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Criticism of Mormonism/Books/Nauvoo Polygamy/Index
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Index of Claims made in Nauvoo Polygamy: "... but we called it celestial marriage"
| A FAIR Analysis of: Nauvoo Polygamy: "... but we called it celestial marriage", a work by author: George D. Smith
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Use of sources |
Preface
Jump to Subtopic:
- Response to claim: flyleaf - The book claims that Bishop Edwin Woolley married a plural wife without having her first divorce her legal husband
- Response to claim: ix - Joseph Smith proposed a "tryst" with his plural wife Sarah Ann Whitney
- Response to claim: ix - Joseph Smith was age 36, versus Sarah Ann Whitney at age 17
- Response to claim: ix - The book presents Joseph's letter to Sarah Whitney's parents as analogous to Napoleon's passionate love letter to Josephine
- Response to claim: x - Did Joseph Smith have a "predilection" to "take an interest in more than one woman?"
- Response to claim: x - The author posits that Napoleon's Egyptian findings "lit a fire in Smith that inspired even the language of his religious prose"
- Response to claim: xi - "Little did Napoleon dream that by unearthing the Egyptian past, he would provide the mystery language of a new religion"
- Response to claim: xii - The author discusses Joseph Smith's "quest for female companionship...."
- Response to claim: xii - "...Smith utilized plural marriage to create a byzantine structure of relationships intended for successive worlds"
- Response to claim: xii - After the Nauvoo Expositor was destroyed, Joseph Smith was arrested for "destroying a local press"
- Response to claim: xii - The book claims that it is not known whether or not Joseph's wife Emma consented to plural marriages, and that this "remains a mystery"
- Response to claim: xiii - None of Joseph's plural wives are mentioned in History of the Church
- Response to claim: xiii - "...today, in official Mormon circles, Smith's granting of favors to chosen followers, allowing them to take extra women into the home, is rarely mentioned"
- Response to claim: xiv - It became "difficult to access" Church records regarding polygamy after the 1890 Manifesto was issued
- Response to claim: xiv - "The cyclical nature of this suppression of information, first in Illinois and later in Utah, left a brief window in Mormon history from which most of the documentation has been recovered"
- Response to claim: xiv - "because the history of polygamy in Nauvoo was never officially rewritten, even during the period of openness, Joseph Smith's initiation of the practice has remained in an historical penumbra to this day"
- Response to claim: xiv - Joseph "courted and eloped with his first wife"
- Response to claim: xiv - The author claims that the topic of polygamy was already on Joseph's mind as early as the 1820s
- Response to claim: xv - "...these same polygamists continued marrying to the point that they had acquired an average of nearly six wives per family"
- Response to claim: xv - The Church "suppressed" its history
- Response to claim: xv - Nauvoo was "a more or less insignificant river town"
- Response to claim: xvi - Mormon grandparents considered polygamy "requisite for heaven"