A psychosocial analysis of polygamy & monogamy

[AnchoredinChrist]

I was perusing the 'Another attack on monogamy' thread and it seemed to me from the responses that the website Monogamy as Divine Design hasn't been shared on this forum. It contains a lot of secular research done showing psychological and societal harms of polygamy and how all that can be related to early Mormon polygamy and I think it to be worth the read so I'll just link it here: http://historicalmonogamy.wixsite.com/divinedesign 

It's the "sister" website of Historical Monogamy Doctrine: http://historicalmonogamy.wixsite.com/evidenceofdoctrine 

Historical Monogamy Doctrine is the first website and argues doctrinally against polygamy having been commanded by God or practiced by Joseph Smith (and I suppose is intended to be read first -- it's also the Mormon history narrative that I myself align with.) And Monogamy as Divine Design continues the argument that polygamy isn't of God, mostly from the psychosocial angle -- even though its message is Mormon-polygamy-focused I think its info contains a lot of relevance when talking about secular non-monogamy ideas.

[webbles]

I really wish the author of those 2 websites cited sources better and used them better.  We had a discussion about the evidence site a while ago (https://www.mormondialogue.org/topic/75679-historical-monogamy-doctrine-website/) and back then I had gone through several of the points and found some minor issues with how it was cited.  Just made it hard to track down things.

An example on this new page is section "53 ~ Extreme poverty has decreased in every country of the world, except for polygamous ones ~".  The source for that claim is a World Bank chart that doesn't actually show what the author wants.  It isn't separating out the countries by polygamy, but by location.  If I look at actual countries that have legal polygamy vs those that don't, I see contradictory evidence.  Angola, which is Sub-Saharan but doesn't have legal polygamy, is increasing its extreme poverty.  Bahrain, which is not Sub-Saharan but does have legal polygamy, is apparently without any extreme poverty.  Because the claim is absolute (every country except for polygamous ones), it is really easy to refute.  The claim needs to be softened and it should be using a graph that actually shows what the claim is.

Another example is the author writes "Brigham Young's first plural wife, Augusta Adams Cobb, was denied a divorce from him after continued written requests and despite her having another man she wished to remarry" with absolutely no sourcing.  First, Augusta is not his first plural wife, that would be Lucy Ann Decker.  And I tried to find the evidence behind that statement and the best I could find was that Augusta regretted having married Brigham instead of Joseph Smith because it caused problems for her Boston kids (from her first husband).  She didn't care for Brigham after a point and he didn't allow her a divorce (though he allowed quite a few others) but she didn't have another man she wished to remarry.  She asked to be sealed to Jesus and Joseph (this is after Joseph's death) so it seems more like a dig against Brigham (he isn't good enough for her) - https://yearofpolygamy.com/year-of-polygamy/episode-158-augusta-adams-cobb-and-other-boston-mormon-women/

Another example is the section "74 ~ Male guardians marrying female wards ~".  The author first quotes from Ann Eliza Young which is a big red flag because we know that she did make up things so you can't just accept her word by itself.  And then the section has this really long quote without a source.  I thought that quote would be easy to find (it is 2 paragraphs long with some really unique phrases) so I searched for it.  And I couldn't find it.  I tried several times.  I asked to AI searchers to find it.  I finally found what I think is the source of it because the story is very similar, but it is not the same English.  It is from an 1861 book by Jules Remy detailing a trip he made to Utah in 1855 (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fc/A_Journey_to_Great-Salt-Lake_City%3B_with_a_sketch_of_the_History%2C_Religion_and_Customs_of_the_Mormons_and_an_introduction_on_the_Religious_Movement_in_the_United_States%2C_in_Two_Volumes%2C_Vol._II_(IA_dli.granth.73851).pdf).  In there, around page 174, he tells a story about a mother/daughter that he meets and it is very similar.  Except it has some interesting parts.  First, when the husband asks to marry the step-daughter, she says no, the mother says no, and even Brigham Young doesn't help him.  The husband then marries another woman to be spiteful and this new wife discovers what happened and is angry.  She is the one that tosses out the first wife and daughter, not the husband (though he probably didn't care at this point).

