The issue of the role of women in the Christian, Muslim, and Jewish religions, including the polygamy issue with the Jewish patriarchs and the Muslim and Mormon prophets goes back to the fact that all these religions are embedded in a primitive Bedouin-like tribal culture. This culture viewed women as chattel male-owned property. This was so deeply embedded in the culture of 2000 B.C. that it appeared in the 10 commandments.
The commandment in question reads: "Thou shalt not covet your neighbor's house, wife, male-slave, female-slave, ox, or ass; in sum, any of your neighbor's property."
Thus, our slaveholding Confederate forefathers justified slaveholding as a divine command. And just so, this passage of the Bible continues to be the Cornerstone of male-dominated religious philosophies for the sexual politics regarding women. Of course, there are multiple other Old Testament passages that reinforce the foundation of patriarchy; not the least of which is the simple matter of exclusively male pronouns for the person of God. Before the women's movement in the 1960s, women were to be seen and not heard from in the churches.
I recall intense discussions in church Bible study groups over the biblical role of women. Certain literalists, including some Phyllis Schlafly-like women, argued passionately that all the male pronouns referring to God in the Bible absolutely proved that God was male. This crude anthropomorphism was virtually incomprehensible to me. Yet in a nut-shell it encapsulates the entire more sophisticated apologetics of male patriarchies like the Catholic Church: Jesus was male, the Apostles were male, Elohim and all the Hebrew pronouns are male, therefore God must be male and there can only be male Catholic priests. One day I was so exasperated with such literal anthropomorphism that I decided to push its proponents to their philosophy's logical extreme. I challenged them with the question of how one determined the sex of a human being at birth. Then I answered my own question: You look at the child's genitalia and see if the newborn has a penis or a vagina! Do you think God has either a vagina or a penis? The suggestion that God might have a vagina was surely the most shocking thought, but I believe that even picturing God the Father with a penis was sufficiently shocking to make my parents sink through their pews in shame. That's possibly why iconoclastic Christians and Muslims took quite literally the 10 commandment demand forbidding any making of "graven images." In Christian pictoral art, we've pictured God with secondary sexual characteristics, like male facial hair and testosterone enhanced upper body strength. This has reinforced our millenial tradition of literally "picturing" or conceiving of God as male. But can God be male in any normal use of the English language without a penis, two testes, a scrotum, and a prostate?
Thus when I read about Mormon prophets who seem quite convinced that when they speak--Verily, verily--God is speaking, when I hear them extolling the blessings of the everlasting principle of polygamy, I ask myself: Do they really believe God is speaking through them? Or are they consciously aware that they are bamboozling "the elect" because they have are unable to control the excess testosterone coursing through their system? It makes me have a fuller appreciation for the "fertility religions" with their phallic symbols. I also wonder what the Mormon women were thinking. Did they believe that God was a ventriloquist speaking through their husbands and commanding them to endorse their husbands' taking multiple younger wives?
We know that Emma Smith did not believe Joseph Smith Jr. was speaking for God when he, Smith, and HE, God dictated Doctrine and Covenants Section 132 commanding Emma to accept Smith's multiple wives under pain of divine destruction. We know that Orson Pratt, Apostle (of polygamy), who extolled polygamy as "one of the greatest blessings of the last dispensation," had a first wife Sarah M. Pratt who damned polygamy as the "direst curse with which a people or a nation could be afflicted. . . . It completely demoralizes good men, and makes bad men correspondingly worse. As for the women--well, God help them! First wives it renders desperate, or else heart-broken, mean-spirited creatures; and it almost unsexes some of the other women, but not all of them, for plural wives have their sorrows too." Mary Ann Angell Young, Brigham Young's second wife described the once most favored wife of Young, Emmeline Free Young, finally experiencing "the torments of the damned" once she too was replaced by a younger, newly more favored wife. Zina D. Jacobs Smith Young, another plural wife of Brigham Young, while espousing the patriarchy's line for public consumption, ("The principle of plural marriage is honorable. It is a principle of the gods, it is heave born."), described her fellow plural wives "whose hearts are full of hell" and who would love to "tear his [Brigham Young's] eyes out." Phebe Woodruff, first wife of Prophet-President Wilford Woodruff, who also praised polygamy for public consumption said in private: "I loathe the unclean thing with all the strength of my nature." Then she explained that she was forced to "say anything commanded of me" because otherwise she would be "turned out of my home in my old age which I should most assuredly be if I refused to obey counsel."[i] Thus, we have the testimony of at least three wives of three of the Mormon’s original President-Prophets. Not only do they use the words “curse,” “torments of the damned,” and “hearts full of hell,” but they testify to the dictatorial, tyrannical character of these husband prophets who would throw aged, decrepit wives into the streets if they would not publically proclaim the fictitious blessings of “celestial marriages.” And these are the men whose writings are accepted as the “Word of God,” and whose doctrines must be as slavishly submitted to today as their wives had to submit during the heyday of Mormon polygamy!?!
When Christians hear of Muslim men who believe that if they become suicide bombers they will be rewarded in the afterlife with the favors of 40 virgins, it does not take them too long to come to the conclusion that the revelation that established this doctrine originated in an overheated, sexually frustrated, alpha male brain and not the mind of God. So why should Christians, even Mormon Christians, find it difficult to believe that the revelations establishing polygamy in Mormonism have the same origins?
Men, including myself, are not infrequently accused by the everyday wisdom of women of letting our penises do too much of our thinking for us. I strongly suspect that the wives of the Mormon prophets I’ve quoted above would agree with that sentiment in regards to their husbands. I think that they, if given a multiple choice question, rather than choosing the option that when the prophet spoke, God was speaking—they’d opt for the opinion that when the prophet spoke, it was his penis that was doing the talking.
[i] Again see Van Wagoner’s Mormon Polygamy referenced in the previous blog; particularly chapter nine, “Women in Polygamy.”
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