."
So far as the practice of plural marriage
in the Great Basin is concerned, Brigham
Young once said that, while some told the
outside world it did not exist, he refused
to blanket the facts."I never deny it,"
he said."I am perfectly willing that…[non-members]
should know that I have more than one wife
and they are pure before the Lord and are
approved in his sight." At the same
time, in connection with his theories of
the godhead, Young said he withheld much
of what he knew. And George A. Smith revived
the theme of a filtered exposure for those
young in knowledge of the Gospel. The majority
of things sacred and binding on the Saints,
said another, properly remained unwritten.
Emphasis on the importance of protecting
friends also continued. In 1859, probably
as part of an effort to obscure church connection
with the Mountain Meadows massacre, apostles
Amasa Lyman and George A. Smith fulminated
against doubting members who "sought
to betray and expose their brethren into
the hands of their enemies."
When the national campaign against Mormon
polygamy became intense, the use of non-truths
spread rapidly to the larger body of the
church. In his account of the legislative
and constitutional extremes to which Idaho
legislators felt they must go, John D. Hicks
described those Mormon tactics that provoked
the response. It was alleged, he said, that
"when polygamists were prohibited from
voting, the Mormons promptly swore that they
were not polygamists; when those who taught
polygamy were discriminated against, everybody
immediately became silent on the subject;
and when members of organizations which advocated
polygamy were denied the ballot, they withdrew…from
the Mormon Church." Children were instructed
to deny knowledge of family relationships,
of their parents' whereabouts, and even of
their own last names. One church authority
was so concerned about the pervasiveness
of intentional falsehood that he feared for
its effect on the moral fiber of Mormon society.
In a letter to President John Taylor in 1887,
Charles W. Penrose expressed concern that
"the endless subterfuges and prevarications
which our present condition impose…threaten
to make our rising generation a race of deceivers."
...It was hardly unexpected, then, that the
Woodruff Manifesto was probably drawn, and
certainly interpreted, with ulterior purposes
in view. Mormonism's continued support for
polygamy after 1890, and the use of devices
to obscure it, was but a perpetuation of
styles long practiced. There was a difference,
however, in that after 1890 leaders found
it necessary to exclude not only Gentiles
but many church members from a knowledge
of newly authorized plural contractions.
This returned the church to circumstances
analogous to those under the Prophet Joseph
Smith in Nauvoo. Whereas all Mormons, polygamous
and non-polygamous, might take umbrage from
attacks on the church's tenets during the
crusade, after 1890 they were divided into
two classes of their own: those who believed
the leaders' pretensions about the abandonment
of polygamy and those who looked upon such
statements as a hedge against discovery of
the truth. As in the Nauvoo period, those
aware of these things had to reconcile them
as best they could. Franklin S. Richards
once told Carl A. Badger how he appropriated
purposeful inconsistencies by his leaders.
He put such problems aside, he said, by considering
the good and the noble men and women in the
church, as opposed to what he would forfeit
by rejecting them for their faults.
...The pressure on those undertaking plural
marriages in the post-Manifesto years was
extraordinarily intense. Katherine C. Thomas,
whose father, George Mousley Cannon, had
married her mother as a polygamous wife in
1901, said she and her siblings were told
not to ask their parents about their plural
relationship. As a child she was instructed
to conceal from others the identity of her
father, and as a first grader in Salt Lake
City she was required to attend school using
a false name. Anthony W. Ivins's son, Heber
Grant Ivins, told of his dismay as a youngster
when a church officer visiting with one of
his plural families in the Ivins home lectured
one of his children on the need to give a
false name when asked by others who she was.
Later, after he became an apostle and moved
to Salt Lake City, another of Ivins's children,
Florence, described how, following a meeting
with fellow apostles and the First Presidency,
her father seemed upset. When Florence asked
her mother what the matter was, Mrs. Ivins
confided to her that during the meeting President
Smith had said he "would lie any day
to save [his]…brother." Ivins—who, as
we saw at the time of the Smoot investigation,
had always opposed deceit—was shaken. Florence
said that she believed her father troubled
over President Smith's statement for the
rest of his life.
With the world divided into those for and
those against, suspicions sometimes partook
of an intramural character, infecting relationships
between quorum members themselves. At the
time of the Smoot investigation, when great
care was taken to coordinate answers and
cloak Senator Smoot with the appearance of
ignorance regarding the polygamous activities
of his colleagues, for reasons yet unclear
one of the plural wives of President Joseph
F. Smith referred to Apostle Charles W. Penrose
as "a Judas." Uneasiness also led
some leaders to caution their colleagues
not to write everything that was said and
done in their diaries. Referring specifically
to the journals of George Q. Cannon and Abraham
H. Cannon, Joseph F. Smith feared their enemies
might gain access to and use such materials
against them. For this reason some urged
that no private record of what transpired
in their meetings be kept by individual apostles
at all.
Men engaged in what they believe are great
causes naturally order the data of their
perceptions to vouchsafe their dearest goals.
This is not always a conscious process...However
disingenuous they may have appeared to an
outsider, it is unlikely Mormon leaders sensed
anything but righteous consistency in their
defensive adaptations for so high a cause
as plural marriage.
