During the 19th century, what can
be called kingdom theology dominated sealing practices. Kingdom theology can be
seen most clearly in the law of adoption, where sealings between
non-biologically related adults were designed to bind individuals in eternal, dynastic
structures with patriarchal heads. Joseph Smith’s sealing practice was confined
to marriage, but shortly after his death. Brigham Young and his associates instituted
adoptive sealings. Initially these took the form of sealing nonbiological
relationships in which adults were sealed to high church leaders as members of
their extended adoptive “families” or “kingdoms.” These massive “families”
proved important organizational structures during the Mormon exodus to the
Great Basin. Thereafter the so-called law of adoption was suspended until the first
Utah temple was dedicated in 1877 at St. George. At that point, there was an
effort to reinstitute the practice. Within this theological frame, marriage
sealings were another mechanism for creating priestly connections, at times in
disregard of temporal family relationships. Where modern Latter-day Saints
think of such sealings in terms of “eternal families” using ideas of
companionate marriage and nuclear families, their 19th-century forebearers
thought in terms of kingdom and sacral networks. (Nathan B. Oman, Living
Oracles: Law and the Latter-day Saint Tradition [Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2026], 168-69)
This explains, for example, the
bewildering variety of Brigham Young’s plural marriages. Fifty-five women were
sealed to Young. Only sixteen of these women bore his children. Twenty-three of
the women belonged to Young’s households, although some of these wives likely did
not have a sexual relationship with Young. The other women were sealed into
Young’s eternal kingdom without becoming part of his earthly family. Some of
these women were much older when they were sealed to Young, including one woman
sealed on her deathbed. Some of them held themselves out as “wife of President
Young” without being part of his household. Some of the women were sealed to
Young while continuing to be married to other men, presumably to be included in
Young’s postmortal dynasty. See generally Jeffrey Ogden Johnson, “Determining
and Defining ‘Wife’: The Brigham Young Households,” Dialogue: A Journal
of Mormon Thought 20, no. 3 (1987): 57-70. (Ibid., 274 n. 43)
