by Jane Choate

Created on: February 19, 2008   Last Updated: February 21, 2008

In the early years of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints (Mormon), Jesus Christ revealed to Joseph Smith, Jr. that
the custom of polygamy, which was sanctioned in ancient times,
should be re-established.

At the time polygamy was introduced by the Prophet Joseph
Smith, most of the converts to Mormonism were strict New England
Puritans. To them, the practice went against every custom and

training. However, the faithful accepted it as a commandment from
God. Polygamy was restricted to those who had proved themselves
capable of maintaining more than one family.

Despite the widespread and often negative publicity given to
Mormon polygamy, there were never at any time more than three
percent of the families of the Church who lived in plural
marriages.

The famous English playwright and a non-member, George Bernard
Shaw, gave an interesting explanation of polygamy in a speech he
made in New York City to the Academy of Political Science. At a
special meeting in the Metropolitan Opera House on April 11, 1933,
he said,

"... I wonder how many of you have ever studied the history of
the Latter-day Saints: one of the most extraordinary episodes of
the white settlement of the world. You should do so; for it shews
Americans doing something for reasons which would astonish me very
much if I saw the same thing being done for the same reasons in
England.

"There was a time when the Mormons were so few in number that
they were in very great danger of being killed by their pious
neighbors because their views were unpopular. But they were
themselves a very pious people. They were brought up with the
strictest old-fashioned ideas with regard to the relations of the
sexes and the sanctity of marriage; marriage, of course, being the
established monogamous marriage of the Christian west.

"Well, their leader went to these pious men and women and said
to them, 'I want you to take to polygamy. I want all you men to
have as many wives as you can possibly afford instead of one wife.'

"Think what a terrific thing that was to say to such people!
I do not know any more moving passage in literature than that in
which Brigham Young describes how, after receiving this appalling
order, he met a funeral on his way home and found himself
committing the mortal sin of envying the dead. And yet Brigham
Young lived to have a very large number of wives according to our
ideas, and was to become immortal in history as an American Moses
by leading his people through the wilderness into an unpromised
land where they founded a great

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