The Dark History Of Mormonism — From Child Brides To Mass Murder

Published November 20, 2017
Updated February 10, 2023

A Lesson In Mormon History And Polygamy

Warren Jeffs holding and kissing a child bride

YouTubeWarren Jeffs is one of the most infamous individuals in Mormon History. Here is Jeffs with one of his child brides.

Polygamy had been one of the main wedges that split the congregation in Nauvoo. Like everything else in Mormon history and doctrine, this had been promulgated as a revelation to Joseph Smith from God, but it never rested easily with non-Mormons who saw it in practice.

Keeping multiple wives struck them as un-Christian, and polygamous groups tend to concentrate the supply of young wives toward the top, where middle-aged men lead families that sometimes number in the dozens of people. This leaves lots of unattached young men at the bottom, where they’re likely to cause trouble.

Those young wives are sometimes very young indeed. Several of Brigham Young’s 55 wives were as young as 15, and Joseph Smith’s 26th wife had been 14 at the time they were “sealed for eternity.” Many of the older wives of Mormon patriarchs were concurrently married to more than one living husband, which also struck onlookers as sacrilegious.

Hostility over this practice was a major driver of the Mormon expansion westward, as practitioners fled to the remote territory they called Deseret, where they could continue in peace. By the end of the 1880s, as it became obvious that Deseret was being organized into the State of Utah, then-Mormon President Woodruff had a revelation from God to abandon plural marriage “in obeyance to the law of the land.”

Not every Mormon accepted this revelation. To this day, several splinter factions operate more or less underground and hew close to the old ways. The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ still exists, despite its leader, Warren Jeffs, being sentenced to life in prison in 2011 for sexual assault of two minors, one of whom was 11 when she was sealed to Jeffs, who was then 49 years old.

With an estimated 4,500 members, this is possibly the largest polygamous sect still in existence, but it is far from the last.

Utah officials estimate as many as 80 to 100,000 people currently belong to various polygamous groups around the state. Most of these consist of just one or a small number of families and difficult-to-verify stories abound about continued child marriage and incest, usually between first cousins.

It’s worth noting that the official LDS establishment vehemently denounces these groups and their practices, and bigamy is punished more severely in Utah than in most other states.

Despite this, because of the continuing tendency of Mormon groups to flood small towns and dominate local politics, some local law enforcement in places like Colorado City are suspected of turning a blind eye to their churches’ illegal activities.

author
Richard Stockton
author
Richard Stockton is a freelance science and technology writer from Sacramento, California.
editor
John Kuroski
editor
John Kuroski is the editorial director of All That's Interesting. He graduated from New York University with a degree in history, earning a place in the Phi Alpha Theta honor society for history students. An editor at All That's Interesting since 2015, his areas of interest include modern history and true crime.