Here is an accusation that comes up a lot. Most people don’t even know what they’re referring to when they make it. I’ve heard people accuse Joseph Smith of having sex with girls anywhere from 16 to 12, and this always used as a justification for either killing him or the entire membership of the church. Don’t believe me? Check out the responses people have to something as silly as a meme on Imgur. Notice how when confronted with the knowledge that the state of Missouri openly attempted to exterminate all the members of the Church many respond, “Well, what do you expect? Joseph Smith was having sex with children!” Now, obviously this is a stupid response that, if anything, betrays the hatred of the person speaking more than anything. Even if the accusation were true it wouldn’t justify murdering thousands of people any more than the crime of Herschel Grynszpan justified Kristallnacht. But, if you understand history, the accusation itself is simply wrong.
So, how should we think of this accusation? Well, we must admit the truth first and foremost- Joseph Smith was married and sealed (there is a difference that will be covered) to young women.
Fanny Alger
Joseph’s first plural wife was Fanny Alger. She and her family moved Mayfield, Ohio in 1830 when she was 14 years old. The date commonly cited for the start of her relationship with Joseph Smith is 1833, which would make her 16 and Joseph 28 at the time of their plural marriage. But this date is unlikely according to historian Dr. Matt Staker:
Mary Johnson [daughter of John and Alice Johnson born in 1818] lived in the Smith home (Whitney Store) to provide assistance to Emma. She died March 30, 1833. Her death was unexpected and shook up the family. I believe Fanny Alger replaced Mary as household help for Emma. If that’s the case it is unlikely Fanny lived with the family while they were living at the store and it is unlikely she assisted them before mid-1833. She most likely assisted between 1834 and 1836, in their home up near the temple.
This is important information as it increases Fanny’s age possibly as high as 20 years old when she began her polygamous relationship with Joseph Smith. This is far from the child that anti-Mormons want you to imagine Fanny Alger to have been in order to create the image of a dangerous, lecherous Joseph Smith they can use as a straw man in their arguments.
The marriage wasn’t performed without the knowledge of Alger’s parents, nor does there seem to have been a period of courtship. Rather, in a form so old fashioned that today it is positively archaic, Joseph asked Levi Hancock, Alger’s uncle, to approach her and ask for permission to marry her. They gave permission and the plural marriage was performed by Hancock repeating words told to him by Joseph as the ceremony occurred. You can read Hancock’s account here:
Father goes to the Father Samuel Alger—his Father’s Brother in Law and [said] “Samuel the Prophet Joseph loves your Daughter Fanny and wishes her for a wife what say you”—Uncle Sam Says—“Go and talk to the old woman about it twi’ll be as She says” Father goes to his Sister and said “Clarissy, Brother Joseph the Prophet of the most high God loves Fanny and wishes her for a wife what say you” Said She “go and talk to Fanny it will be all right with me”—Father goes to Fanny and said “Fanny Brother Joseph the Prophet loves you and wishes you for a wife will you be his wife”? “I will Levi” Said She. Father takes Fanny to Joseph and said “Brother Joseph I have been successful in my mission”—Father gave her to Joseph repeating the Ceremony as Joseph repeated to him.
The whole thing was, in essence, an arranged marriage. And afterwards, though Fanny herself eventually married another man and moved away, the Alger family stayed loyal to the church and made the Exodus west in 1846 and settled in southern Utah where they died in the 1870s. As Dr. Brian Hales notes, it seems unlikely that they would have done so if they had viewed the entire experience as a tawdry affair with Joseph violating both common sexual mores and their daughter.
Of the two, this is perhaps Joseph’s least controversial marriage. Fanny was definitely old enough to be considered “of age” at the time she was married to Joseph, even if you go with the youngest, unlikeliest age of 16. Even now the sexual age of consent is 16 in many places and in more than half the states in the US you can be married at 17 or younger with parental permission such as in this case. Today she would be considered young even if she was married to Joseph at the more likely later ages of 18-20 but that isn’t the same thing as pedophilia. But neither then nor now, perhaps more especially then, would the age be an issue of controversy. This is simply an issue of society being different in the past than it is today.