And section "86 ~ Reports of overt polygamy coercion" has 2 issues.  First, it quotes Emma Lynette Richardson.  I know that story really well as she is a sister of my ancestor.  The story is a lot more complicated than what the website is implying.  At the same time that she is married off, her mother (Mary Ann) and father (Edmund) do one of the oddest things.  Edmund had been sterilized back east and so when they arrived in Utah and were baptized (yes, they came to Utah before being baptized), they felt like they needed more kids.  But Edmund was incapable of doing that.  So, they asked Brigham Young for an idea and he proposed that he divorces them, marries Mary Ann to an upstanding man in the community, and have children come through that marriage.  Then Brigham would divorce Mary Ann from that other man and remarry (and seal) Mary Ann to Edmund.  This is what they did (I'm a descendant of one of the sons from this odd relationship).  No one in the community knew about it.  Mary Ann lived in her own house and there is debate on whether Edmund lived with her, left and never visited during the time, or left and did visit (I lean to the later).  Emma Lynette was 14 at this time and would absolutely have noticed a man coming to stay the night (or Mary Ann might have gone to his house, we don't really know).  So, she was married off to get her out of the house (and the Mormon Reformation was happening so that influenced who she was married off to).  It is a weird situation and very sad for Emma Lynette (her first 2 kids die from a pandemic and she later leaves her husband and finds a much better husband).  But I would not say it is a polygamy coercion situation.

It also talks about the story of Levi Savage and his 2 young wives (they are his stepdaughters).  When I looked for the source of that story, it turns out that what the author wrote is backwards.  They went to Salt Lake, got married (without any issues or running away) and then on the way back, that is when the woman disappears.  So, she is already married and not being coerced into the marriage.  She is just being coerced to going back to her husband.  The source of this was her history sketch in familysearch.org

 

Sorry for the long windiness but I really wish the author of that site did much better with the sources.  It is frustrating to read through it and keep feeling like something is missing or incorrect and then to actually look into a few and have my fears validated.  It makes me distrust the entire site.

[AnchoredinChrist]

4 hours ago, webbles said:

An example on this new page is section "53 ~ Extreme poverty has decreased in every country of the world, except for polygamous ones ~".  The source for that claim is a World Bank chart that doesn't actually show what the author wants.  It isn't separating out the countries by polygamy, but by location.  If I look at actual countries that have legal polygamy vs those that don't, I see contradictory evidence.  Angola, which is Sub-Saharan but doesn't have legal polygamy, is increasing its extreme poverty. 

Right, so the data analyzing overall GDP was country-by-country, and like all of the other WomenStats data, each country was "rated" on a five-point scale from least polygamous to most polygamous, with more factors taken into account than just whether or not polygamy was legal in a country or not. -- When I looked up the WomanStats project online just now, I saw that it was actually started by BYU, which I hadn't known: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WomanStats_Project

I presume a greater factor involved in marking whether a country is very polygamous or not would be prevalence. I didn't know anything specific about Angola, but my wikipedia search just now says that even though polygamous marriages aren't legally recognized in Angola, they are very common, "Although polygamy is officially illegal in Angola, the practice is known to be widely socially acceptable and very prevalent among the Angolan population." Apparently polygamy is less prevalent in Bahrain, even though it is legal there: "Like many nations in the Muslim world, polygyny is legal in Bahrain. However, according to the Bahrain Center for Human Rights' write-up on women's rights in Bahrain at the present time, polygamy is only practiced by a minority of Bahraini citizens"

The graph of course, even though it is by location, is by continent/region, not country like the WomanStats data, so it's a general visual showing overall performance of regions, with the more polygamous "regions" of the world showing to have significantly more extreme poverty. I understand that you would perhaps prefer to see a graph detailed country-by-country as that would of course be more accurate, but to me it still works to show the overall trend that the more polygamous parts of the world are the more impoverished parts of the world. The actual WomanStats data is much more nuanced than "polygamous" or "monogamous" and "impoverished" or "not impoverished", due to the five-point rating, and it shows that the 170 countries that they measured followed this scale, but all that might be more difficult to put into one graph unless the graph were to be interactive. All of the data for the WomenStats project is online so you can look it up there: https://www.womanstats.org/mobile/index.html — I don't happen to have an account there myself.

[webbles]

17 hours ago, AnchoredinChrist said:

Right, so the data analyzing overall GDP was country-by-country, and like all of the other WomenStats data, each country was "rated" on a five-point scale from least polygamous to most polygamous, with more factors taken into account than just whether or not polygamy was legal in a country or not. -- When I looked up the WomanStats project online just now, I saw that it was actually started by BYU, which I hadn't known: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WomanStats_Project

I presume a greater factor involved in marking whether a country is very polygamous or not would be prevalence. I didn't know anything specific about Angola, but my wikipedia search just now says that even though polygamous marriages aren't legally recognized in Angola, they are very common, "Although polygamy is officially illegal in Angola, the practice is known to be widely socially acceptable and very prevalent among the Angolan population." Apparently polygamy is less prevalent in Bahrain, even though it is legal there: "Like many nations in the Muslim world, polygyny is legal in Bahrain. However, according to the Bahrain Center for Human Rights' write-up on women's rights in Bahrain at the present time, polygamy is only practiced by a minority of Bahraini citizens"

