On Past LDS Plural Marriage You have nothing to apologize for. Absolutely nothing. I keep hearing the same theme from young Saints. Shockingly, I even hear it from some young LDS influencers behind closed doors. They have a problem with Joseph Smith. They have a problem with Brigham Young. "He took all those wives." There is nothing in your past to be ashamed of. You can defend it intellectually, persuasively, and historically. Listen to the women who lived it. In January 1870 thousands of LDS women rallied in Salt Lake City against a federal bill aimed at plural marriage, and within weeks they were among the first women in America to vote. In 1887 Congress took that vote away in the name of fighting polygamy. There was nothing wrong with it at the time, and nothing unbiblical about it. Ask Abraham. Ask Jacob. Ask David. When Nathan rebuked David, it was over Uriah and Bathsheba, not his other wives. God said, "I gave thee thy master's house, and thy master's wives into thy bosom" (2 Samuel 12:8). Jacob's four wives bore the fathers of the twelve tribes (Genesis 37:2), whose names are written on the gates of the New Jerusalem (Revelation 21:12). The moment you start apologizing for your past, you have accepted the other side's premise. You have adopted a moral paradigm whose endpoint is an attack on your faith. That paradigm makes the spirit of the age the judge of revelation. Do you really think that if you give up plural marriage, they will suddenly like you? No. Plural marriage was never the real target. The target is the office of prophet. Your church already gave it up in 1890. They did not suddenly like you. They kept coming for the Book of Mormon, the First Vision, and the temple, because every one of them rests on the same prophetic claim. Either Joseph Smith was a prophet of God or he was not. If he was, he could have taken five hundred wives for all I care. The same goes for Brigham Young. The only question that matters is whether God spoke. Yes, plural marriage has no place today, because the same prophetic office that commanded it also ended it, not because the times changed. Defending your past is not the same as reviving it. So when you apologize and say, "Well, those were different times," you are quietly denying the prophetic calling your church stands on. At that point you might as well deny the church altogether. Why even stay? So no, do not apologize for your past. Be true to who you are. Be proud. Your people built Zion out of a wasteland. They took an inhospitable desert and made it into civilization.