The real controversial issue here is that she is a polygamous wife not her age. And whether you think polygamy was a commandment of God or not is entirely based on your religious belief, not a general moral principle. If Joseph Smith was a Prophet of God then polygamy was a commandment of God, if not then you’ll read into it what you want as an explanation. No matter what you want to believe, the case is clear enough here that neither then nor now does the case of Fanny Alger suggest Joseph was a pedophile. Near the end of her life, when asked about her relationship with Joseph, long after his death, she responded, “That is all a matter of my own. And I have nothing to Communicate.”[Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling page 327, 2005]
The next case is a little more challenging. It is the case of Helen Mar Kimball.
Helen Mar Kimball
Helen Mar Kimball was the young daughter of Heber C. Kimball, one of the original Twelve Apostles of the modern era. He would go on to be First Counselor in the First Presidency from 1847 to 1868. The evidence in the case of Helen Mar Kimball is clear. She was sealed to Joseph Smith when she was 14 years old.
Okay. Take a breath if you need to do so. For some that may be a shock. Joseph Smith was married to a girl as young as 14 years old. Doesn’t that then mean he was having sex with a 14-year-old and isn’t that definitely pedophilia? Well, the answer to the first question is sort of (he was sealed to her but what this meant will be elaborated upon further down), and no. He didn’t have sex with her. That is an assumption without any evidence for it and with a good amount of evidence against it.
So, then what do we know about Helen’s case? Quite a lot actually. She is one of the few plural wives of Joseph’s who actually wrote an account of it later in life.
First off, Joseph Smith didn’t approach anyone about marrying Helen. Helen’s father, Heber, approached Joseph Smith asking if he would be sealed to Heber’s daughter, Helen. The reason for this was because Heber loved Joseph Smith. Heber wanted he and his family to be eternally united to the Prophet of God in a completely unbreakable way that would ensure that they would eternally be together in the Celestial Kingdom. So, how did he do that? He asked his young daughter if she would be sealed to Joseph and asked Joseph if he would be sealed to her. They both agreed and then they went and asked Helen, who upon hearing the teaching about sealing agreed to it and so the sealing was performed. It had nothing to do with Joseph’s supposed sexual deviancy or even any initiative on his part. And again, we see this very traditional form of almost arranged marriage taking place.
This motivation, to be united for eternity to the family of the Prophet, reveals a very different motivation for sealings than what we have today. Today sealings equate exactly to the idea of being married and making babies- an eternal family. This was not always the case in the early church. When sealings were first revealed they were undertaken for many reasons other than strictly uniting biological or legal families together for eternity. Consider the Law of Adoption.
In the early LDS theology of the Law of Adoption a person could be sealed as the son of a prominent church leader, (though it was not necessarily always a church leader) thereby ensuring their salvation and exaltation as “legitimate” family – most often as children or spouses- of the church leader. This was especially true of converts whose families often rejected them upon their conversion to the church. The method by which this was done was the sealing, which was performed not just to seal husbands and wives but to seal people to one another in a vast array of family relationships based not upon blood but priesthood ties. According to Dr. Samuel Brown, “For the early Latter-day Saints, a savior on Mount Zion was an individual responsible for ensuring a place for his adoptive kindred in the society of the blessed at the time of final judgment.” (ibid, 46) The Law of Adoption sealed people without faithful member families into eternal family relationships to church leaders which would ensure salvation and exaltation for those so sealed.
