Daughter of Mormon Top Leader complains about polygamy and her mother corrects her. #lds #mormon

When a Daughter Questions Polygamy and Her Mother Has Answers

A daughter of a senior LDS Church leader once complained that polygamy was a mistake. Her mother didn't comfort her or validate the discomfort. She corrected her. That exchange, surfaced on the Mormon Stories Podcast, cuts to the heart of how polygamy is still defended, rationalized, and passed down within the families closest to institutional Mormonism.

This is not a minor theological footnote. The LDS practice of plural marriage shaped the demographic, cultural, and doctrinal identity of the Church from Joseph Smith's era through the 1890 Manifesto and beyond. How leaders' families talk about it privately tells us something official correlated curriculum often does not.

The Historical Record on Mormon Polygamy

Joseph Smith introduced plural marriage in the early 1840s, though the practice was publicly acknowledged only in 1852 under Brigham Young. By the time the Church issued the 1890 Manifesto under Wilford Woodruff, tens of thousands of Latter-day Saints were embedded in polygamous family networks across Utah and surrounding territories.

The numbers matter here. Estimates from historians like B. H. Roberts and later researchers suggest that between 20 and 30 percent of Utah Mormons lived in polygamous households at the practice's peak. The Church's own demographics were built on those family lines, which is precisely the argument the mother in this account was making.