The account is given in an essay that has been posted on the official website of the Mormon church as part of a series of articles on the role of polygamy in the religion’s history. What is stunning is that the official version of his polygamist life has now been published by the Mormon church itself, an institution that in recent decades has gone out of its way to downplay the unconventional marital practices of its early male founders, not least Smith himself. The fact of Smith’s long and prolific embrace of “plural marriage” is not in itself surprising – his adoption of the practice as a route to heavenly exaltation has long been discussed by historians and theologians. (In some cases, these “sealings” were apparently not marriages as we would think of them, but were intended solely to matter after death.) Some of the women were already married before Smith “sealed” himself to them for eternity. They ranged in age at time of marriage, or “sealing” as the Mormons called it, from Fanny Young’s 56 to Helen Kimball who was just 14. And so it came to pass that Joseph Smith, visionary and creator of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, took to himself up to 40 wives, engaging in sexual relations with between 12 and 14 of them.
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