"Regeneration--Now and Evermore!": Mormon Polygamy and the Physical Rehabilitation of Humankind

Abstract

Latter-day Saint belief in polygamy, although introduced in the 1830s and 1840s, was not publicly defended until the church relocated from the Midwest to the Great Basin. Its practice by thousands of Mormons in the late nineteenth century may have constituted the largest prescribed departure from traditional monogamy in Western civilization since the Middle Ages. 1 Determined to present their views as persuasively as possible, church leaders commenced a campaign in 1852 to convince the world that what they were doing was not only scriptural but practical and scientific. 2 Most accounts of Mormonism's polygamous experience [End Page 40] grant only incidental importance to the naturalistic arguments used. And those who acknowledge the unique biological powers ascribed to plural marriage generally fail to integrate Mormon claims with sexual assumptions common at the time. 3 While revelatory command was always significant to them, nineteenth-century Mormons borrowed extensively from guidebook authors, scientific thinkers, and sexual theorists of the day. Their purpose was to convince others that only through the substitution of polygamy for monogamy could men and women be restored to their pristine capacities and the world prepared for the millennium.

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