Take for example the case of John Milton Bernhisel. Eight months before the Martyrdom, the Prophet Joseph Smith sealed the still unwedded 44-year-old Bernhisel to eleven different friends and family members, either as their eternal father, brother, or husband. This group included a deceased female friend, four of his aunts, and his brother’s wife. In 1846, after the murders of the Prophet and Patriarch, Bernhisel was sealed to Joseph Smith as his son “by the law of adoption and to become a legal heir to all the blessings bestowed upon Joseph Smith pertaining to exaltations.” (ibid 68) And Bernhisel is but one example of this system that saw orphans sealed to new fathers and people in what we today might term “part member families” to new spouses in order to ensure their exaltation in the Celestial Kingdom. Starting after the Martyrdom, thousands of men and women ranging from their 20s to their 40s were “adopted into” the families of prominent church leaders through the sealing power with 74% of these adopted members were sealed to Apostles Heber C. Kimball, Willard Richards, John Taylor, or Brigham Young. And many of those sealed to these church leaders actually took upon themselves the last names of their adopted fathers. The reason so many member leapt at the chance to be sealed to church leaders or to people who themselves been sealed to church leaders is explained by Dr. Brown:
Two weeks later Smith reiterated that the adoptive associations, “seal[ing] the hearts of the fathers to the children and the children to the fathers” would be operationalized through the temple rituals of “anointing & sealing.” Their exercise would ensure that the Saints were “called elected and made sure.” This power over election meant Mormons could save their children, reliably and durably. This development of the adoption theology eliminated the specter of families broken apart by the later iniquity of a child.
…By 1842, Smith had made clear that the full-fledged adoption theology was adequate to secure the salvation of children. In his famous Elijah sermon, he preached that “a measure of this sealing is to confirm upon their head in common with Elijah the doctrine of election or the covenant with Abraham -which when a Father & mother of a family have entered into[,] their children who have not transgressed are secured by the seal where with the Parents have been sealed.” William Clayton’s account of the sermon confirmed that when parents make “their calling and election sure … a seal is put on the father and mother [securing] their posterity so that they cannot be lost but will be saved by virtue of the covenant of their father.”
It seems to me that when Heber asked Helen to be sealed to Joseph Smith, he was contemplating the Law of Adoption as Bernhisel had and thousands of others later would. Heber wasn’t looking to pimp his 14-year-old daughter out to a man twice her age. Heber was looking to use the sealing power as a way to ensure that his family was “adopted” into the family of the Prophet. This would ensure not only Helen’s exaltation, but the exaltation of their entire family as it became one with the family of the Prophet. On some level Helen was not married to Joseph as we think of it today with all the requirements of sexual intercourse and child rearing. She was sealed to Joseph, providing that desperately wanted eternal link between Joseph’s family and Heber’s that would unite them all forever.
Understanding the Law of Adoption and its promise that people sealed together by the priesthood in temple rituals would have an eternal family that could not be rended apart by sin helps us understand a comment of Helen’s that has often been used by anti-Mormons to make it sounds like Joseph was using his position to manipulate women into having sex with him. Helen remembered Joseph saying this to her when he, her father Heber, and her mother Vilate explained the sealing power to her:
If you will take this step, it will ensure your eternal salvation and exaltation & that of your father’s household & all of your kindred.
Taken out of context it certainly sounds like Joseph could be using his position to manipulate her. But in context you see something different. In context, it is clear that what is being taught to Helen is something that had been openly taught to many others – the power of the sealing to make your calling and election sure not only for yourself but for all those you are sealed to as well. Neither Joseph nor her parents were telling Helen that her salvation or the salvation of her family depended on her being sealed to Joseph, rather that doing so would ensure their salvation. So Helen is sealed to Joseph, who everyone assumes will be exalted. As a result she will be exalted. As a result of her exaltation and sealing to her family they will be exalted and so on. And it had to be a marriage sealing because if Helen were sealed to Joseph as his daughter that would potentially nullify her sealing to her father as his daughter, there by cutting her off from her family and preventing the very thing the sealing was designed to bring about.
After the Martyrdom, Helen would go on to marry Horace Kimball Whitney for “time only” when she was 16 years old. He was 22. This is more than a side note. Notice that she was publicly married to Horace at the exact same age that Fanny Alger was when she married Joseph Smith. And what public ruckus was there over Helen’s marriage at 16, which certainly included sexual intercourse? None. Why? Because, as we will discuss in some detail below, that was well within the social customs and legal age of consent for the era and more common than people today understand. Not even those who hated the church batted an eyelash at such a marriage because it was legal and socially accepted. This again demonstrates that in Joseph’s day the problem with his relationship with Fanny Alger was not her age but that it was polygamous.
