What Is Marriage For?

by E. J. Graff

  In 1823, Joseph Smith found and translated golden plates (lost before anyone else saw them) that explained that Israel’s lost tribes had long ago come to North America, and were now commanded to “restore the ancient gospel spirit” of Christianity in all its fullness and purity. Toward that end, the Mormons aimed—among other things—to rescue marriage. Marriage, in LDS theology, was the only way a person could achieve the highest glory and status in its very hierarchical heaven. The Church of the Latter-Day Saints had (and has) an incredibly complex marriage theology. You could marry for “time,” which was valid only here on earth, involved sex, children, and household responsibilities, and could be performed by anyone, Mormon or secular. You could marry for “eternity,” which had to be “sealed” by Mormon priests in private Temple rites, was valid only in heaven, and included no earthly sex (although a man was still financially responsible for an “eternity” wife, if alive). And you could, under the auspices of a Mormon priest, marry for both “time and eternity”—valid both on earth and in heaven.

  Here’s the key: your earthly marital status defined your status in heaven. In “eternity,” men who’d had properly “sealed” Mormon marriages became angel-patriarchs ruling over their wives, children, grandchildren, and so on. A woman’s rank in this system depended on how senior her husband was in the LDS Church. Anyone who, while on earth, had not married for “eternity” spent the afterlife serving those who had. Meanwhile, as angel-patriarchs’ children went on to have properly sealed marriages and offspring, the clan’s senior patriarch “eventually would move on to rule over whole new worlds, achieving full godhood in conjunction with their wives in what could easily be seen as a kind of cosmic ‘manifest destiny.’ ” The Mormon vision of marriage was quite openly about male rule—on earth as in heaven.

  Once you believe marriage to be about eternal male power, making you the ruling patriarch of a heavenly tribe of angels, why stop at eight or nine children by one wife? Why not go the whole way and ensure that your tribe’s heavenly seed will be as numerous as the sand on the seashore and as numberless as the stars? We know how the Mormons answered the question, but at the time it was far from obvious. Because the accompanying question is: how in the world did good nineteenth-century Protestants, raised in an urbanizing world, retreat back to agrarian polygamy? How could nineteenth-century Americans or Europeans (Mormons were and are indefatigable missionaries) raised in strict monogamy possibly turn to something so reviled by Christianity, their families, their neighbors, and themselves?

  It was far from easy. Joseph Smith’s charismatic prophet-status—he was regularly handing down new revelations from the fierce angel Moroni—had drawn thousands of folks into this spiritual elite. And yet when Smith secretly told his coterie of top leaders that God had ordered them—like the Hebrew patriarchs—to take up “plural marriage,” many rebelled. Some had to be flatly ordered to obey. Some left the sect rather than, as instructed, take another wife or hand over a daughter to be sealed as one of Smith’s “plural wives,” of whom there were soon dozens. But the Saints were already cut off from the outside world by their own belief that they were the Chosen and by neighbors’ intense hatred and persecution. How could they refuse their Prophet’s direct revelation, endangering their salvation and solidarity? Meanwhile, once they were doubly or triply married, how could they ever leave the Church without admitting that they or their daughters had been licentious sinners?

  Smith was not so rash as to openly introduce the drastic new doctrine of “plural” or “Bible marriage” to his ordinary flock. And before he got around to it, he and his brother, also a church leader, were jailed—and then dragged out and killed by a mob of Illinois militiamen. In the resulting crisis, some Mormons fled the Church. Others joined Brigham Young’s famous covered-wagon trek into Utah’s Martian landscape, during which many died. All this—Smith’s martyrdom, attacks by the “gentiles,” exile into the desert far from their birth-families—steeled the spines of the Mormons who remained, making it far easier to cut off their childhood training in monogamy. And once Brigham Young introduced it, “plural marriage” was a way to prove one’s stern Mormon commitment.

