There is a church growing faster in Liberia than almost anywhere else on earth, and most of us could not tell you the first true thing about the man whose name sits behind it. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has gone from fewer than a hundred members in Monrovia in 1986 to more than twenty thousand today, with a temple now promised for the city.
Missionaries in white shirts are a familiar sight on our streets, and this past June they filled a hall in Monrovia for the eighth Strengthening Families Conference, telling Liberian parents and pastors and government officials how to build strong marriages and raise righteous children. Few of the Liberians who sat in that hall, or who open their doors to the missionaries afterward, know the first true thing about the man whose church this is. We think they should.
Joseph Smith spent his early adulthood not prophesying but treasure-hunting — hauled into a New York court for using a stone hidden inside his hat to claim he could locate buried gold for paying customers. That same stone-in-a-hat method is the one he later used to “translate” golden plates that, conveniently, no one else was ever permitted to see. This is not a fringe accusation invented by his enemies. It is acknowledged history. The man who would found a global religion built his first reputation on telling desperate people he could find them treasure with magic, and took their money for it.
We raise this because the church he founded has spent the last thirty years positioning itself, internationally and now here in Liberia, as the world’s foremost defender of “the family.” In 1995 the church’s governing body issued what it calls “The Family: A Proclamation to the World,” a document read into the church’s official teaching and now hung on the walls of member households from Salt Lake City to Sinkor. It declares that marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God, and that the family is central to the Creator’s plan. Church leaders have carried that proclamation to the United Nations, to the Vatican, into courtrooms fighting marriage-equality cases, and now into a conference hall in Monrovia, asking Liberians to organize their households and their values around it.
Here is what the proclamation does not mention, and what the missionaries will not volunteer unless you ask. Joseph Smith was married, by the most careful historical counts, to somewhere between thirty and forty women at the same time. His legal wife, Emma Hale Smith, did not know about most of them. He courted at least one of his plural wives — Helen Mar Kimball — at fourteen years old, after her own father offered her to him as a way of binding the Kimball family to the Prophet.
Historians still argue about whether that particular marriage was ever consummated; what is not in dispute is that a grown man in his late thirties accepted a fourteen-year-old girl as his wife, that the girl’s first reaction was horror, and that she was given twenty-four hours to make peace with it before the wedding proceeded.
The church’s own published history admits Smith was also sealed to a number of women who were already married to other living men; not widows, not the abandoned, but wives, taken from their husbands under the cover of religious secrecy. When Emma finally consented to two of these marriages and then changed her mind, she spent months trying to talk the women out of the relationship and back into marriages with someone else. That is not a side note in Mormon history. That is the foundation of it.
This was not a religion that arrived in the world gently, and it did not stay in one place long enough to be ignored. Within three years of its founding in New York in 1830, armed mobs had already driven Smith’s followers out of Jackson County, Missouri, in 1833. They regrouped in Kirtland, Ohio, where Smith ran a church-sponsored bank that collapsed within weeks of opening, wiping out members’ savings — the same year one of his own apostles, Oliver Cowdery, publicly accused him of a secret sexual relationship with Fanny Alger, a teenage servant girl living under his roof.
It was the church’s first whispered polygamy scandal, years before the word was ever spoken publicly. Smith fled Ohio at night, one step ahead of arrest warrants, having already survived a mob that tarred and feathered him. He resettled in Missouri, where tensions over land, bloc voting, and a Mormon militia escalated into open war; in October 1838 the governor signed an executive order declaring that Mormons “must be exterminated or driven from the state.” Days later, a mob shot seventeen Latter-day Saint men and boys to death at Haun’s Mill, some of them gunned down where they had hidden, leaving widows and fatherless children to bury them in a blacksmith’s pit.
Fifteen thousand Mormons fled Missouri in the dead of winter. They rebuilt a third time in Nauvoo, Illinois, where Smith raised a private army of his own, ran for President of the United States, and finally — after years of denying it to his own wife and church — could no longer keep his secret marriages hidden. When a Nauvoo newspaper printed what his own followers were whispering about it, he ordered the press smashed. He was dead within a month, killed by a mob in the Carthage jail.
Two years later, Brigham Young marched the remaining Saints out of Illinois entirely, into the Utah desert — the fourth expulsion in fourteen years. Bank failure, armed politics, and a private militia all played their part in those four exoduses. But polygamy ran through nearly every one of them: whispered in Ohio, denied in Missouri, and finally the very thing that got the founder killed in Illinois. It was not abandoned out of conviction. It was abandoned in 1890, only when the United States government was about to take the temples by force, as the next section makes clear.