As for a sexual relationship between Helen and Joseph, there is simply no evidence for it. In fact, from all accounts, Joseph Smith and Helen Kimball were never even alone together. (transcript pg. 9) They were always accompanied by a chaperone when around one another, which of course makes it difficult to ever have any time for sexual relations. Likewise, after her marriage to Joseph she continued to attend dances as a girl her age would. Some times a quote from Helen about how she wasn’t allowed to attend certain dances at the Mansion House in 1843 is used to support the idea that Helen was treated as a wife and couldn’t go to dances generally, but this doesn’t seem to be the case when the quote is seen in fuller context:
During the winter of 1843, there were plenty of parties and balls. … Some of the young gentlemen got up a series of dancing parties, to be held at the Mansion once a week. … I had to stay home, as my father had been warned by the Prophet to keep his daughter away from there, because of the blacklegs and certain ones of questionable character who attended there. … I felt quite sore over it, and thought it a very unkind act in father to allow [my brother] to go and enjoy the dance unrestrained with others of my companions, and fetter me down, for no girl loved dancing better than I did, and I really felt that it was too much to bear. It made the dull school still more dull, and like a wild bird I longed for the freedom that was denied me; and thought myself a much abused child, and that it was pardonable if I did murmur.
A “blackleg” was slang for a “professional criminal,” a “swindler,” or a gambler, which goes long with Helen’s mention of people of “questionable character” being at the dances. So what we have in context is not Joseph Smith trying to prevent his secret teenage bride from meeting younger men who would be romantic or sexual competition to him. Rather we have Joseph Smith telling his friend Heber to keep his only daughter away from dances where men of low character will be who would take advantage of her as any man might warn his friend today. Helen is complaining that, in a show of sexism that we would still see in many places now and which certainly fit the sexual mores of 19th century America, the boys were not treated the same as she was in regards to potential danger, romance, and sex.
Sexuality was simply not part of the relationship between Helen Kimball and Joseph Smith. Given the above evidence that Joseph Smith and Helen were never even in the same room alone together and that in general she seems to have been able to continue with dances and such there is hardly even a relationship between Joseph Smith and Helen to discuss. So, no. This is not proof Joseph Smith was a pedophile either. You have to have sex with children to be a pedophile and Joseph never did such a thing nor is there any evidence he ever wanted to do such a thing and the history of his plural marriages to Fanny Alger and Helen Mar Kimball bears this out.
Marriage Patterns in the 1800s
Okay, so all of that might make sense to you, but there is still something holding you back. Maybe the age issue is still making you squeamish. Whether it is 17 or 14, even being in a relationship anything like marriage may seem off putting to you. And that makes sense. It is a natural reaction to the world we live in today where women and men both marry at much older ages and 14 and 17-year-olds are thought of as being minors. But there is something to keep in mind here. We aren’t talking about the present day when we talk about these relationships. We’re talking about the early to mid-1800s. The question is how would a marriage between an adult man and a girl who is 17 or 14 appear in that time period? Well, we can sort of answer that.
The modern concept of the teenager developed as late as post-WWII America in the 1950’s. Before that time the idea of delaying the onset of adulthood all the way into a person’s twenties was practically unheard of. When you go back into the first half of the 1800’s you can clearly see how people we think of as children, thirteen-year-olds for example, were expected to work like adults. By 1820, “children made up more than 40 percent of the mill employees in at least three New England states…[and] more than 1 in 5 children by 1900.” Today this would, and most often is, seen as a sort of heinous crime by many. But the reasoning for it is straight-forward. Often, people were simply too poor to be able to have children without those same children working to help provide money and food for the family in greater proportion than they consumed. As a result, children laboring was seen as a social good in 19th century America:
Although the economic value of work for children was emphasized, its perceived underlying benefit was also important in its growth in the 19th century. This value was seen in the nature of the outreach that some organizations such as the Charles Loring Brace Children’s Aid Society (CAS) provided to orphaned children. In establishing its first lodging house for boys in 1854, the CAS emphasized that it would “treat the lads as independent little dealers and give them nothing without payment.” Through avoiding the prospect of idle children, CAS thought it was avoiding “the growth of a future dependent class.” It believed that the best way to bring children out of poverty was to have them work at an “honest trade.” …In annual reports, the CAS published letters that highlighted the productive capacity of the children. These letters reported things such as how the child “does nearly as much as a man” or was earning his keep
Children were not children when they reached what today we call adolescence. They were not seen as children with an innocence that needed to be protected but people who were ready to take upon themselves adult responsibilities. This short documentary on the issue of how adolescents were not seen as children or teens but as mini-adults with adult responsibilities before the mid-20th century, may help develop a further understanding of the issue.
