Joseph Smith’s Polygamy: Theology by Hales Brian C

Author:Hales, Brian C.
Language: eng
Format: epub

Chapter 11

The Law of Adoption

A common theme in Todd Compton’s In Sacred Loneliness is the belief that Joseph Smith was motivated to add more plural wives because, “in Smith’s Nauvoo ideology, a fullness of salvation depended on the quantity of family members sealed to a person in this life.”1 According to Compton, “the church president apparently believed that complete salvation (in Mormon terminology, exaltation . . .) depended on the extent of a man’s family sealed to him in this life.”2 Specifically concerning plural wives, Compton observed: “By an almost cruel irony, the greater the number of women married, the greater the man’s exaltation, according to nineteenth-century Mormon theology.”3

Supporting this interpretation, Compton and others point to a 1903 quotation from Benjamin F. Johnson: “The First Command was to ‘Multiply’ and the Prophet taught us that Dominion & powr in the great Future would be Comensurate with the no of ‘Wives Childin & Friends’ that we inheret here and that our great mission to earth was to Organize a Neculi of Heaven to take with us. To the increase of which there would be no end.”4 Nauvooan Joseph Fielding is also referenced to emphasize this point: “I understand that a man’s dominion will be as God’s is, over his own creatures and the more numerous they, the greater his dominion.”5 Although the language of Johnson and Fielding is somewhat ambiguous, it does imply that increasing the number of a man’s “Wives Childin & Friends” or “dominion” during mortality augments a man’s condition after the resurrection.

Joseph Smith’s theology teaches that men may increase their family size through three mechanisms. First, biological offspring can be born in the covenant or afterwards sealed to their parents. (See Chapter 7.) Second, through a process discussed in this chapter, called “adoption” sealings, persons could be sealed to a couple to whom they were genetically unrelated.6 The third method was being sealed to additional plural wives. While men may increase the “quantity of family members” through these ordinances, an overriding question is whether increased family size actually brings eternal benefits that are denied to members of smaller families. In other words, did Joseph Smith really teach that a man’s eternal standing is enhanced by every biological child fathered, by each adopted offspring sealed to him, or by every additional plural wife married?

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