Description

Right from the beginning, Mormon polygamy has always been shrouded in obfuscation and mired in controversy. Shortly after Joseph and Hyrum’s deaths and amidst the chaos of the succession crisis, debates raged regarding Joseph Smith’s involvement in plural marriage and its legitimacy as a practice in the church he left behind. These disagreements swelled with the 1860 Reorganization led by Joseph Smith III, RLDS proselytizing efforts in the Utah Territory, and the later Temple Lot trial of 1891. As the LDS Church in Utah discontinued the lived practice of polygamy, and while Mormon Fundamentalism developed and diversified in the 20th-century, the arguments supporting and denying Joseph Smith’s role in the origins of Mormon polygamy evolved while still drawing from earlier sources. The transition from RLDS to the Community of Christ, and the separation of the Restoration branches, occasioned additional adaptations to the arguments that Joseph fought polygamy. In this session, John-Charles Duffy and John Hamer explore the genesis and evolution of anti-polygamy arguments that deny Joseph Smith’s participation in the practice. How might historical polygamy denial inform our understanding of the contemporary polygamy truther movement? Amanda Hendrix-Komoto and Mary Ann Clements will join for the panel discussion.

John Hamer is a American-Canadian historian, mapmaker, and Community of Christ minister. He holds degrees from BYU and the University of Michigan and has served as the Executive Director and later President of the John Whitmer Historical Association, the Religious Studies Coordinator and a current board member of Sunstone, and as a minister for the Centre Place congregation of Community of Christ in Toronto. He is a leading expert on various divergent groups of the Restoration movement.

John-Charles Duffy is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Religion at Miami University in Ohio. He is a scholar of American religious history, specializing in religious diversity, Mormonism, and the intersection of religion as U.S. culture. He holds a PhD in Religious Studies from UNC-Chapel Hill and a MA in English from the University of Utah. He has also served as an editor for Sunstone Magazine and co-authored Mormonism: The Basics, published by Routledge.

Mary Ann Clements is a trained genealogist and an independent historian. She enjoys using her genealogical skills to reveal stories of lesser-known figures and families in Mormon history. Her research interests also include Nauvoo counterfeiting and forged Missouri deeds. Mary Ann has been interviewed on the Sunstone Mormon History Podcast, Gospel Tangents, and Mormon Book Reviews.

Amanda Hendrix-Komoto is an associate professor at Montana State University, where she directs the graduate program in the Department of History and Philosophy. In 2022, she published her first book, Imperial Zions: Religion, Family, and Race in the American West and the Pacific with the University of Nebraska Press. Several institutions, including the Huntington Library and the Charles Redd Center at Brigham Young University, have funded her research. The Mormon History Association also gave her article “Mahana, You Naked” an award for best article of the year. She is currently finishing a biography of Joseph Smith’s niece Ina Coolbrith and has begun a biography of Minerva Teichert.