Today, I'll talk about men being sealed to multiple women, either in this life, like my great-great-grandmother, or serial polygamy as practiced by two of our current First Presidency. For those that have been following my posts over the years, you know this is personal, as I have a daughter that was sealed to her first husband who died, and then got remarried to a man that was sealed to his deceased wife. I wrote about it 5 years ago.
This seems like a simple enough question that a Church with direct revelation from God should have an answer to. Now, there are, of course, silly things we don't know about God, like can He make a rock so big that He can't lift? But the purpose of this series is to address questions that the Church should answer because they are of concern to many church members. For the above question, it is (or should be) of concern to over 50% of the members (female) and a smaller number of members (men) that are concerned for their wife's/sister's/mother's feelings.
We know this is of such a concern that it was even addressed in General Conference by Elder Oaks four years ago.
My dear brothers and sisters, a letter I received some time ago introduces the subject of my talk. The writer was contemplating a temple marriage to a man whose eternal companion had died. She would be a second wife. She asked this question: would she be able to have her own house in the next life, or would she have to live with her husband and his first wife? I just told her to trust the Lord.
Oct 2019 GC: Trust in the Lord
So let me translate what Elder Oaks said into plain English: "We don't know jack". Yet, this is such an important question that women are writing to Elder Oaks about it. My daughter did not find that talk funny, even though if you listen to the talk linked above, you'll hear the congregation laughing.
Now this is something that our leaders used to know a great deal about. Brigham Young said multiple times that polygamy was required for exaltation. Probably the most famous of those quotes is:
The only men who become Gods, even the Sons of God, are those who enter into polygamy. Others attain unto a glory and may even be permitted to come into the presence of the Father and the Son; but they cannot reign as kings in glory, because they had blessings offered unto them, and they refused to accept them.
Journal of Discourses, Vol.11, p.268 - p.269, Brigham Young, August 19, 1866
You can find many more quotes here.
Therefore, according to Brigham Young, there will be polygamy in the afterlife. Yet, today's leaders would rather not talk about it, seemed to have forgot about it, and will tell you to "trust the Lord". I believe there is only one way that the Church could answer this and keep everybody happy; both polygamous and monogamous marriages will be exalted. Everybody is happy. Other options include only monogamous marriages being exalted or only polygamous marriages being exalted, which create monumental problems with our theology, let alone the PR disaster from the later.
Speaking of bad PR, I usually use Pixabay to find royalty-free images for my blog posts. For this post, I typed in "polygamy" in the search bar and the above temple photo was the only one that showed up as royalty-free. Usually there are hundreds for any given subject. Not a good look for the Church that is trying to shed it's skeletons in the closet that the only photo related to polygamy is one of an LDS temple!
So what are your thoughts on Elder Oak's talk? Is this a legitimate question that should be answered, or am I straining at a gnat?
Image by John R Perry from Pixabay
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