As they were worked as adults, they were expected to take on more adult responsibilities. For women, this included preparing for marriage or even being married. Now, marriage rates in the US before the 20th century are hard to come by easily. But I have found one study that tracks marriage rates from 1850 to 1880 both on a national level and on a regional basis. The 1850 date is useful because it records what marriage patterns were like at the beginning of the decade, which also tells us what marriage patterns were like in the years culminating in the end date of 1850 -i.e. it gives us great indicators for what marriage patterns were like during the 1840’s when Joseph Smith was doing things like being sealed to 14 year old Helen Mar Kimball. And this study has some very revealing things.
First off, it shows that the average age for most women in the US held between 20 to 25 from 1850 to 1880. This is the number the critics of Joseph Smith often use to try and paint him as some radical pervert. What they ignore are the statistics that show how many women were married at ages younger than 20. From 1850 to 1880 the number of women married between the ages of 15 to 19 hovers right around 12%. That means one out of every ten girls, statistically, were married in the exact time frame that Joseph had married Fanny Alger and Helen Mar Kimball.
Secondly, when you look at the numbers by region, the percentages are much higher in the Western frontier regions than in the Eastern urban areas. And this holds true for areas where the Saints had little to no presence. For example, the Upper Mid-West (or West North Central Region in the study) 20% of women were married between the ages of 15 to 19. In the Southern Mid-West (or West South Central Region in the study) has 24.6% of its women marrying between the ages of 15 to 19, nearly 1 of every four! In the Northeast marriage rates for women marrying between ages 15 to 19 hover around 10% to 12% for most of the century and in the Southeast marriage rates for women marrying between ages 15 to 19 hovers around 16%-17%.
So, what does this tell us? Was America a nation of pedophiles during the 1800s, especially before the Civil War, when Joseph Smith lived? No, of course not! It tells us that while Joseph Smith’s marriages to Fanny Alger or Helen Mar Kimball may have stood out as perhaps a bit “redneck” or backwards, they wouldn’t have been anything highly irregular in the frontier regions that he spent most of his life living in. If they had been monogamous relationships the ages of the wives in question would not have been seen as illegal or immoral, even in the urban eastern regions. They weren’t pedophilia. What made them so very controversial was that they were polygamous.
In the book Michigan: A History of the Wolverine State, the standard history text for the history of Michigan, which is in the same region as Ohio (where Joseph married Fanny) and Illinois (where Jospeh was sealed to Helen), the historian and author Willis F. Dunbar addresses the issue of marriage in Michigan in the first half of the 1800’s. He writes:
“Social occasions found young people engaged in the age-old quest for a mate. Although the girls frequently sang a little ditty that announced,
I am too young, I am not fit,
I cannot leave my mamma yit,
They often said yes at the age of fourteen or fifteen if the right young man popped the question. Weddings were big events on the frontier, occasions for visiting, feasting, drinking, and making merry. Following the ceremony, the young couple was serenaded with all sorts of noisemaking paraphernalia a night or two after the wedding. This was called a ‘shiver-ee.’…Sexual irregularity was harshly condemned in pioneer days. …Any departure from the moral code met stern rebuke and social isolation from one’s neighbors.”