  Its first purpose was to restore men to their superior position. The Saints (as they thought of themselves) believed, as historian Lawrence Foster writes, that “polygamy would allow men to reassert their proper authority and leadership. It would free them from the unnatural sexual influence women hold over men in a monogamous system [which leads] to ungoverned and ungovernable children . . . thereby undermining the whole family organization and resulting in social chaos.” Or, as Brigham Young put it, “Let the wives and the children say Amen to what he says, and be subject to his dictates, instead of their dictating [to] the man.” Being a patriarch, of course, wasn’t pure pleasure. Multiply-married men had to support those wives and children, an especially heavy load because wives usually balked at sharing their household or children and so each required a separate house. Even at the peak of plural marriage in official Mormon theology, only about 20 percent of Mormon men lived polygamously.

  Polygamy also allowed men many sexual outlets while still forcing them to take responsibility for the consequences of their drives: it was usually Mormon elders who were rewarded with fresh sixteen-year-old wives. But most interesting to us is, perhaps, that “at the deepest level, [polygamy] was a fundamental protest against the careless individualism of romantic love, which seemed to threaten the very roots of family life and social solidarity.” There was almost no courtship for these plural marriages, since it would be slightly scandalous to see a married man hanging around a young woman too much: an elder simply sent a proposal to a potential wife via her family, and she responded yes or no. Nor was there modern intimacy after marriage. You can’t get too personal if you see each other only once or twice a week—or if you know that one of you will be with someone else the next night. As one plural wife wrote to another, she must be as “pleased to see [her husband] when he came in as she was pleased to see any friend”—neither more nor less. Wives treated polygamy as a kind of religious renunciation, while husbands had to avoid favoritism and work hard to keep harmony lest they be exposed as unable to govern. You weren’t making love: you were making kin. Just as polygamy, in other words, was explicitly antifeminist, so it was explicitly anti-individualist.

  But it was pro-community. Since polygamists could not retreat into the gauzy haven of personal sexual love, a lot of energy—male and female—could be harnessed to build the new Jerusalem. Martha Hughes Cannon, the United States’s first female state senator and a fourth wife, argued that polygamy was a feminist’s dream: “If a [woman’s] husband has four wives, she has three weeks of freedom every single month.” And think how the kin ties multiplied! One nineteenth-century elder “was related by blood or marriage to over eight hundred people”—making one’s family and one’s community almost interchangeable.

  But while all this made sense to the Mormons themselves, LDS polygamy was shocking to outsiders. One British commentator said it was “incompatible with civilization, refinement, and domestic felicity.” Others attacked it as sowing despotism and undermining a republic: all that male rule over small clans had explicitly kingly implications. (Although Elizabeth Cady Stanton was heard to mutter that most Senators were polygamists, even if they hadn’t married their second wives.) And many people linked polygamy with slavery, insisting that both turned women (willing or un-) into concubines.

  The polygamous side of Southern slavery, of course, was very much on nineteenth-century Americans’ minds. How polygamous was the South? Every bit as much as the Romans, their counterparts. Young white plantation owners or heirs could go to New Orleans’ annual octoroon debutante balls, where they could choose a young woman and then haggle with her mother over the exact terms of the concubinage contract: in what part of town she would live, how large her house or apartment would be, what she’d get for annual maintenance, all written and signed before consummation. Les
s formally, of course, slaveowners did seduce, coerce, or rape their female slaves. Plantation polygamy was based on the feudal idea of father/lord/master, a more sensual and exploitive system than the Mormons’ biblical father/patriarch. But the two did get conflated in public debate.

  And so in 1862, President Lincoln signed the Morrill Act, which outlawed polygamy in American territories. In 1874 Brigham Young’s personal secretary challenged the ban as violating his religious freedom: he got two years of hard labor and a whopping $500 fine. By 1882 Congress passed the Edmunds Act, which criminalized a man’s cohabitation with more than one woman; stripped anyone convicted of polygamy of the right to vote or hold office; and barred you from jury duty if you so much as said you believed in polygamy. In 1887 Congress annulled the Mormons’ articles of incorporation, confiscated their assets, and imposed test oaths on Utah citizens. In all, almost 1300 Mormons were criminally prosecuted. Finally the Church of the Latter-Day Saints capitulated and officially renounced polygamy. Although some polygamous marriages still existed and some new ones are still being made, the official battle was over. Polygamy had been driven from the public field.