This is the same man, and the same church, now teaching Liberians that marriage is ordained of God to be between one man and one woman, lawfully wedded, and that children deserve the stability of that arrangement above all else. We do not say this to mock the tens of thousands of sincere, decent Liberians who have joined this church and who, today, practice exactly the kind of monogamous, faithful family life the proclamation describes. Most of them know little of this history, and many would be appalled by it. Our argument is not with them. It is with an institution that arrives in our country asking to be trusted as a moral authority on the family while keeping its own founder’s family history — and his own people’s four-state, fourteen-year history of exile — carefully out of the missionary pamphlets.
And it is worth saying plainly: the man’s death did not end it, and neither did his church’s conscience. Brigham Young, who succeeded Smith, did not dismantle the practice of plural marriage. He expanded it, married dozens of wives himself, and led the church in defending polygamy as sacred doctrine for another forty-six years. It did not stop because the church decided, on reflection, that secret marriages to teenagers and other men’s wives were wrong. It stopped in 1890 because the United States government had disincorporated the church, seized its assets, and was threatening to confiscate its temples outright.
Church president Wilford Woodruff issued the Manifesto ending new plural marriages only after the legal options ran out, framing surrender to federal law as fresh revelation from God. Existing plural marriages were not dissolved. Some continued for decades after. The lesson Liberians should draw is not complicated: this institution’s positions on marriage and family have shifted, historically, under outside pressure and legal necessity, not moral re-examination. The proclamation it brings to Monrovia today is the most recent version of a position that has changed before, when it was forced to.
Nor was the cost of that first forty years confined to marriages. In September 1857, Mormon militia in southern Utah, fearing a federal invasion and convinced they were carrying out God’s will, surrounded a wagon train of roughly 120 emigrant men, women, and children from Arkansas, lured them out of their defensive position under a flag of truce, and slaughtered nearly all of them. Investigators later found women’s hair caught in the brush and the bones of children still cradled in their mothers’ arms. Only the youngest were spared, taken into Mormon homes.
It took the church a hundred and fifty years to formally express regret, and even then it described the massacre as the product of “tragic misunderstandings” rather than a deliberate act carried out by men convinced that obedience to unquestionable religious authority outweighed the lives of the families in front of them. We mention this not to suggest that today’s Latter-day Saints in Liberia are capable of anything like it. We mention it because it is the clearest evidence in the historical record of where Smith’s founding idea — that one man’s claim to revelation cannot be questioned by law, conscience, or anyone else — eventually leads when it is taken to its logical end. An institution with that history does not get to walk into Monrovia and lecture Liberian families about sanctity without expecting us to ask what “sanctity” has meant, historically, inside its own walls.
Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven makes this argument in its full, disturbing detail, tracing the line from Smith’s unaccountable revelation through Mountain Meadows to the 1984 ritual murder of a young mother and her infant daughter by two Mormon fundamentalist brothers who believed God had personally commanded it. Krakauer is careful, and so are we, to say that the overwhelming majority of Latter-day Saints today reject all of this and live quiet, faithful, peaceful lives. But an institution that built its moral authority by hiding its founder’s conduct from its own members for over a hundred years, and that abandoned its most controversial practice only when the law left it no other choice, has earned, at minimum, a healthy Liberian skepticism before it starts teaching us what a family is supposed to look like.
We have spent two decades in this country watching imported certainty arrive in pressed shirts and good manners, asking only that we stop asking questions. We have no objection to anyone’s faith, and no interest in telling Liberians what to believe. We object, on principle, to any institution — religious, political, foreign-funded, or homegrown — that asks for trust on family values while declining to account for the family its own founder actually built: one wife who was lied to, dozens more taken in secret, a fourteen-year-old girl pressured by her own father, other men’s wives quietly absorbed into his household, and a press destroyed rather than allowed to ask about any of it.
And now this same institution — a movement so volatile it was driven out of four American states in fourteen years, in no small part over its own founder’s secret marriages — crosses an ocean to tell Liberians that our family traditions need correcting. Plural marriage is not some foreign scandal we are encountering for the first time.
It has been recognized, regulated, and woven into customary law across ethnic groups in this country and across this continent for generations, governed by its own codes of inheritance, responsibility, and community obligation, long before any missionary stepped off a plane in Monrovia.
We are not here to argue that our customary practices are beyond question, or that every tradition deserves to survive unexamined. We are here to point out the nerve of an institution doing the questioning. A church whose own prophet kept dozens of wives in secret, whose own second president expanded the practice for another forty-six years, and which abandoned it only when the American government threatened to seize its temples, does not get to arrive in Africa and present its current position on marriage as God’s timeless and unchanging pattern. It is not timeless. It is the most recent stop in a long history of this institution rewriting its own rules whenever the law left it no other choice.
And now it wants Liberian families, with traditions older and more settled than its own, to treat that shifting history as eternal truth.
Liberians filling that conference hall, sending their children to its meetinghouses, or simply opening the door the next time the missionaries knock deserve to know whose authority they are being asked to build their families around, and exactly what that authority did the last time anyone questioned him.
Ask the questions. Read the history. Then decide for yourselves.