Joseph Smith married more than thirty women, including a fourteen-year-old, and the LDS Church's own Gospel Topics essay "Plural Marriage in Kirtland and Nauvoo" admits it. Then it stops right where the reckoning would start.
Jess and Hannah read the essay line by line and trace what it leaves out. Fanny Alger, the teenage domestic worker Joseph married first. Zina Huntington Jacobs, pregnant by her husband when she was sealed to Joseph. Helen Mar Kimball, fourteen, told her family's salvation depended on saying yes. And Emma Smith, named by God in Doctrine and Covenants 132 and threatened with destruction if she refused. Plus the angel with the drawn sword, the public denials from the Nauvoo pulpit, the Utah sermons that called monogamy a disease, the 1890 manifesto, and the celestial polygamy still in the church's General Handbook as of 2024.
The church told you what happened and asked you to walk by faith about what it means. This is the part it left out.
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