Excuse me a little bold language here, without meaning to be harsh, but firm: I have serious doubts as to the qualifications of the historians cited in the PBS special "the Mormons". The same guy who claimed that there was no archeological evidence either for the story of the Exodus or for the Book of Mormon (topic I dealt with here), made the fantastic claim that the 1830s in America were a time of crisis for the nuclear family. After an hour on various Google searches, I can find no evidence to substantiate that claim. Gold rushes around that time period DID cause a number of families in the East to be more or less temporarily broken, but I don't believe census records on the number of households containing nuclear families reduced so drastically as to support the idea that Joseph Smith's insistence on the sealing of families could be reasonably seen as a reaction to it. And the other female historian makes the nonsensical claim that the question of the celestial status or not of NON-polygamous marriages could only be posed after the 1890 Manifesto revoking the practice of plural marriage, thus betraying both a profound misapprehension of LDS doctrine, and severe methodological shortcomings in her documentation practices since the question was settled in the very same primary text that authorized plural marriage in the first place.
This latter assertion is completely ridiculous to anyone with even the most basic understanding of the facts of the practice of polygamy in the early LDS church. It was a mainstream doctrine but was NEVER a mainstream PRACTICE. And, as this historian's assertion more insidiously implies, the doctrine surrounding plural marriage NEVER treated other eternal marriages as any less meritorious of celestial glory--quite the reverse! I will repeat this clear yet somehow elusive-to-PBS-documentary-producers doctrine even though it should already be abundantly clear to those of you following my previous posts on the matter(on polygamy I and II): The LDS, from the first revelation on the term "eternal marriage" or "celestial marriage" as it's often called, conceive of two types of marriage, differentiated by the sphere of influence of the authorities that ratify them: 1. eternal marriage (sanctified by God's authority, done in His manner), 2. earthly marriage or "temporal marriage" or "marriage for time" (sanctified by earthly authorities, done in their manner). When authorized by God via revelation to living prophets, the practice of polygamy CAN be eternal, but in no way diminishes non-polygamous eternal marriages. In other words, the major distinction between the two has not changed: polygamy was NEVER considered a "saving" doctrine, whereas "eternal marriage" has ALWAYS been.
So let's discuss the LDS understanding of the non-polygamous family unit in more positive terms.
The family really is as Teryl Givens explains in the PBS special (I'm not discussing much of its merits here because my purpose is to point out where the framing of debate and/or facts distorts, but please believe me when I affirm that I grant them full credit for everything they did right, accurately, and fairly): not a social unit, but an eternal unit to the LDS. Mormons don't claim to know precisely why God chose the means He chose for children to enter the world, but they do affirm that there ARE eternal reasons for it (most famously in the Church's much discussed Proclamation on the Family)--reasons that began before our birth and that can, based on individual qualification, continue throughout the eternities to come.
To the Mormons, gender was a property of our spiritual being BEFORE we gained bodies each with a sex to match our spiritual gender, and the sexual union of male and female was ordained to co-operate with God--to co-create with Him--in the production of the physical bodies in which each of His spirit children receive their mortal tabernacle of flesh. The sacredness of this co-creative, procreative power to the mind of the LDS faithful should be evident: God trusts us with a part of His power and with the vital formative years of His children's education. Is it any wonder then that even in our contemporary world where the nuclear family is less and less prevalent as the norm (although reports that it is no longer the norm are mostly based on twisted statistical analyses--as in the recent assertion by the New York Times that 51% of women in the latest American Census were living without a spouse. The NYTimes debunked the statistic on its own under pressure in a later op-ed piece noting that the statistic was arrived at by including all women of ages 15 and older in the data thereby including unmarriageable children in order to make a headline, but left out the most salient point made astutely by conservative talk-radio host and nationally syndicated columnist, Michael Medved, that the data also includes widows and divorcees and is therefore not an accurate measure of American attitudes towards marriage at all--the more accurate truth being that an overwhelming and whopping 94% of women beyond the age of 20 get married at some point or other in their lives), that all the studies show that a nuclear family results in the best chances for children (the subject of another brilliant, but not for the faint of heart article by the hard-hitting Mr. Medved), even when that family is less than ideal (which we all are in a way, by definition, right?)? Now of course there are going to be situations of divorce, death of a spouse, extended periods of military service, etc. that require tolerance for the numerous, but exceptional cases where the ideal cannot be met, and there are even some cases where one or both parties are not able, whether it be for reasons of worthiness or from a previous not yet dissolved eternal marriage which has nonetheless obtained earthly legal divorce, to enter a temple (the only authorized place for the "sealing" authority to be exercised) so that an earthly temporal marriage I the temporary solution, but this in no way invalidates that the value of the IDEAL of the eternally married family unit of husband and wife is vastly superior for the chances of maximum benefit for the children than any other arrangement--the mythical, but sporadically realized always adoring, completely committed, and monogamous gay couple included (but that's for another post).
For those of you who don't believe in life beyond this earth, can you at least take a second with me to imagine the forces at work in the life of a couple who WERE completely convinced that their marriage was meant to be eternal. Would that reduce the instance of divorce, do you think? Would that motivate youth before marriage to be more careful in their selection of a mate, do you think? Would a longer term perspective allow couple to see past each other's temporary foibles, do you think? And would it motivate them to be more forgiving if it turns out to be more than just a foible, or even more than just temporary? Of course there are always going to be people who feel like they've made a terrible "eternal" mistake, and then an eternal marriage can seem more like a prison than a way out (and I think there should be careful counsel between irreconcilable parties--especially since irreconcilability is often little more than a convenient term justifying a lack of willingness to forgive the other and move on--and there should be a way out made possible for those cases where it truly is a necessity as determined by the parties involved in the contract--i.e. the married parties AND a representative of the ecclesiastical authority that sealed them together), but these really are exceptional, minority, and negative cases. Don't you think the mere length of perspective would tend overwhelmingly to a more positive atmosphere in the home?
OK, now for some note on blogging life: I'm going to attempt a 31-hour one-way trip to a family reunion with my wife, son, and triplet girls. It's such an insane proposition that I may never recover, much less pick up my metaphorical blogging pen ever again. Nonetheless, I fully intend to resume posting the week of Aug 11, but may only be sporadically checking in until then.
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