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The first episode in the 132 Problems podcast. I introduce myself and the podcast and explain my journey with polygamy.

Summary

In this introductory episode, Michelle Stone introduces herself, her background in Mormonism, and the purpose behind her podcast, 132 Problems: Revisiting Mormon Polygamy. She shares her personal journey of belief and transformation, explaining how she once fully embraced polygamy as a divine principle but later came to question its spiritual and historical validity.

Key Themes:

  1. Michelle’s Background and Early Beliefs About Polygamy
    • Lifelong member of the LDS Church, with pioneer ancestry and deep roots in Mormon polygamy.
    • Grew up believing in polygamy as a celestial law and even lamented its absence in modern LDS practice.
    • Her grandmother was born into a post-Manifesto polygamist family, and her husband’s great-grandfather was also from a polygamous lineage in Mexico.
    • She was conservative, deeply committed to LDS teachings, and homeschooled her large family with a strong belief in Zion principles like polygamy and consecration.
  2. The Moment of Doubt: Her Husband’s Question
    • Over 10 years ago, her husband came to her after studying Jacob 2 (Book of Mormon) and said:
      “I think maybe polygamy is not of God.”
    • This shocked her, as she had never questioned polygamy before.
    • In an effort to prove her husband wrong, she began studying polygamy in-depth—expecting to find confirmation of its divine origin.
    • Instead, she found contradictions, scriptural evidence against polygamy, and a new perspective that fundamentally changed her views.
  3. Why Talk About Polygamy in 2022?
    • While polygamy was officially ended by the LDS Church over 120 years ago, it remains a central doctrine in many ways.
    • Temple sealings allow for polygamous relationships in the afterlife, and the church continues to struggle with its polygamous past.
    • For many LDS women, polygamy creates anxiety about eternal marriage and gender roles, making it a crucial issue to address today.
  4. Her Approach: A Scriptural and Theological Study
    • Unlike other polygamy discussions that focus on Joseph Smith’s historical involvement, she wants to focus on what the scriptures actually say about polygamy.
    • The podcast will be a deep theological and scriptural dive to determine:
      • Did God ever truly command polygamy?
      • Does polygamy fit within God’s character and eternal plan?
      • What does the Bible and Book of Mormon say about polygamy?
  5. Interacting with Different Perspectives
    • Created a Facebook group to discuss polygamy and was surprised when modern-day polygamists joined the discussion.
    • Engaged with members of the Allred Group (Apostolic United Brethren, AUB) and found them to be kind, devout people who sincerely believed in polygamy.
    • Through these interactions, she developed empathy but also strengthened her belief that polygamy is not of God.
  6. A Call for Open and Honest Dialogue
    • Stone invites people from all perspectives—whether mainstream LDS, fundamentalist polygamists, former members, or non-Mormons—to engage in the discussion.
    • She wants this podcast to be a safe space for thoughtful dialogue, rather than a source of division or contention.
    • Her goal is to seek truth, even if that truth challenges long-standing beliefs.
  7. Conclusion: A Journey of Discovery
    • Stone acknowledges the difficulty of questioning polygamy but believes that truth-seeking is essential.
    • The podcast will explore scriptural contradictions, doctrinal inconsistencies, and historical perspectives on polygamy.
    • She thanks listeners for joining her on this journey and hopes for a rich and enlightening discussion.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Welcome to 132 Problems revisiting Mormon polygamy. In this first episode, I’ll introduce myself and the podcast and share why I am doing this and what I hope we can accomplish. Thank you for being here as we take a deep dive into the murky waters of Mormon polygamy. OK, so why in the world a podcast on polygamy in 2022? It seems like few things could be less relevant. The practice was officially ended, um, almost 120 years ago, and yet here we are still talking about it. So I really want to thank you for starting with this first episode. I hope that, um, you will listen to the episodes in order. This is such a big topic and it is really important to me. I want you to understand the intention of the podcast and where I am coming from. So first, let me introduce myself. My name is Michelle Stone. I am. A long time, a a lifelong Mormon daughters of daughter of pioneers and um. Mother of a large family that I have homeschooled and been a very, very dedicated conservative Mormon my whole life who never had a problem with polygamy. In fact, I had quite a testimony of polygamy and actually felt sad that we were losing blessings by not being able to live it. So that’s how um conservative of a member I have been my whole life. My grandmother was born in colonial Dulon to post manifesto polygamist parents and um actually my husband’s great grandfather was born in also colonial Dulon. I was thinking colonial Juarez, but colonial Dulon, so our history goes back quite a long way with polygamy and yet it’s quite close to me. My grandmother was raised in a polygamist family and in fact part of my family heritage, one of the stories that we have, um. My great grandmother was a younger wife to an older couple, so my great grandfather’s first wife was barren and was not able to have children, and when they were in their 40s, they married my great grandmother who was young, I believe 20, I could be wrong, and she went on to have a large family of children. And when my grandfather, my great grandfather died, who had been. A leader in the church and held many callings when he died. The meeting house was full of all of the people and the leaders of the church coming to see him, and many years later when his first wife died, the story that we that I grew up hearing is that my great grandmother sat weeping at the empty chapel and said, Where are they? Don’t they know I loved her just as much as I loved him. And so my feeling always was clearly there are things about polygamy that I don’t understand, but I know that it’s good and I know that it makes people happy and I know that it’s important relationships and I believed all of the stories about how women need women and thought naively about how wonderful it would be to have sister wives to talk with and visit with as we did all of our work and child raising so that’s where I was coming from with polygamy. In fact, I, um, used to teach quite a bit in homeschooling circles and I. Really felt like in our quest to establish Zion, the law of consecration and the law of polygamy were the laws of Zion and the celestial kingdom, and those were the things that needed to be restored in order for us to become a truly Zion people. So wow, that is weird to say all of that right now because, because I have a very different perspective at this point. Um, several years ago, over 10 years ago, my husband one day walked in, and he had been studying,