Michigan: A History of the Wolverine State, page 175
There are some very telling bits of information in that quotation. First of all, the bolded information makes it obvious that women being married at ages 14 and 15 were not unheard of in the exact time frame Joseph Smith was living in that region of the nation. Second, a few sentences after the main part of my quotation, but still on the same topic and same page, it is made clear that these marriages were not seen as immoral because even the slightest immorality would have been met with crushing social condemnation and isolation. Marriages to girls as young as Helen Mar Kimball were accepted as a moral state of affairs and moral marriage in the part of the country that Joseph lived there when he lived there.
As a passing bit of telling prose, the above ditty quoted by Dr. Dunbar that he says young women sang during this era, itself testifies to the very pattern we have seen with Joseph Smith’s marriage to Fanny Alger and sealing to Helen Mar Kimball. Here we see a social convention where older men requested the hands of 14 to 15-year-old girls from their parents who gave permission and then the girl would be married to the men in a style reminiscent of an arranged marriage. This quotation was found in a Pulitzer Prize winning biography on Abraham Lincoln’s early years in Indiana, showing that the situation it describes applied to more than just Michigan, but to the area all around, at the very least, which would of course include Ohio and Illinois- Michigan’s southern neighbors and Indiana’s western and eastern neighbors. Here is the ditty in full:
THUS THE FARMER SOWS HIS SEED
Come, my love, and go with me,
And I will take good care of thee.I am too young, I am not fit,
I cannot leave my mamma yit.You’re old enough, you are just right
Abe Lincoln Grows Up pages 131-132, 1975 edition
I asked your mamma last Saturday night.
The Legal Age of Consent
Not only were marriage ages drastically different than what we now have today, so were age of consent laws- that is the age at which a person was considered able to legally consent to sex. While this topic isn’t relevant when considering Joseph’s relationship to Helen, it might very well be considering his relationship with Fanny Alger might have included sex. So, what was the age of consent in the USA in the 1830’s and 1840’s? I don’t know. I haven’t found any evidence that goes back far enough. The earliest numbers I have found are for 1885, but even they will prove illuminating and possibly quite shocking as a demonstration of how Americans approached to concept of sexual consent during the 19th century. Below is a picture of a page from a book containing the historical work Statutory Rape Laws In Historical Context which shows a table of the age of consent laws in US states from 1885 to 1999. (Note: The age spans are marked as what they were in 1999, not what they were in 1885, if they existed at all in 1885.)
As late as 1885 the majority of US states set the age of sexual consent as low as 10 years old, 7 in Delaware! Why so low? Because when the average lifespan hovered between 38 (for men) and 44 (for women) meaning that you were already middle aged if you waited to 20 to get married, and children were thought to be more like mini-adults and expected to work like an adult, as talked about before, they were believed to be capable of making more adult decisions concerning sex and marriage at younger ages than in present times. This is why, as non-LDS anthropologist Manuel “Manu” Padro wrote that the real issue most people in the 1800’s had about Joseph Smith’s marriages wasn’t the age of his brides.
Neither was it the fact that these relationships seemed adulterous to outsiders. It also doesn’t appear to be his practice of polyamory. It would appear that the real issue behind the rage was heresy. This is reinforced by the content of 19th Century writings on Mormonism which often focused on heresy, and similarities to the Münster Rebellion and “fanatics” a 19th Century word used for people who believed in the gift of modern prophecy, like the Shakers and the German Pietists.
While his unconventional sex-life certainly inspired public scandal and outrage, I can’t say that I’ve seen any evidence that would cause me to conclude that the age of teenage brides was ever a concern for 19th Century Americans. Joseph Smith was to them, an outsider and a heretic. The real fuel to the scandals was heresy. Sexual impropriety was just a tool to punish that heresy. The age of his teenage brides seems to have not been considered a form of sexual impropriety by his many enemies.
