Driscoll’s Claim, Reframed
Mr. Driscoll’s booklet includes a stand-alone chapter, “Mormon Polygamy,” and treats plural marriage as decisive proof that Latter-day Saints are not Christian. He rehearses the 19th-century conflict, the 1890 Manifesto, and today’s discipline against polygamy, while raising questions about eternal sealings for widowers.
Before we let that framing stand, let’s put the question where the Bible puts it.
Replace the Burden of Proof
Monogamy is the rule in modern Latter-day Saint practice, and it is generally considered the ideal in our theology. The burden of proof, then, is not to show that monogamy is good. The burden is to show from the Bible that polygamy is always and everywhere a sin, even though:
The covenant fathers Abraham and Jacob (and some apocryphal texts say Isaac) practiced it,
The Law of Moses legislated marriage in ways that sometimes produced polygyny, and
Israel’s kings David and Solomon were condemned for murder and idolatry, not for the mere fact of multiple wives.
Where does the Bible teach that polygamy is always wrong, given those facts?
What the Bible Actually Says
Rather than projecting modern societal morality on historical people, let’s look at what the Bible says:
- Abraham – Abraham took Hagar as a second wife or concubine at Sarah’s instigation (Genesis 16). Whatever the household pain that followed, God never voided Abraham’s covenant status on that basis. Scripture repeatedly calls him “righteous” and “the friend of God” and renews the covenant with him after Hagar and Ishmael.
- Jacob (Israel) – Jacob married Leah and Rachel and later took Bilhah and Zilpah, yielding the twelve tribes of Israel (Genesis 29–30). The text never condemns Jacob’s covenant standing because of plural marriage. Instead, Israel’s national story begins with that complex family.
- Levirate marriage in the Law of Moses – Deuteronomy 25:5–10 commands a surviving brother to marry his deceased brother’s widow to raise up seed. In practice, that could create a plural union if the brother was already married. This is not a loophole. It is statute law given by God to protect widows, preserve name and inheritance, and raise up seed within Israel.
- David and Solomon – God, through Nathan, rebuked David for adultery and for orchestrating Uriah’s death, not for the existence of multiple wives before the Bathsheba incident (2 Samuel 12). In fact, Nathan says God “gave” David those wives. Solomon’s downfall is charged to his idolatry and his heart turning to other gods under the influence of his wives, not to a bare numerical count of wives (1 Kings 11). The sin is apostasy, not simply plurality. Deuteronomy 17:17 warns a king not to “multiply wives” so that “his heart turn not away.” The focus is the heart and its loyalty to God. Scripture targets idolatry and exploitation, not an abstract marital arithmetic.
- New Testament pastoral order – When Paul instructs that a bishop or deacon be “the husband of one wife” (1 Timothy 3, Titus 1), he is specifying qualifications for leaders in Greco-Roman congregations. It was not issuing a retroactive universal condemnation of Abraham, Jacob, or the Mosaic system. The standard is marital fidelity and household order for those offices.
Summary
The Bible does not present plural marriage as the creation ideal. It also does not declare every instance of plural marriage to be per se sin. The sins Scripture condemns are exploitation, adultery, oppression, and idolatry. The test in every age is covenant faithfulness.
What Actually Happened in Latter-day Saint History
Plural marriage began as a religious command to a small minority of Latter-day Saints and later ended by revelation. In the United States it became the legal and political “Mormon Question.” Congress passed increasingly punitive laws: the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act, the Poland Act, the Edmunds Act, and the Edmunds-Tucker Act, which disincorporated the Church, seized assets, and led to mass prosecutions and imprisonments.
In 1890 President Wilford Woodruff issued the Manifesto, which the Church sustained, committing the Saints to obey the law of the land. That began the end of new plural marriages, while existing families were not dissolved. A small number of new sealings persisted for a time at the margins, chiefly in Mexico and Canada, then ceased.
Today the Church strictly prohibits polygamy and excommunicates members who practice it.
“Celestial Polygamy” and Sealings
Critics sometimes point to modern sealing policy, noting that a widower may be sealed to a subsequent wife for eternity. That is a theological, not a practical, plurality, and it is handled within temple doctrine about sealing, resurrection, agency, and ultimate judgment. It is also asymmetric today: widows are sealed to one husband. Whatever one’s feelings about that asymmetry, it is not a license for earthly polygamy, which the Church forbids.
Common Objections and Clarifications
“Joseph Smith practiced polyandry.” – The historical record distinguishes several categories that critics often flatten: time-and-eternity marriages, eternity-only sealings, and adoption-oriented dynasty sealings that created kinship networks in a frontier church under siege. Understanding that landscape reduces sensationalism around a handful of cases that did not function like ordinary marriages.
“It was all about sex.” – Plural marriage produced hardship and sacrifice for women and men. Serious Latter-day Saint and non-Latter-day Saint historians document that religious obedience, family duty, and community survival were the dominant motives. The early Utah social order, including the later abandonment of the “law of adoption” in favor of sealing children to parents, reflects religious aims more than libertinism.
What the Restoration Actually Taught
The Restoration affirms monogamy as the norm and allows God to command exceptions for His purposes, including raising up a covenant people. That pattern appears in scripture. When circumstances changed, revelation ended the practice, and the Saints submitted. The modern Church’s discipline, policy, and public teaching are unambiguous.
Replacing the Burden of Proof
So the questions for Mr. Driscoll are these:
Where does the Bible say that polygamy is always sin, in light of Abraham and Jacob’s covenant status and the Law’s levirate command?
If David is condemned for adultery and murder, and Solomon for idolatry, where are they condemned for plurality as such?
If Deuteronomy 17:17 targets royal pride and apostasy from the influence of foreign wives (as we saw with Solomon), not arithmetic, why is it portrayed as a universal ban?
If New Testament office-holder standards require a “husband of one wife,” why should that be read as a retroactive judgment on the patriarchs or Mosaic legislation?
If the Restoration moved from a temporary exception back to the ideal of monogamy by revelation in 1890, why is the living Church’s actual practice ignored in favor of a caricature?
If “biblical Christianity” is the standard, the Bible itself refuses the claim that every instance of plural marriage is automatically sinful. Scripture privileges covenant fidelity, justice, and worship of the true God. On that biblical ground, the more honest burden of proof is this: show, from the Bible, that polygamy is always wrong, even when the patriarchs practiced it, the Law sometimes produced it, and the prophetic condemnations aim at idolatry and exploitation, not simple plurality. Until that burden is met, Driscoll’s polygamy chapter proves less about the Bible and more about post-biblical assumptions.