The Whispered Faith

AMERICANA The Whispered Faith Brigham Young was a Mormon bold, And a leader of the roaring rams, And a shepherd of a heap of pretty little sheep, And a nice fold of pretty little Jambs, And he lived with his five andforty wives, In the city of great Salt Lake Where they woo and coo as pretty doves do, And cackle like ducks to a drake.

--Old Frontier Ballad

The house is unprepossessing, a small, white wooden frame structure in a quiet Salt Lake City suburb. The family patriarch, a stolid pressman of 41 with muttonchop whiskers, sits in his modest living room playing with two of his seven children. In the kitchen, three women are busy over several bushels of peaches. One woman is peeling the plump yellow fruit; another toils over the kettles simmering on the stove; a third pops peach halves into bottles. The tableau seems to be a Rockwellian slice of rural Americana, a pair of friendly neighbors helping a housewife put up peaches for the winter. There is one discomforting difference, however; all three women are the wives of the man playing in the living room with his children.

The Mormon rams of Brigham Young's polygamous persuasion still exist, but they do not roar; they whisper. Scattered across every county in Utah, most numerous in the Salt Lake Valley, live perhaps 20,000 men, women and children who still take literally Young's solemn litany: "The only men who become Gods, even the sons of God, are those who enter into polygamy." They keep their private lives extremely private, for polygamy is illegal in Utah, as in every other state, and was outlawed by the Church of Jesus

Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1890. Today, the Mormon Church excommunicates any of its members who still dare live by what is rather cryptically called "the principle."

Better than Swapping. These practitioners believe very strongly in polygamy as God's law. They must: polygamy is no redoubt for the lickerish. "Prayer is 99% of our existence, if not 100%," the pressman explains. "If a person goes into this principle who is selfish, lustful or jealous, it will make a devil out of him." Whatever his spiritual resources, though, the man with three wives has serious worldly problems. Just the simple recreational act of going to a drive-in movie has potential for domestic havoc. "We fight over who will sit by him," says one wife. "So we go to triple features and take turns." The jealousy factor in this family could be particularly acute, since the wives are also blood sisters.

Yet in the polygamous marriage, necessity is the mother of household tranquillity. "We don't believe in divorce at all," says one of the wives. "Anyway, Mom won't have us back. So we know that the only way to succeed is to make amends." They all agree that their way of life, however trying, breeds a more enduring form of familial happiness than loosely bound monogamy. "I feel sorry for people who don't live in polygamy," says one wife. "In our world, instead of a man getting involved in wife swapping and chasing other women, he brings them into the family." Women, on the other hand, often instigate the plural marriage. "It's not unusual for the girl to ask the man to marry her," notes another such wife. "Women should take the initiative, especially if the man is married."

Legal Redress. Fear of the law is a grave concern, but not sufficient to shake the devout from their article of faith. Morris Q. Kunz, 66, has three wives living in adjacent houses in a Salt Lake

City suburb. In 1945, he went to prison for two full years rather than sign a statement disavowing the principle. Says Kunz, "Persecution is a necessary prerequisite for salvation." He indicates that he intends to continue practicing the principle to the fullest. "I have three wives," he says, "thirty children, eight stepchildren, more than 200 grandchildren and six great-grandchildren, and I ain't dead yet." Kunz and his fellow practitioners are further reinforced by their conviction that they are the defenders of a tenet which the official Mormon Church accepts as fundamental --even though it cannot legally be lived at present.

Indeed, there is more social than legal pressure on Utah's polygamists, since they have traditionally proved difficult to prosecute. During a 19th century flare-up over polygamy, after the followers of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young had become solidly entrenched in Utah, an exasperated Abraham Lincoln compared Mormonism to a log. "It was too heavy to move, too hard to chop and too green to burn," he said. "So we just plowed around it."

Now, though polygamy is punishable in Utah by a $500 fine and up to five years' imprisonment, officials have a hard time persuading the sons and daughters of old Mormon families to testify against their neighbors. Nor is it likely that faith in the principle will entirely dissipate of its own accord, especially since many polygamists feel they will eventually win legal redress. Says the pressman: "I feel that in today's relaxed atmosphere, the conviction of one of us would be rejected by the higher courts." Still, such ephemeral considerations do not ultimately matter to the faithful. "I believe in a God who is unchanging, and the laws of the land do not change the laws of God," says the pressman firmly. "When the laws of the land restrict an individual, then the laws of God supersede."

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