In other words, it isn’t that Joseph may have had sex with multiple women . Nor does it seem like an issue that some, like Fanny, may have been younger than eighteen. In the above link, Padro gives multiple examples of cases of famous American men as well as social examples that include either or both of these factors occurring in early America without it resulting in social out cry or violence. The problem is that Joseph Smith was committing heresy by claiming modern revelation that authorized his participation in polygamy. He was seen as a threat to what we might identify today as W.A.S.P. -White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant- culture and for that he needed to be eliminated.
That the problem with Latter-day Saint marriage customs in the 19th century had nothing to do with the age of the brides but everything with the heretical belief in polygamy is also the conclusion of Dr. Martha Ertman, a law professor at the University of Maryland’s Francis King Carey School of Law, about why the Latter-day Saints were persecuted so violently even after the Martyrdom. This was because Americans:
saw a social treason against the nation of White citizens when Mormons adopted a supposedly barbaric marital form, one that was natural for “Asiatic and African” people, but so unnatural for Whites as to produce a new, degenerate species that threatened the project of white supremacy. …This discourse designated the overwhelmingly White Mormons as non-White to justify depriving them of citizenship rights such as voting, holding office, and sitting on juries. …[This] helps explain how designating Mormons a subject race rendered their subjugation inevitable.
Polygamy as a modern revelation, Padro’s “heresy” and Ertman’s “barbaric marital form” and “social treason,” was the problem Americans had with the Saints in the 19th century, not the age of the wives themselves. This is because before and after Joseph Smith’s era the ages at which Joseph Smith and those who followed after him were married/sealed to their wives was not the issue. The issue was the polygamous nature of the relationship, not the ages of those involved.
Conclusions
The history is conclusive. Joseph Smith was not a pedophile. According to the customs of the age he lived in, his relationships to both Fanny and Helen were not inappropriate because of their ages. Both relationships individually fell well within the legal, social, and cultural spectrum allowed in his day. The problem was that these relationships were polygamous, but in his era and time the ages of his wives were immaterial and well within social convention. As Padro explains, it is only with the changing ideals of children, sex, adulthood, and law that occurs over the course of the early to mid-20th century that it even becomes possible to cast Joseph Smith as a pedophile based solely on current social concept and, as a result, it is only during that era that the accusation first emerges. The present day effort to try and turn Joseph Smith into a pedophile is based on the blurring of history, the ignoring of the lived context within which Joseph Smith and thousands of others like him lived in, and is an effort to project our modern sensibilities onto a past people who were in many ways very different than we are now both in thought and how they lived. The accusation has nothing to do with actual history and can only exist by twisting or distorting actual historical facts if not by outright lying about them. On top of this, the only young wife that he could have possibly had sex with was Fanny Alger and she was not a child but was considered to at an age where she would be thought of and treated as an adult by the society of her era. She was not a “minor.” Joseph and Helen were never even alone in a room together so the likelihood that he had sexual relations with her is nil.
Of course, most anti-Mormons don’t actually care about that. Theirs is a vile effort based on ignorance to generate hatred to attack and destroy faith. In many ways it is a continuance of the hatred the Saints have always been subject to because they have the audacity to declare the heretical truth that the Heavens are open, that God speaks, that prophets walk the Earth today, and the God has established His church in modern times as He had anciently. The anti-Mormons are just looking for some scandalous charge to hurl at Joseph Smith to blacken his name and thereby also the church which he was the prime instrument of God in restoring. Most of them couldn’t be bothered to plumb the actual history and theology of the era to understand the man in context. And the few that do, once their claims are disproven, simply move on to the next slanderous assertion to try and accomplish their goals.
Unknowingly or not, in doing so they only further prove Moroni’s prophecy that Joseph’s name “should be had for good and evil among all nations, kindreds, and tongues, or that it should be both good and evil spoken of among all people” (JS-H 1:33).As the Lord told Joseph when he was suffering in Liberty Jail, “The ends of the earth shall inquire after thy name, and fools shall have thee in derision, and hell shall rage against thee; While the pure in heart, and the wise, and the noble, and the virtuous, shall seek a counsel, and authority, and blessings constantly from under thy hand.” (D&C 122:1-2) In this instance and in many others, these scriptures are being fulfilled before our very eyes and in our very lives.