The graph of course, even though it is by location, is by continent/region, not country like the WomanStats data, so it's a general visual showing overall performance of regions, with the more polygamous "regions" of the world showing to have significantly more extreme poverty. I understand that you would perhaps prefer to see a graph detailed country-by-country as that would of course be more accurate, but to me it still works to show the overall trend that the more polygamous parts of the world are the more impoverished parts of the world. The actual WomanStats data is much more nuanced than "polygamous" or "monogamous" and "impoverished" or "not impoverished", due to the five-point rating, and it shows that the 170 countries that they measured followed this scale, but all that might be more difficult to put into one graph unless the graph were to be interactive. All of the data for the WomenStats project is online so you can look it up there: https://www.womanstats.org/mobile/index.html — I don't happen to have an account there myself.

That kind of strengthens my issue with the site.  If WomenStats has the data, why not show it vs show a completely unrelated chart from World Bank.  I'm not looking for a country-by-country chart.  A chart 2 with two lines would be enough.  1 line for non-polygamous countries and 1 line for polygamous countries.  And then I'd love an actual list of what are the polygamous countries.  Because if they aren't looking at legality but are looking at prevelance, than that could mean the US could be included as we have a decent amount of polyamorous relationships.  Since I can't tell exactly what the website is arguing and because I can easily find data that refutes how I read the arguments, it makes me not trust it.  Because it feels like it is cherry-picking its data or the author isn't actually drilling into the data.

I found a maps page in WomenStats that shows all the countries on the 1-5 scale

One thing that is interesting is that US is yellow so is it polygamous or not?  Depends on if we are only looking at the ones orange/red or if we also are including the yellow.

I can see that Angola is marked with a 4 (I'm giving 1 to the dark green and 5 to the dark red).  But so is Bahrain.  So, if "polygamous countries" are all 4 and 5s, then the statement is false.  But if polygamous countries are only 5s, then why did the website mention Haiti since that is a 4 (you have to zoom in but it is an orange color)?

I also went through several of the red countries (the ones that are definitely "polygamous countries" by WomenStats) and Burkina Faso has been declining its extreme poverty.  I also went through some of the green ones (definitely not polygamous) and found Kosovo which has increased its extreme poverty and been bouncing around at a higher level since 2016.  https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.DDAY?end=2022&locations=XK-BF-HT&most_recent_value_desc=true&start=1994&view=chart has Haiti, Kosovo, and Burkina Faso

If the author of the website had instead said something like "Most polygamous countries are not declining in extreme poverty", than it would be fine.  But the author is using an absolute ("every").  The data they are using doesn't use those absolutes.

[JLHPROF]

On 8/7/2026 at 5:29 PM, AnchoredinChrist said:

Historical Monogamy Doctrine is the first website and argues doctrinally against polygamy having been commanded by God or practiced by Joseph Smith (and I suppose is intended to be read first -- it's also the Mormon history narrative that I myself align with.) 

It's a trend, usually relying on revisionist history. No real historian doubts the established origin.  Just a lot of internet warriors.

Whether it's commanded by God is a matter of faith.

[AnchoredinChrist]

On 8/8/2026 at 2:43 PM, webbles said:

First, Augusta is not his first plural wife, that would be Lucy Ann Decker. 

Okay so, I did some more digging and I discovered that Brigham Young's marriage to Lucy Ann Decker was not recorded until 1846 -- it was recorded as an 1842 marriage, but the record itself was not actually made until the year 1846. I think you might be able to find it in the Nauvoo 1846 temple records here: https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/catalog/285774 Since there wasn't any evidence before the martyrdom that they were married pre-martyrdom, those who espouse the narrative that Brigham Young introduced polygamy consider such back dates to be fabricated, or at least without proper evidence. We have contemporary evidence that Augusta Cobb, before the martyrdom, followed Brigham to Nauvoo to be a plural wife (but we find out from her letters later that Brigham forbid her to speak to Joseph Smith) so that would be why those who don't believe Brigham Young to disregard when he later said a marriage date was. Another piece of evidence against the LDS narrative was that Lucy Ann Decker was still married to her first husband William Seeley in 1842 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Brigham_Young's_wives), so that makes the back-dated marriage claim to Brigham Young a lot less credible too.

I also found that even though no sealing record was made until 1846, they were definitely in a relationship earlier, as she gave birth to their first child together on June 19, 1845, (https://ancestors.familysearch.org/en/KWJH-DJZ/lucy-ann-decker-1822-1891) about a year after the martyrdom, but that still doesn't date their relationship as being before the martyrdom by any contemporary evidence, as Augusta's was.

