'If you leave, you go to Hell' Polygamy: One religion's custom is the rest of the world's joke

By Allen Abel National Post (Canada)

"I want to be a god," the polygamist said as we sat on his long, curving sofa. "If I have more wives, I can have more children," he told me, his voice rising, pounding the armrest with the fervour that is always least temperate in those who think themselves divine. "I believe that I'm emulating the Man Upstairs," he said. "God has sired billions of children with billions of wives in Heaven. I'm practising exactly the same thing, right here on Earth. "I WANT TO GET WITH GOD'S PROGRAM!" The room was heavy with religious tracts, the trappings of a zealot's celestial certainty. But there were mundane belongings, as well: a Beatles anthology; Anne of Green Gables; Monty Python videos; A Bug's Life. Supper was over, a creamy pot of something on the stove. Six of the polygamist's 11 children were watching Disney's Tarzan in another room. One, a baby daughter with Down's Syndrome, had come successfully through minor surgery earlier in the day. She wandered in and beamed at me toothlessly and cuddled up to Daddy, swamped in a soft pink robe. "It's the aspiration to godhood and perfection and the riches of a vast family kingdom," her father declaimed. He was in his forties, a trim, blue-eyed, handsome, neatly bearded man resembling the actor Robin Williams in his face and urgent demeanour, lounging at home in jeans and white socks and a light dress shirt. A designer and salesman of surveillance equipment, here in the southern suburbs of the capital of the Beehive State. But the salesman had fallen behind in his training for divinity. One of his two wives had left him, taking five of the children. The other was downtown on this damp, foggy night, awaiting the arrival in Salt Lake City of the sacred Olympic flame. "Would you like to take another wife," I asked my host. "I am as vigorously determined to do it as anyone could ever be," he replied. "It is impossible for me to confine my feelings to only one woman." - - - Mormon polygamy has fascinated and disgusted American Gentiles for more than 150 years. Imposed on the earliest disciples by Joseph Smith the Prophet -- who later was lynched in an Illinois jail for his deviant ways -- it had become so detested by the turn of the 20th century that, when my grandfather Abelowitz applied for United States citizenship in 1912, he was made to swear to only two clauses: That he disavowed the sovereignty of Nicholas, Czar of All the Russias, and that he did not advocate the taking of multiple wives. These days, for most of us, it's just a joke. So there's a billboard now on Interstate Highway 15 in South Salt Lake that smugly shouts: Wife. Wife. Wife. Husband. It's an advertisement for a four-person ski lift at a nearby resort. And then, of course, there is the wildly famous dark new draught from a Park City brewer: Polygamy Porter. "Why Have Just One?" sings a slogan on the six-pack. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints officially expurgated polygamy from its divinely revealed dogma in 1890, throwing a bone to the American mainstream in exchange for statehood. But that was merely in this Earthly life; in Eternity, the prophets ordained, a man still might harvest godliness like autumn fruit, in proportion to the census of his troupe. Thousands of "breakaway" or "fundamentalist" Mormons in this country, Mexico and Canada refuse to accept that decree. Many live -- or are forced to live -- in cultish, incestuous colonies built on welfare fraud and slavery, where girls in their early teens are "assigned" to cohabit with elderly patriarchs, under penalty of shunning or severe physical and sexual abuse. Others, like my polygamous host, are part of the modern Utah mainstream, known to all, unapologetic, unprosecuted and defiant. He estimated that 30,000 "plural family members" exist, one-third of them as ordinary and suburban as he and the heaven-bound harem of his dreams. "It's very titillating to think about a household with two women," he allowed, as the evening went on. "But then you realize that we're just regular humans in a normal situation. There is a managerial responsibility that goes with it that is much, much greater than your usual cat-and-dog, 50-50, tug-of-war that goes on within a monogamous marriage." "Let's face it. It is a vertical, patriarchal, organizational situation, and somebody had better be in charge, or there's going to be chaos. In the biblical sort of way in which this has been presented to Man in Scripture, it is the husband who takes on that role as the leader of the family." "Yes, it is galvanizing to be in that role. But it's just like being a sales manager in a car dealership -- you'd better keep the customers happy or you're going to be losing wives." "I'm talking about that quintessential richness that comes from building a family. There is a mystical sense of strength of having brought that about. It's like the difference between listening to monaural and stereo." - - - The former wife of the same polygamist received me in a tattered little townhouse downtown. She once had been as committed as he to the intrinsic holiness of multiple couplings. "Just like Martin Luther and his 95 Theses, we had 95 reasons why the Mormon Church was apostate," she said. After she left him, she accepted the position of Third Wife to another would-be Salt Lake godhead. But now she was out forever. "He came in one night and drew me a pie chart to explain how the arrangement would work," she said of her second plural mate. She was a big woman, nearly filling a couch, suckling the newest of her seven children. "He said, 'J--- gets three slices, M---- gets two, and I'll give you one.' Sunday was just for him alone." "How did you feel when your day arrived?" I asked her. "I would be excited," she answered evenly. "But what was really strange was that we were all living in a very small house, and C---- would never show any affection during the daytime. "We were more like brother and sisters, not holding hands, no hugs, never anything intimate. "Then all of a sudden, at nine o'clock, his door would open and then you'd have this completely different relationship." "Were you jealous when it was the other wives' nights?" I wondered. "Usually not," she answered. "I accepted it pretty well. But I remember one time with my first husband, he went away on a business trip for two weeks and when he came back, it was her night. And I felt really bad." - - - I met several women who had run from polygamous men. One was 64 now, but not broken or weary; just the opposite -- sharp, insightful, wise. We sat in her kitchen and she spooned yogourt to her little grandson and said, "We were like a lot of Patty Hearsts." "Did you love him," I asked. (She had been ordered to marry her brother-in-law in one of the Northern Utah clans. It was decreed by God, the elders said.) "No, but I liked him," she replied. "We were told to never fall in love because then you wouldn't marry the one that God intended for you. So you buried your feelings. You anaesthetized your feelings. It's just a job." Her husband's other wife was her own sister. She endured this for 34 years. I wondered: "When your sister was having sex with your husband, what did you feel?" "Nothing," she said. "I thought that it was fine, because I didn't love him. You see, the men had created this way of life for so long that it had become the normal tradition in our group. They avoided love. They avoided all human feelings. They created a God in their image and because they believed that God has plural wives and has sex with them in Eternity, they could do the same on Earth." "Why did you stay so long?" I asked. "If you leave, you go to Hell," the former wife smiled. - - - What was it really about, this strange Utah custom that the world laughed at? "It's not a joke to a child who's being sexually abused," one of the women told me. "It's not a joke to a 13-year-old who realizes that she has reached maturity, and she is going to be married to a 70- or 80-year-old man." "It was like the Discovery Channel," another of the women said. "You know how stallions sometimes kill the mares with foals, and run off the other stallions? That's how it was with those men and the young girls." "It's driven by greed," said a woman who had bolted from an infamous hamlet on the Arizona border called Colorado City, after only a week of an arranged marriage to her first cousin. "Sex has something to do with it as well, and power is a real trip. But the basis is purely religious. These people believe that the only way to get into Heaven is through their fathers and husbands." She predicted a holocaust, should the Gentile authorities ever try to shut the clans down and free the children-brides. "Waco was child's play compared to these people," she warned. "Do you still believe in heaven?" I asked her. "Of course I do," she replied. "Do you need a man to get there?" "I don't need anyone. I believe that God recognizes each of us as individuals. But it took me a long, long time to figure that out."

National Post (Canada) Originally published February 23, 2002

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