Matthias F. Cowley provides another illustration
of how malleable, in threatened circumstances,
traditional values can be. At the time of
his hearing before the Quorum of Twelve Apostles
in 1911, describing how he had performed
post-Manifesto plural marriages when authorized
by George Q. Cannon and others, he related
the chastisement he once received for consulting
too broadly in certain cases. He also spoke
of the practice of pre-dating post-1890 plural
marriages so as to make them appear to have
occurred before the Manifesto."I mention
these things," he said, "only to
show the training I have had from those over
me." He might have added that they were
but drawing on the teachings of others before
them. Yet Cowley did not view himself as
a dishonest man. In what would otherwise
seem a non sequitur, he told the quorum:
"I am not dishonest and not a liar and
have always been true to the work and to
the brethren…We have always been taught that
when the brethren were in a tight place that
it would not be amiss to lie to help them
out." Then, in words remarkably close
to those that troubled Anthony W. Ivins (and
those remembered from an earlier occasion
by Justus Morse), Cowley said he had heard
a member of the First Presidency say that
"he would lie like hell to help the
brethren."
In addition to a commitment to friendship,
and the capacity religious intensity has
for blurring moral boundaries, Cowley's statements
draw our attention to another feature of
the Mormon belief system. Church authorities
from the time of the prophet Joseph Smith
onward placed great stress on the need for
"following the brethren." Because
men and women were thought not able always
to see as far and as clearly as their leaders,
church members were told that, when confronted
with doubt or difference, they should subordinate
their judgment to that of priesthood superiors.
To these explanations must be added another.
In the minds of some, their circumstance
was entirely involuntary. The Saints had
been brought to a condition in which they
must be true either to their religion, with
its requirements, or to their country, with,
in their view, its unrighteous laws. This
unwanted dilemma is what gave them cloven
speech and manners. Anxious justification
was clearly what prompted President John
Taylor to declare in 1880: "Have we
done anything covertly? Not until we were
forced to." Richard W. Young, a prominent
Salt Lake City attorney and stake president,
struggled with the same issue before the
Smoot investigating committee in accounting
for false denials in the early church. Although
uncomfortable with such things, Young explained
them as the result of "exigency"
and "circumstances."
Men yet living with plural wives, contrary
to the law and after the Manifesto was interpreted
as prohibiting it, were, said another churchman,
like one having to pull his ox from the mire
on the sabbath. Henry S. Tanner explained
it best. The promises made by the Mormons
to the government, he said, were extracted
by force. It was like a man seized by a powerful
foe and compelled to say things ordinarily
repugnant as the only way to obtain his freedom.
Under such circumstances, Tanner stated,
the words had no binding power. Consequently,
the Mormons were as free as if they had made
no promises at all. By interpreting anti-Mormon
laws as Satanic artifice in which the Saints
had become involuntarily ensnared, those
who continued to marry and live polygamously
were forced to prevaricate as the only way
of escape.
The Book of Mormon prophet, Nephi, once was
instructed to take the life of another that
God's purposes might be fulfilled. With His
help the Saints could outwit the enemy again.
Verbal contortions might be inspired. Church
leaders sincerely believed that God sometimes
led them by a different way when important
things were at stake. When Heber J. Grant
astonished Judge John W. Judd by telling
him that he did not intend to observe the
laws prohibiting polygamous cohabitation,
Judd asked about Grant's signed promise that,
if given amnesty, he would keep such laws.
The apostle was reported to answer "that
that made no difference, [because] every
man who signed had to make his election of
the force of his signature." This was
close to the thrust of Apostle John Henry
Smith's alleged remark that the Woodruff
Manifesto was but "a trick to beat the
devil at his own game." Like the Shia
of Islam, Mormons believed that dissimulation
for the cause really was not wrong. Because
they were compelled, by lying with mental
reservation the faithful were yet in the
service of the Lord.
History is generous with examples of individuals
responding in similar ways when caught in
circumstances like those confronting the
Saints. Not only were there instances in
scripture, like Abraham, who had such resorts
forced upon them, but in every war there
have been cases when to lie was construed
as an act of patriotism. And what is to be
said of the deceit surrounding circumvention
of things like British taxes in the colonial
period or the fugitive slave laws? Heber
Bennion, recalling President Heber J. Grant
to memory of the Mormon practice of false
denial in the past, reminded him that, depending
on the circumstance, it could be quite acceptable.
If such behavior were to be categorically
condemned, what of the countless fibs told
to children in the interest of benign myth?
What was to be done with Jacob lying to obtain
Esau's blessing? And, he asked, what of President
Joseph F. Smith's purposeful misstatements
before the Smoot investigating committee?
These same considerations led Anthony W.
Ivins's son Grant to plead extenuation in
the church's behalf. Given the high priority
attached to the practice of polygamy, one
can understand the lengths to which Mormon
determination was carried in preserving it...
Most fundamentally, what brought these trials
upon the church was the decision to project
only the appearance of compromise. As Senator
Joseph Bailey said when interrogating Joseph
F. Smith in 1904, given the alleged gravity
of their attachment to the doctrine, he would
have thought that, as Christians, Mormons
would have gone "to the stake"
before temporizing with plurality. A policy
of pretense once taken, however, casuistry,
secrecy, and moral contradiction necessarily
followed. And this, just as certainly, invited
charges of hypocritical behavior. After the
turn of the century, outsiders more than
once observed that Mormon leaders consistently
stood for honest policies—so long as their
own affairs were not involved. As one gentile
resident was reported to express it, "When
any of us sin…we sin for our own sakes."
But when a Saint crossed the line, it was
done "for Christ's sake."
Last of all, the use of mistruth as a device
for assisting the survival of plurality provided
a nursery for those who continue in polygamy
today. Mormon fundamentalism is at least
partially a consequence of such tactics..."
- from Solemn Covenant: The Mormon Polygamous Passage by B. Carmon Hardy, Urbana and Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 1992, pp. 365-378.