The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy: Haunting the Hearts and Heaven of Mormon Women and Men by Carol Lynn Pearson

genre: nonfiction, religion, Mormonism

Having been raised myself in the Mormon faith, polygamy has just always BEEN THERE, as a thing.  As a weird black blot on my church's history.  I have distinct memories from high school where people who didn't know anything about Mormonism asked me, when they heard I was Mormon, how many wives my dad had.  I was dumbfounded.  "We don't do that anymore!" I told him.  But the thoughts about it lingered, unanswered in a way I was able to just let go of until recently.  It wasn't until I started digging into my own pioneer family's history and found it riddled with polygamy that I started to really let my brain simmer on both the teaching and the practice of polygamy and it caused me deep, life-changing pain.  

I think this book is important because it literally, sometimes word for word, articulates some of the exact feelings I've had and said to my loved ones about why the "doctrine" of polygamy is so devastating to women.  The author does a beautiful job of sharing her own thoughts and experiences tied in with many, many other voices of people whose lives have been impacted, in one way or another, by teachings that include a heaven where men can have more than one wife.  Because although polygamy is no longer practiced (and you're excommunicated if you do), we are still taught that Mormon heaven is a place of polygamy and Carol Lynn Pearson asserts that perhaps this is not true.  Her vision is that there is a future where the Brethren take this doctrine to the Lord and allow us as a church to acknowledge that Polygamy, in total, was an error.  It was wrong when it was practiced and that there is no future for it on earth OR in heaven.  I don't know if I can imagine such a thing happening but reading her words about it felt amazing.

I read this book in a day.  I liked her voice as Wise Woman Elder who has seen much, lived much.  I like her poetic way with words, her optimism and even the way she's found to deal with the cognitive dissonance that results from the idea of prophets making errors.  It is a book that brings up LOTS of feelings, anger, sorrow, pain and, maybe a tiny bit at the end there, hope.  I don't know if I have any hope myself, yet, but I'm going to cling to hers for a while.