They named me Lucy on March 3rd. Dressed in white (dress, socks, slippers), I clutched a lacy sack of sacred clothing while I followed the small congregation from room to room of the Mormon temple. I entered a closet-like space, the place they name people in, the room that launches a person from who they were before their naming to who they become after. The two of us alone in the closet: the temple worker, a twenty-something woman who wore clothes that matched mine, whispered my new name.
“Lucy,” she said. Lucy, Lucy, Lucy. I could not forget it. With the exception of the divinely-appointed temple workers and a woman’s husband, no one is to know a person’s temple name. A film during the temple ceremony specifies the new name is information a person “should always remember and which [they] must keep sacred and never reveal, except at a certain place…”1 That certain place, the only moment a woman is allowed to confess the name aloud, is at the conclusion of the ceremony when she reveals the name to her husband. Men are forbidden from ever disclosing their name to their wives. Lucy. Lucy. Lucy.
I don’t know what my ex-husband’s name is. He knows mine. When I divulged my name, upon the temple worker’s permission, I hesitated. I had been named Lucy for one hour, and I already felt attached to it, hesitant to say the name out loud, to let it slip from my lips. The name that was mine became his too. Our secret.
…
“The Prophet came to the rescue,”2 Lucy Walker wrote. In the spring of 1841, the Walker family rebuilt their lives in Nauvoo, Illinois, as part of the Mormon migration west out of New York. A year after their arrival, Lucy’s mother died. Fifteen-year-old Lucy, among her nine other siblings, was left motherless and shortly thereafter her father’s health deteriorated. Joseph Smith, the founder and prophet of the Mormon church, offered a solution. “You have [just] a family as I could love,” Joseph said to Lucy’s father. “My house shall be their home … place the little ones with kind friends, and the four Eldest shall come to my house and [be] received and treated as my own children.”3 Lucy was child number four.
Despite Joseph’s perceived heroism, Lucy wrung her hands “in the agony of despair”4 over her family’s separation. Mr. Walker hoped to reunite his family once his health improved, but a future revelation from Joseph would soon change everything.
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Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, colloquially referred to as Mormons, receive their new name when they “take out their endowment”5 in the temple. The Mormon endowment ceremony is often done on the cusp of adulthood: prior to serving a Mormon mission, or days before a celestial marriage.
The temple is the pinnacle of the religion. The church’s official doctrine states “Everything in the Church—the meetings and activities, the missionary efforts, the lessons taught and the hymns—all lead to the work done in holy temples.”6 More than 17,000 Mormon meetinghouses stand across the world as a place to worship, many of which display signs that announce, “Visitors Welcome.” Temples, on the other hand, are deemed “literal houses of the Lord” and are highly exclusive—buildings only the most stalwart Mormons enter. Fewer than two hundred temples currently operate worldwide.7
Temples provide ordinances (sacred rituals) for exaltation. For someone to attain the highest degree of glory in the celestial kingdom, a certain set of ordinances must be performed for that person: baptism, confirmation, ordination to the Melchizedek Priesthood (for men), endowment, and temple marriage to a worthy person of the opposite sex.8 Mormon heaven is hierarchical, with only the ordinance-holding Mormons at the top. Members of the church tend to hold a deep desire to prevent empty seats in heaven, thus doing all they can to save their family members from kingdom separation. The temple, and only the temple, ensures eternal families, together forever.
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My ex-husband and I married quickly. I was nineteen years old. When we were dating, he brought up marriage within weeks of knowing each other. I thought I loved him, imagined marrying him even, but the relationship was moving fast, and I didn’t know how to slow it down. In October, he suggested we marry in March. I suggested May, past my birthday so I would no longer be a teenager.
“Why would we wait?” he asked, and he tickled my knee with his fingers. “This is what God wants. Why would we postpone God’s plan?” Other than my own fear, and because I believed God had actually answered his prayer, I could think of no reason to postpone. “I prayed and God wants us to get married on March 5,” he said. Alone in my bedroom I prayed too, eager to feel the affirmation of our union. At first I felt no confirmation. For days I returned to my knees and begged God for a sign that marrying soon was His plan for me. While I waited for God to approve of the marriage date, my not-yet-fiancé urged us to finalize a temple reservation for March 5. After all, he said, we could always cancel the reservation if God told me no.
Mormons are taught that God’s Spirit speaks to us through warm feelings, often described as bosoms burning. During prayer I stayed on my knees long enough for cheap apartment carpet to press wrinkles into my knees. As I prayed and thought about my then-boyfriend, I felt happy imagining a life with him. Through my warm feelings I believed God told me yes.
At Judgment Day, Mormon doctrine claims Jesus will call men by their new names to direct them into heaven. Husbands will then direct women into heaven by their new names.9 I took out my own endowment and was named Lucy two days before the wedding.
“Lucy,” I whispered to my fiancé when prompted at the temple. He then grabbed my hand, and, with interlocked fingers, pulled me past a white sheet that symbolized the veil and into a new room representative of heaven, a rehearsal for him one day pulling me into the celestial kingdom. He smiled at me, and I took in the symbols of heaven: the chandeliers, the lights, the vases of flowers. He kept hold of my hand while we sat on a white velvet loveseat with oak armrests, and I knew what heaven would be like with him.
