Sham Marriages in Joseph Smith’s Nauvoo - John Turner Pt. 35 | Ep. 2129
Mormon Stories Podcast
Dr. John Dehlin
4.5 • 5.7K Ratings
🗓️ 26 March 2026
⏱️ 128 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Welcome back to Part 35 of our series with Dr. John Turner discussing his new book “Joseph Smith: The Rise and Fall of an American Prophet.”
In 1843, Joseph Smith began introducing some of his closest family members – including his wife Emma Smith and his brother Hyrum Smith –to the controversial and secretive practice of plural marriage.
This episode dives into one of the most complex and debated periods of early Latter-day Saint history. We explore the story of the Kinderhook Plates –a set of six brass plates that briefly captured Joseph Smith’s attention before being exposed as a fraud –and what that moment reveals about claims of translation and discernment.
We also examine the marriages to the Partridge sisters, the dynamics between Joseph and Emma, and the growing theological framework surrounding celestial marriage, “calling and election made sure,” and eternal hierarchy. As new doctrines emerged, secrecy, trust, and power became deeply intertwined.
This episode raises difficult questions such as: What happened to the Kinderhook Plates –and why didn’t the translation continue? How did plural marriage unfold behind the scenes? What did Joseph teach privately vs publicly? How did those closest to him respond about polygamy?
This is a careful, long-form discussion intended to slow down and examine the historical record in detail.
If you’d like to help keep this project going, please consider donating to support this series here. Your support makes long-form, in-depth historical discussion like this possible!
Purchase John Turner’s book here.
Let us know your thoughts on a Brigham Young series (comprising ten episodes) covering John Turner’s book Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet.
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Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Joseph Smith podcast, brought to you by Mormon Stories |
| 0:04.6 | Podcast. |
| 0:05.3 | I'm your host John DeLinn. |
| 0:06.4 | It's March 12, 26. |
| 0:09.3 | And today we are here for part 35 of our series with Dr. John Turner, historian from the |
| 0:16.9 | George Mason University, Go Patriots, here today to talk about his book, Joseph Smith, |
| 0:24.4 | The Rise and Fall of an American Prophet. Again, we're 35 episodes into this series. |
| 0:31.3 | You can find this series on Spotify, on Apple Podcasts. There's a playlist on the Mormon Stories |
| 0:37.3 | YouTube channel. It's best consumed in |
| 0:40.6 | sequence last week, episode 34. The title or the topic or the theme that I came up with Julia |
| 0:48.0 | was Joseph Smith turns from marrying other men, for marrying women who are already married to other men he |
| 0:56.7 | kind of pivots in 1843 navu illinois to targeting teenagers as his plural wives and so we spent |
| 1:07.2 | last episode which was focused on chapter 27 of John Turner's book entitled Deepwater, 1843. |
| 1:15.4 | We left off that episode, having spoken about several teenage brides that Joseph Smith pursued and obtained and the methods that he used to do that. |
| 1:30.3 | And we spent two and a half hours on that. |
| 1:36.5 | And it was so good as far as I'm concerned. And we didn't leave room for the rest of the chapter. |
| 1:45.5 | And so today we're going to be covering the second half of chapter 27 of John Turner's book called Deepwater 1843. |
| 1:51.3 | We're going to start off talking about one of the great, I would say, |
| 1:59.7 | scandals or smoking guns as it relates to Joseph Smith's claim to be a translator of ancient documents. |
| 2:00.9 | The subject is going to be the Kinderhook Plates. |
| 2:03.1 | We've covered it on LDS discussions before. |
| 2:06.0 | It's been covered a lot in various ways. |
... |
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