Mormon Church Changes Children Polygamy Lesson After Online Criticisms | Ep. 1995
Mormon Stories Podcast
Dr. John Dehlin
4.6 • 5.2K Ratings
🗓️ 20 February 2025
⏱️ 140 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In December 2024, the Mormon Church released a new chapter in the children’s Doctrine and Covenants Stories on the topic of polygamy. In that chapter they discuss how God sometimes commands his people to live polygamy and how hard it was for Joseph Smith to obey. The chapter also discusses how Joseph’s wife Emma did not want her husband to marry other women. Children were even taught that some of the brethren were arrested and put in prison for living polygamy.
After the release of that chapter many people spoke up, criticizing the church for this new content. Many believed these stories were too heavy for children and that by releasing this chapter the Mormon Church was actively teaching a story of sexual assault and grooming.
Today we learned that the church changed this chapter. Certain phrasing was removed as well as entire sections of the chapter. Is this due to online criticism of the church teaching children polygamy? Does the Mormon Church cave under pressure? Join us today as John, Julia (from Analyzing Mormonism), and Alyssa Witbeck discuss these changes.
00:07:55 Clip - Criticism forces the church to change00:25:36 Clip - Nathan Hinckley talking about them using the word “hard”00:26:15 Comparing the original and the new version00:35:20 Clip - Is God okay with forced polygamy?00:36:55 Comparing the changes on the second image00:42:20 Clip - “The Mormon church is participating in sexual assault”00:53:46 Clip - Michelle Stone on Emma Smith00:56:10 In the new version this section has been completely taken out01:01:58 Clip - “How did this get through the review process?”01:15:22 Clip - Mormon leaders went to prison01:19:24 The last panel did not change on Woodruff’s manifesto01:26:08 Polygamy is still hard on women today in an eternal aspect01:36:25 What was the 2015 Exclusion Policy and how the church rolled it back01:32:40 Answers from the Church History Survey01:48:17 The story of Zina Huntington01:50:30 Clip - Can consent be given in a Mormon context?01:54:55 This is a positive change overall02:03:10 What is it that causes people to question their faith?02:06:11 Clip - “A faith that blinds you is problematic”02:08:25 Final thoughts
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories Podcast. I'm your host, John DeLinn. It's February 19th, 2025. And today we have good news. The thumbnail for today is Mormon Church Caves to Pressure. But while we're often covering, you know, sometimes covering critical stories on Mormon Stories |
| 0:23.2 | Podcasts stories that are critical of the LDS Church today, I think we're going to be |
| 0:28.1 | complimenting the LDS Church and celebrating a change that they made. |
| 0:32.9 | So some of you will remember back in December, the LDS Church released, we'll call it a lesson for children that was sort of like this cartoonish story about Joseph Smith's polygamy. |
| 0:46.6 | And we did an entire episode about it. |
| 0:48.9 | In fact, several YouTubers, podcasters, influencers, TikTokers, did episodes about it because collectively, |
| 0:58.5 | those of us in the liberal to ex-Morman wings of the internet felt like this polygamy |
| 1:06.5 | lesson for children was functioning maybe unintentionally as a lesson to help groom children |
| 1:13.0 | for being abused and or for being recruited into polygamy. And so Mormon stories did an episode. |
| 1:21.5 | I think, you know, Radio Free Mormon, Bill Real, Rebecca Bibliotech, and Warman, did an episode. |
| 1:26.0 | Others did episodes. And we all basically said |
| 1:28.8 | this is a fundamentally bad idea. This lesson needs to be changed. It's going to hurt children. |
| 1:35.5 | And it's what? A month and a half to two months after the fact. And I found out this morning, |
| 1:42.6 | thanks to the email of a viewer listener that I don't have permission to use their name, they said, hey, John, you'll be happy to know that the church changed the lesson and clearly changed it as a result of our episode. |
| 1:58.5 | Now, officially, we can't know why the church made the change, |
| 2:04.7 | but we are going to be highlighting what it was like before, what it was liked after. |
| 2:10.6 | We're going to show some of the criticisms that were made by us and by others, and we'll let, yeah, |
| 2:16.6 | everyone draw their conclusions, but really it kind of doesn't matter. I others, and we'll let, yeah, everyone draw their own conclusions. But really, |
| 2:19.3 | it kind of doesn't matter. I mean, on the one hand, we all, I think on the Mormon internet, |
| 2:23.9 | feel happy to know we're probably being listened to. We're probably influential in checking the |
| 2:32.2 | Mormon church and helping and make good decisions. We can't for sure take credit, |
| 2:36.6 | but, you know, we're going to still celebrate the fact that it appears as though the church |
... |
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