  Why? Because Mormon polygamy was aiming in precisely the opposite direction of Western society. Privately, it stood for the opposite of sexual equality and individual choice. Politically, plural marriage was precisely opposed to a democratic system. It explicitly consolidated theocratic and tribal—or kin—power, shutting out outsiders and knitting in insiders; it installed the male as patriarch, officially superior, a monarch instead of an elected legislator; it subordinated the individual to the group and strictly disciplined emotions; it stripped away individual uniqueness and equality and replaced it with clan discipline; it opposed capitalism’s urbanizing trend toward smaller and more intimate families; it elevated constant procreation and the making of kin over personal love. Mormon polygamy was trying to push back the oncoming tides of the modern world. It aimed in the opposite direction as the forces that lead us today toward same-sex marriage.

  To put it more simply, those who fear that same-sex marriage will lead to incest and polygamy aren’t looking at the facts. Tribal and despotic societies put kin first, allowing in-marriage and polygamy. Democratic egalitarianism, on the other hand, implies that the individual is who counts in marriage. The first insists that women are subordinate to men, either to be exploited or overruled, and reduces both to their reproductive functions. The second treats women and men as equals in morals, politics, sex, and marriage—and treats their inner lives as what matters in sex. Polygamy endorses and grows from the first; same-sex marriage, based firmly on gender and sexual equality and individual choice (to be explored more fully later), endorses and grows from the second. Philosophically, the two stand perfectly opposed: the same social system could not stretch to admit both.

  Such a statement may seem to contradict one of this book’s running themes: that throughout history, different marriage rules often overlap on the same ground. But societies cannot tolerate marriage rules that oppose their most fundamental political, economic, or philosophic values—which is why, for instance, the battle to legalize contraception (and to recognize individual choice in sexual life) won despite centuries of official Christian opposition. The LDS attempt to revive biblical polygamy was a defiant stand against the West’s most basic political and personal values: the movement toward same-sex marriage, on the other hand, grows out of precisely those values. For the very same reasons that the Mormons lost their marriage battle, same-sex couples belong.

  Marrying Everyone: Utopians

  There’s one more attitude toward marriage-for-kinship: those who object to marriage at all. History is littered with visionaries who have wanted to overthrow family ties—whether by blood, adoption, marriage, or friendship—so that we could all be kin. Within the lesbian and gay communities remain some who recoil from today’s campaign for same-sex marriage, who came of age with a revolutionary sensibility and thought marriage was one of those oppressive institutions that should be overthrown. Their antimarriage philosophy comes from a long and venerable tradition. The intensity of the human sexual bond has always been disturbing to any utopian vision, since it drags our attention away from the needs and hopes of the collective to the selfish desires of the few. Utopians regularly wish we could love everyone equally—which is roughly the same as loving no one particularly. It’s worth looking at what happens when you try to erase kinship and individual bonds—to wipe out the selfishness of marriage—in order to build a vaster human solidarity.

  Plato’s Republic is famous as (among other things) the first recorded intellectual utopia that aimed to throw out marriage whole hog. Writing in the fourth century B.C., Plato proposed that “women shall be wives in common to all the men, and not one of them shall live privately with any man; the children too should be held in common so that no parent shall know which is his own offspring, and no child shall know his parent.” Since Plato aimed at a perfectly harmonious Republic, he wanted all private property—emotions included—utterly banished. There would be no marriage and no ownership: mating would take place at semi-annual festivals, with partners eugenically matched by benevolent overseers. Plato insisted that if a man had a particular family to whom he was attached, “one man would then drag into his own house whatever he could get hold of away from the others; another drag things into his different house to another wife and other children. This would make for private pleasures and pains at private events. Our people, on the other hand, will think of the same thing as their own, aim at the same goal, and, as far as possible, feel pleasure and pain in unison. . . . Will not lawsuits and mutual accusations disappear from among them . . . since they own nothing but their body, everything else being held in common?” Great idea—if you’re an ant, not a human being.