So as a whole, those who don't ascribe to Brigham Young's narrative of polygamy also don't necessarily ascribe to the LDS church's given dates when certain polygamous events happened either. I guess it would be great if there were to be a narrative timeline put together of the two sides so each side's proposed chain of events and their differences could be compared side-by-side, but I've never seen anyone put something together like that.

 

Edited 23 hours ago by AnchoredinChrist

[webbles]

2 hours ago, AnchoredinChrist said:

Okay so, I did some more digging and I discovered that Brigham Young's marriage to Lucy Ann Decker was not recorded until 1846 -- it was recorded as an 1842 marriage, but the record itself was not actually made until the year 1846. I think you might be able to find it in the Nauvoo 1846 temple records here: https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/catalog/285774 Since there wasn't any evidence before the martyrdom that they were married pre-martyrdom, those who espouse the narrative that Brigham Young introduced polygamy consider such back dates to be fabricated, or at least without proper evidence. We have contemporary evidence that Augusta Cobb, before the martyrdom, followed Brigham to Nauvoo to be a plural wife (but we find out from her letters later that Brigham forbid her to speak to Joseph Smith) so that would be why those who don't believe Brigham Young to disregard when he later said a marriage date was. Another piece of evidence against the LDS narrative was that Lucy Ann Decker was still married to her first husband William Seeley in 1842 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Brigham_Young's_wives), so that makes the back-dated marriage claim to Brigham Young a lot less credible too.

I also found that even though no sealing record was made until 1846, they were definitely in a relationship earlier, as she gave birth to their first child together on June 19, 1845, (https://ancestors.familysearch.org/en/KWJH-DJZ/lucy-ann-decker-1822-1891) about a year after the martyrdom, but that still doesn't date their relationship as being before the martyrdom by any contemporary evidence, as Augusta's was.

So as a whole, those who don't ascribe to Brigham Young's narrative of polygamy also don't necessarily ascribe to the LDS church's given dates when certain polygamous events happened either. I guess it would be great if there were to be a narrative timeline put together of the two sides so each side's proposed chain of events and their differences could be compared side-by-side, but I've never seen anyone put something together like that.

 

A compilation of the Nauvoo temple records can be found at https://archive.org/details/nauvoo-sealings-adoptions-and-anointings/.  It is a really fascinating document.  It lists all of the people who received their endowments, all of the sealings, and who they were sealed to (including both proxy and non-proxy).

So, if we are going with contemporary documents, there is no evidence that Augusta was married/sealed to Brigham before 1846 either.  If we go by the earliest contemporary evidence (the Nauvoo Temple sealings), she is quite late, being sealed in Feb 2 and over a dozen being sealed earlier in January.  By the way, Augusta was actually sealed to Joseph Smith.  Brigham stood in proxy for Joseph.  So Augusta and Brigham were sealed for time only (that is how the sealings worked back then for proxy sealings).  You can see that in the "Nauvoo Sealings, Adoptions, and Anointings".  Augusta is listed under Joseph and Brigham as a wife.

When Augusta went to Nauvoo the first time (1843), there is no contemporaneous evidence that she did it to marry Brigham.  She arrived in Nauvoo in October 1843.  She traveled back to Boston in August 1844 and then back to Nauvoo in November 1845. http://www.connellodonovan.com/essex_mormons.pdf

The first evidence is 1846 in the Nauvoo Temple sealings.  Then we get letters from her talking about her sister wives.   Then we have a divorce case between Augusta and Henry Cobb where he alleges that she committed adultery with Brigham in August 1844.  Then we get a "tell-all" book written by Catherine Lewis (1848 https://archive.org/details/CatherineLewisNarrative/page/n1/mode/2up) that says that Augusta told Catherine about polygamy when Augusta returned to Boston (so 1844-1845).

Our evidence that she was married in 1843 is her affidavit from 1869.  That is also where we get Lucy Ann Decker's marriage date.  So if we don't accept one, then I don't see why we should accept the other.  Without that affidavit, she is maybe married by August 1844 (per her divorce case) which would put her further down the line.

I don't see why Lucy Ann Decker being married to her husband would have a factor in this since Augusta was also still married to her husband.  They both have that.  We can't say that Lucy got married later but not say the same thing about Augusta.  They both were definitely sealed by 1846 to Brigham and apparently Lucy's earlier marriage date was actually written in the Nauvoo temple records.  https://www.dialoguejournal.com/articles/determining-and-defining-wife-the-brigham-young-households/ says that but it is really hard to get access to the Nauvoo temple records so no way to prove it.