On Sunday (yesterday) my 13-year-old daughter said something to the effect that Joseph Smith only had one wife. I thought, ‘congrats to the church for its effective indoctrination. If this isn’t cult-like information censorship, what is?’
So I asked her if she knew about polygamy. She said yes, that the early mormons had to do that because there was so many more women than men, so the Lord solved it that way. — This is the simple line, repeated by everyone in church, ever since I was a child.
Many mormons (i’d bet, most) don’t know that their founder, Joseph Smith, married more than 30 women; all before it was officially sanctioned by church policy. Mormons are fed a steady diet of a very edited version of history. And it’s very common to hear the same simplistic, one-line explanations as refutations of things that challenge or contradict the edited version of facts that they’re taught in church. Witness my daughter’s answer (above) about why God permitted polygamy. Even if the reasoning was true, it’s still fair to ask oneself if He foresaw the potential “ball and chain” that polygamy would represent for the future church and if he thought it a fair trade for the few that were able to use it to care for scarce women and use them to populate the earth.