  Unfortunately, it’s been tried—repeatedly. The sexual forms may differ but the totalitarian impulse remains the same: guided by some philosopher/tyrant, erase individual emotions and replace them with a bond to the whole. Not only did the early Christians want to escape marriage, sex, and birth to bring on the millennium; they wanted also to shed their bodies and care for everyone equally, not as flesh loves but as God loves. Writes one scholar, “Jesus commanded his followers to forget ordinary concerns about food and clothing, ‘sell your possessions, and give alms,’ divest themselves of all property, and abandon family obligations”—or in the New Testament’s words, to be his follower each man had to “hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters.” It was a goal much like Plato’s: one can have a pure and undivided heart only by refraining from the selfishness of individual love. Why? As an early Christian theologian wrote mournfully, marriage distracted a man from Christ “because anxiety for those he loves fills his heart.” Heaven forbid! No wonder generations of theologians warned against loving one’s wife too much, “like an adulterer,” drawing attention away from God and the collective good. As one commentator writes, “The Sermon on the Mount is a wonderful, intoxicating sermon. But it is a sermon for bachelors.”

  That millennial fever burned itself down to an ember once the Church became established, although, as we’ve seen, its antagonism toward marriage hung on until the Protestants came around. But the Protestants’ encouragement of marriage—especially when combined with the newly rising powers of the nation-states—included its own internal contradictions, which burst onto the scene in the nineteenth century.

  The nineteenth century was a stomach-churning rollercoaster of economic and social change, with everyone suddenly tossing up and down, here and there, from one class and trade, job and region to another. And just as all traditional controls were taken off the economy, leaving individuals at the mercy of larger forces, suddenly the new and rising nation-states decided to flex their muscles by clamping down more on marriage than had any earlier social authority. During this wild socioeconomic ride, this best of times and worst of times, many individuals had the same impulse as did the St
ate: reform marriage and the family—instead of vaster and more significant forces like, say, Andrew Carnegie. And so the nineteenth century was frenzied with millennial sex-and-marriage hopes, with communities that fervently believed brave new sexual forms could cleanse us of the messiness of being human. We can group the more formal of these utopian seekers into three groups: the celibates, the patriarchal polygamists (or the Mormons, visited in the last section), and the pluralists or sexual socialists.

  The celibates You have to feel for the Protestants: once they broke off from Catholicism with their trumpet-chorus about holy matrimony, those drawn to a celibate life no longer had the option of checking into a monastery or convent. However peculiar it seems to a post-Freudian consumer culture, the celibate impulse is a regular human variation: in every generation some get the call. One of the more famous is the eighteenth-century British woman Ann Lee, who had always recoiled from sex; even after marriage she lived in her father’s house. She gave birth four times in terrifying and traumatic deliveries, and all four children soon died. She looked for redemption in pentecostal religion, until in a 1770 vision she saw clearly—as clearly as had Augustine—that lust and sex were the true sources of sin. The dynamic Mother Ann took charge of a Quaker splinter group called the “Shaking Quakers,” soon called the Shakers, a group whose root beliefs included both equality and separation of the sexes. Together they migrated to the American states, haven for religious dissenters.

  By 1822 there were nearly four thousand Shakers in a variety of American communities. Their religious boot camp accomplished exactly what Jesus had called for: separating parents from children, husbands from wives, all reorganized into “families” of 30 to 150 under a single roof. Strictures included a daily schedule that ran with military precision, hard work, ecstatic pentecostal religious services, absolute celibacy, and owning “all things common”—all things, as Plato had envisioned, including everything from children to meals to emotions. That last required some serious effort: every letter, or feeling, or decision had to be checked with the elders, and everyone submitted to group confession. The long-held human ideal of a transparent, unified heart—everyone committed to the group rather than to the few—could be reached only through total obedience.