In June 2011, Newsweek famously dubbed our time as “the Mormon Moment.” Part of the American public's fascination with all-things Mormon has been renewed curiosity about contemporary fundamentalist Mormon polygamy. Amidst the media buzz over polygamist leader Warren Jeffs's criminal conviction, TLC's reality television series “Sister Wives,” and the March 2011 conclusion of the HBO series “Big Love,” the essayists in Cardell Jacobson's and Lara Burton's new edited volume offer a reasoned, sympathetic scholarly study of the peoples and practices that our culture has exoticized and commodified, to use a Mormon phrase, “worlds without end.”
To be clear, Modern Polygamy in the United States is only about modern Mormon polygamy. American Muslims who practice polygamy are mentioned only in passing. Nineteenth-century non-Mormon polygamous groups, like Jacob Cochran's small group, do not even make the footnotes (even though several of Cochran's followers evidently became Mormons in the 1830s). The curious elision of the word “Mormon” in the title unintentionally reinforces the polemical claim vigorously promoted by the present-day Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that contemporary polygamous individuals who claim Joseph Smith as a past prophet are not Mormons. To their credit, none of the authors in the volume take such a position and liberally use the term Mormon within the volume since each group they study self-identifies with the term. Consequently, to modify an old adage, one should never judge a book by its title.
Essays within the volume cluster around two broad topics. Eight essays (most in the first half of the book) offer a picture of diachronic and synchronic differences among the hundreds of thousands of Americans who have lived in polygamous Mormon families since the 1840s. These essays include discussions of nineteenth-century polygamy in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; specific studies of the origins, development, and schisms of polygamous groups after the mainline LDS church decisively ended “plural marriage” in the early twentieth century; and comparisons of contemporary polygamous groups, including independent Mormon polygamists free of larger sectarian affiliations. The remaining five essays coalesce around a single event—the state of Texas's 2008 raid on the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints' (FLDS's) Yearning for Zion (YFZ) Ranch in Eldorado, Texas. Authors in these essays investigate topics such as bias in media coverage of the raid, the ethics of parental genetic testing by the state on FLDS members in state custody after the raid, the conflicted legal context surrounding the seizure of more than 400 children from their families, and a comparison of the raid with state interventions against the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas and the Family International in Brazil and Europe.
Several essays from the volume stand out as eminently adoptable for a variety of college classroom settings. Anthropologist Janet Bennion's essay, “The Many Faces of Polygamy,” brings the variability of contemporary Mormon polygamy down to the individual level, as well as addresses differences between the major groups, such as the FLDS and the Apostolic United Brethren (the largest contemporary polygamous sect). In the process, the reader learns of rich and poor polygamists, lawyers who are polygamous wives, BYU students turned polygamist converts, polygamist groups with aristocratic-like lineages, polygamous women who “court” other women to become part of their families, and even very rare instances of same-gender sexual relationships within polygamous families. Women's studies scholar Carrie Miles in “What's Love Got to Do with It” offers a Weberian-influenced explanation for why contemporary Mormon polygamy is desirable among some women; she argues that such women desire access to men that they believe can raise them to godhood in the afterlife over other men who cannot offer this power, regardless of the individual man's economic standing. Among polygamist women, such marriages are about accumulating salvific capital rather than primarily about gaining money, having gratifying sex, or meeting romantic ideals (though, these rationales are not completely absent). Finally, sociologist Arland Thornton applies his influential thesis of “reading history sideways” to the reactions to and conceptions of polygamous groups; that is, he shows how the modern western discourse of progress and civilization versus backwardness and barbarism still shapes many of the debates on human sexual relationships, including modern Mormon polygamy. In fact, even contemporary polygamists use such language, arguing that they are “modern” and are not trapped in a bygone era, thus reinforcing some of the most prominent colonial metanarratives that postmodernity has not shaken.
What unites all of the essayists, beyond topic, is their empathetic approach to their subjects and their melioristic aims. Many of the authors have conducted field research among polygamous Mormons for decades and have long-lasting friendships. They hope, too, that their essays might “delay if not prevent future unwarranted raids that have similar disastrous results” as the 2008 YFZ Ranch raid has had (xxv). It should go without saying, though, that the authors do not advocate for all of the choices that their subjects have made. The authors admit that abuse has occurred in some polygamous families (though it is not symptomatic of Mormon polygamy per se). Most contemporary Mormon polygamous groups are racist toward African Americans. A very, very small number of polygamous groups have even gone through spates of internecine violence, including the practice of religiously justified murder. The authors hide none of this. However, the authors' overall tone cultivates an empathetic critical judgment in their reader toward a much maligned religious minority.
Each essay in Modern Polygamy could be read with minimal background knowledge about polygamous Mormons, lending the volume to easy course adoption in upper-level undergraduate classes or graduate seminars. I, for one, will adopt essays from this volume for the basis of class discussions on conflicting relations between religion and state, religion and sexuality, and prominent cultural conceptions of religious others. If your college library needs one volume on contemporary Mormon polygamy, this work is surely the one to order.
