Polygamy Under Brigham Young w/ Lindsay Hansen Park & Bryan Buchanan | Ep. 1834

Brigham Young's Polygamy and the History the Church Spent Decades Hiding

Polygamy under Brigham Young was not a quiet theological experiment practiced by a handful of true believers. It was a sprawling social system, built on secrecy, coercion, and institutional control, that shaped nearly every dimension of early Utah Mormon life. Episode 1834 of the Mormon Stories Podcast, featuring historian Lindsay Hansen Park and researcher Bryan Buchanan, pulls that system into sharp focus and asks a question that still hasn't received a straight institutional answer: why did LDS leadership spend years publicly denying something it was privately mandating?

The answer, according to Park and Buchanan, is that the denial was not incidental. It was policy.

The Succession Crisis and the Polygamy Inheritance

When Joseph Smith was killed in 1844, the question of who would lead the church was genuinely unsettled. Park notes that historians have identified at least eight competing claims to succession, including Sidney Rigdon, David Whitmer, and various members of the Smith family. Brigham Young's rise was not the foregone conclusion that later institutional memory made it appear.

What Young inherited along with the presidency was a polygamy system already operational but still largely underground. Several men close to Joseph Smith, including Heber C. Kimball, stepped in to "care for" Joseph's wives by sealing them to themselves. The language around this was pastoral. The reality was that widows were being redistributed.