Some three weeks ago, the First Presidency announced a
policy change – members of the church who married civilly would no longer need
to wait a year before being sealed in a temple. This had been the rule already
in most countries (where the authorities do not tolerate secret weddings) but
not in the United States. Indeed, church magazines had often run articles
praising American couples for the great sacrifice they made by marrying in the
temple, even to the exclusion of their non-member relatives.
Then came the current press release, which features a church
spokeswoman from Spain talking about what a blessing it was to be able to marry
in the presence of her non-member family and friends and be sealed later that
day, and how glad she is that everyone will now be able to enjoy that blessing.
This has led a lot of Latter-day
Saints to question whether the “sacrifice” that they were previously asked to
make was really necessary at all. Some simply chalk it up to God requiring
different sacrifices of different people at different times, while others
refuse to acknowledge that any good at all came from a practice which alienated
so many people from the church by excluding them from their children’s
weddings.
Getting to the bottom of the matter
requires us to look at what the Prophet Joseph Smith had to say about weddings.
The first edition of the Doctrine and Covenants, published in 1835, had a section
(no. 101 at the time) which set forth the Church’s beliefs about marriage.
Joseph didn’t write this (the assignment had gone to Oliver Cowdery) but he
preached out of it during the Nauvoo years and reaffirmed that it was the only
law of marriage recognized in the Church. The relevant passage reads:
According to the custom of all civilized nations,
marriage is regulated by laws and ceremonies. Therefore, we believe that all
marriages in this Church of Christ of Latter Day Saints should be solemnized in a public meeting or feast prepared
for that purpose, and that the solemnization should be performed by a presiding
high priest, high priest, bishop, elder, or priest-not even prohibiting those
persons who are desirous to get married of being married by other authority.
This
section is no longer a part of the Doctrine and Covenants; Brigham Young
removed it during his presidency, on account of the trouble that another passage was causing for him,
namely, the part that reads:
Inasmuch as this Church of Christ has been reproached
with the crime of fornication and polygamy, we declare that we believe that one
man should have one wife and one woman but one husband, except in case of
death, when either is at liberty to marry again.
Even
after polygamy was done away with, secret weddings remained a part of the
program, although they were not the norm until the mid-twentieth century, when
temples became more widespread and it was easier to get married and sealed at
the same time.
Then,
the church began penalizing couples who chose to solemnize their marriage “in a
public meeting or feast prepared for that purpose.”
No
doubt many thousands of people have been left with a bad impression of
Mormonism as the religion which made them sit out of their son or daughter’s
wedding. And those who have chosen to remain aloof from the gospel for this
reason might be reasonably condemned for their hard-heartedness, if the requirement that their child marry in secret
had come from God.
But
as it turns out, the practice which seems repugnant to these fathers and
mothers is one that was rejected by
the Prophet Joseph. These people cannot be condemned for rejecting that which
Joseph also rejected; therefore, the guilt for their alienation from Mormonism
must lay elsewhere.
It
was a good move for the leaders of the church to stop penalizing Mormons who
choose to marry in public as was required in Joseph’s day. It would be a better
move to restore the original law of marriage and to stop permitting secret
weddings entirely.
This is very interesting. How do you find passages of D and C that were taken out by Brigham Young?
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