[00:03:59] I think he’d been studying Jacob too, and he came in and he just said, I think maybe polygamy is not of God, and it was so shocking to me that he would say that that polygamy was a mistake and I didn’t even have a way to. Compute what he was saying. I just thought, what are you talking about? You’re crazy. And we talked about it for a minute and I went on a quest to study polygamy cause I realized I didn’t have any really good answers for him. I had always just accepted it. Um, because it was what I had been taught. I hadn’t really studied it out for myself, so I went on a quest to study out polygamy so I could show my husband how very wrong. How very wrong his thought was, and as I studied mainly in the scriptures. I was continually surprised, I guess shocked. I was knocked for a giant loop in what I began to learn and um. And it’s such an interesting topic because like I said, in so many ways it’s irrelevant to us. It’s not part of our current religion, but in other ways it is central and core to every single thing to our relationships, to our eternal destiny, to our identity as women and as men. And so it’s, it’s actually it stunned me how important it was, how ignorant about it I was and how naive I was. And so I’ve, I’ve been in that space for quite a few years, having a very different perspective than I used to and um a few years ago I really felt. Profoundly called that I needed to share what I had learned. And um since then, it’s been a really hard couple of years at our house and just now I am feeling like I need to start doing this, so I’m. Stepping into the great abyss, I’m sure those of you who have tried to do something that is way out of your comfort zone can understand a little bit of how I’m feeling, but, um, but I want to share what I’ve learned so many of almost all of the studies of polygamy that I have found focus a lot, I guess right now on what Joseph Smith did, what Joseph Smith taught, what, you know, um. It really focuses on what did Joseph Smith do and that and it seems like most people are motivated to say Joseph Smith did participate in polygamy or Joseph Smith didn’t participate in polygamy and that is really not what I want to focus on. I really want to focus on sharing my journey which mainly was the scriptures and so we are going to this podcast, the idea behind it is to study polygamy out scripturally and theologically. When I, my perspective changed on polygamy, I was so shocked and off balance that I really needed people to talk to about it, and I tried to start conversations in in several of the different Facebook groups I’m in, and man, that is not a welcome topic. It is so people’s feelings about it are so intense that. The, the most of the Facebook groups just didn’t want to deal with the intensity of the emotion and it was really interesting and so I ended up just starting my own Facebook group to to discuss Mormon polygamy and it was such a fascinating journey because many pro polygamists, um, members of the church, like members of the church with with testimonies of polygamy joined, but. To my

[00:07:48] surprise and great gladness, many actual polygamists joined the group, mostly men, and, um, and they shared their their, um, theology and their ideas and their history, and I was really interested in that because I want to know truth. I don’t want to have an opinion one way or the other. I should have shared when I was talking about my history with polygamy. I am. My mom is a composer and she wrote, she writes wonderful children’s music and for many years I sold her music as I was a mom and we would do parties in people’s homes. If anyone’s familiar with bright music, um. And I through doing that, I went into the homes of many polygamist women, and most of my friends that I met were in the all red group, and they were some of the just most beautiful souls. I love these women. I loved these women, and they shared with me their perspective on polygamy and their testimony and their um beliefs that had been handed down to them, and I was like, you know what? This this fits in with my history what they explained to me this this one friend in particular um told me that they believe their ancestor was called in by the president of the church and told polygamy needs to stay on the earth but it can’t be part of the church so I’m calling you and. And some other people were called to keep this principle alive even though you need to be separated separate from the church and then in time they believe that those will be brought back together and you know my my um my great grandfather was actually a post manifesto polygamist and the story in our history is that he was called in by the president of the church and told to take a second wife and. Um, I’ve heard, I guess there’s some scuttle, but some people think that he had a vision or a dream about having children, and so he went to the president of the church. It was either either way he met with the president of the church and um was told to take a second wife and that’s why they moved to Colonial Dublo in Mexico because polygamy was illegal in America. And according to the first manifesto, Mormons were not participating in polygamy. So, um, so none of these things were hard for me to believe and I really just had so much love for these women and they were raising their family the way I was wanting to raise my family and Um, we believed in motherhood, which felt like kind of a lonely place to be sometimes. So anyway, so I have very warm loving feelings toward the polygamist that I personally have met. I think that just like in any other group, there can be good people and there can be bad people, but um. But that’s why all of this was so surprising to me and um my hope for this podcast is that people from all sides of this discussion will want to join and share. Um, I really, really did start out wanting to prove that polygamy was true and as I or was was truly of God. And as I studied more, I began to just want truth. I just wanted, I just want to know God and know God’s um perspective on women and on men because you can’t understand. The eternal destiny and nature of man unless you do of woman as well and um that’s what I’m hoping that’s what I’m still seeking. I don’t claim to have by any means all of the answers and so I’m hoping that those who are currently living in polygamy, those who are currently members of the mainstream LDS Church, those who have left. The um the church and those who maybe have nothing to do with with the LDS Church, but I’m sorry, I should say the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. We have so many things to keep up with, but those who have nothing to do with the church but maybe are curious about polygamy will want to join.

[00:11:54] But what I do want to make clear is that it is not in any way my intention to create division or contention to um. Make anybody feel judged. I just I’m hoping that we can join together to have a very enriching and inspiring enlightening dialogue about this most interesting topic and piece of our history and so. So I do hope that you will join us. I’m sorry that it’s, I’m new at this, and you know I’m gonna, I’m gonna do a lot of it, just goofy, just I’m doing my best, but anyway, thank you for joining us and I hope that this will be a great experience for all of us.