Polygamy's roots in America!

What religions pop in your mind when you think about polygamy?

Islam?

Buddhism?

Hinduism?

Pagans?

What about Mormonism?

The Church of Latter-Day Saints, also known as Mormonism, is a church that began in 1831 in New York when founder Joseph Smith had revelations that lead to the founding of the LDS Church.

At the beginning of his religion he believed that persons who were commanded to should take more than one wife. As the climate within the United States began to change in 1852 with the new LDS leader Brigham Young. Brigham Young continued to discuss plural marriage or polygamy with great criticism from the American public. As states began to make plural marriages illegal many Mormons moved out west to areas known now as California, Utah and New Mexico or were forced to live there lives in secrecy.

In 1878 the United States supreme court decision in Reynolds V United States stated that although the practice of plural marriage was part of the LDS church it was not a protected under the constitution.

By 1890 President Woodruff made a public condemnation of the Mormon church and the participation of plural marriage. This is also around the time that the United States was considering letting Utah become a state in the United States. In order to attain statehood, Utah needed to abandon their fundamentalist Mormon upbringing. In order to do that the church developed into condemning one of the core beliefs in plural marriage and by 1910 began excommunicating members who entered into new plural marriages.

Now there are approximately 37,000 fundamentalists members of the Latter-Day Saints church. There are less than half of that number that actually practice plural marriage.