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The prophet Joseph Smith introduced Lucy Walker to others as his daughter. In 184210, the year after Lucy’s mother died, Joseph asked Lucy’s brother (Joseph had sent Mr. Walker away on a church mission) for his blessing in marrying her as a plural wife. In 1843, Joseph claimed that God revealed to him the requirement of polygamy, although Joseph had been secretly practicing plural marriage for years. Joseph claimed that God sent an angel three times commanding him to practice polygamy. The church’s current official statement on plural marriage suggests “when God commands a difficult task, He sometimes sends additional messengers to encourage His people to obey.”11 Upon the angel’s third visit, “The angel came with a drawn sword, threatening Joseph with destruction unless he went forward and obeyed the commandment fully.” Joseph, ever faithful, begrudgingly agreed.
In 1842, most Mormons squirmed in discomfort when confronted with the commandment of plural marriage, yet Lucy’s brother was impressed by Joseph Smith. He noted “instead of taking a course to deceive and prostitute and bring about [Lucy’s] ruin, he took a straight-forward, honorable, and upright course, in no way depriving her of her agency.”12 Thus, Lucy’s brother consented to Lucy becoming one of Joseph’s eventual thirty-four (or more) plural wives. Joseph was thirty-eight years old. Lucy was sixteen.
Lucy described Joseph’s proposal as a thunderbolt. “Gross darkness instead of light took possession of my mind,” she wrote. Joseph informed her he had “been commanded of God to take another wife” and she “was the woman.” Lucy’s “astonishment knew no bounds.”
Horrified, Lucy felt “tempted and tortured beyond endurance until life was not desirable.” Joseph grew up a farm boy, known among his family and friends for both his physical and mental strength, as well as his ability to tell elaborate and engaging stories on the spot. With the authority of being a prophet and her foster father, along with the charisma and reputation Joseph held, Lucy, a teenager, likely wondered whether or not she even had a choice. She didn’t accept or deny him; instead, she said nothing. Joseph asked if she believed him to be a prophet, a demand for her to express devotion not only to God, but to him.
“Most assuredly I do,” Lucy replied.
“If you will pray sincerely for light and understanding in relation thereto, you shall receive a testimony of the correctness of this principle,” Joseph responded. And Lucy did. She prayed to God, “Why should I be chosen from among thy daughters, Father, I am only a child in years and experience, no mother to counsel; no father near to tell me what to do in this trying hour.” Lacking comfort she wrote, “Oh that the grave would kindly receive me, that I might find rest on the bosom of my dear mother. Oh, let this bitter cup pass. And thus,” she wrote, “I prayed in the agony of my soul.”13
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There is a moment at the start of the temple ceremony in which a temple worker offers an opt-out prior to making the covenants. Once a person is dressed in the sacred undergarments and attire, once all attendees that day are gathered and seated in a chapel, a person can choose to stand up and flee. However, to keep with tradition, many people bring family and friends to celebrate the endowment ceremony. A person publicly escaping is unlikely.
Much of the temple ceremony remains a secret, even to members of the church. The temple is considered the most sacred portion of the gospel and members are forbidden from discussing the ceremony outside of the temple. The ceremony includes making sacred covenants—promises to give everything, including ten percent of their income, to the gospel for the rest of eternity. Further, Mormons promise during the ceremony that if they reveal the secrets of the temple, they will suffer their life to be taken.14 And so with the stakes of protecting these secrets, I knew very little about the Mormon temple ceremony before I was enmeshed in it.
Receiving a new temple name is one of the first rituals of the ceremony. Mormons are taught that this temple name is their true name, their Heavenly name, the name that God gives to each person individually.
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Within a month of marriage, I Googled definitions of marital sexual abuse. I learned words like “coercion” and “consent” and “marital assault.” One of the covenants I made in the temple was to “hearken to the counsel of your husband as he hearkens to the counsel of the Father.”15 My husband read scriptures aloud to us each night, then we knelt and prayed by the side of our bed. Nightly, before I rose from my knees after prayer, he touched me. When I didn’t want to have sex, he explained how it was my duty to oblige his needs.
When I resisted, he placed his hands on my head and, using the supposed priesthood power given to worthy men as young as eleven, blessed me to understand him. A verse in Mormon scripture states, “If any man have a wife, who holds the keys of this power, and he teaches unto her the law of my priesthood, as pertaining to these things, then shall she believe and administer unto him, or she shall be destroyed. Saith the Lord your God; for I will destroy her.”16 The verse, a revelation recorded by Joseph Smith in 1843, was a direct instruction to Emma Smith, Joseph’s first wife, commanding her to accept Joseph’s polygamy. A requirement of Mormon women to obey their husbands became canonized as doctrine, both in the temple and in scripture. I tried to feel God’s Spirit when my husband blessed me with the power I believed he held, the power that, as a woman, I would never be permitted to feel.
With closed eyes and my husband’s hands on my head, I yearned for the Light of Christ to counsel me. I felt nothing. When I opened my eyes and his hands were off my head and on my chest, my hips, my crotch, I tried crawling away but ended up on the bed all the same. Aiming to avoid my husband, I avoided praying with him. Instead, I prayed in secret. When I prayed alone on the floor of the bathroom, my agony became fervent pleas for help. When my husband prayed, he attested that God revealed more sex would consecrate our marriage. God, it seemed to me at the time, answered our prayers differently.
After I took out my own endowments in the temple, despite many arguments with my husband, I refused to return to the temple with him. The expectation for Mormons is that once endowed, married couples return often to renew their covenants, but I didn’t want to hearken unto him again. I didn’t want him to call my name and mime pulling me through to heaven. I didn’t want to watch him nod and say “yes” in a promise to preside over our family. I believed that one day what we mimicked in the temple would become reality at the resurrection, but I couldn’t bear the thought of its reenactment. So I didn’t go back. But my husband was committed to the gospel. He would not be deterred.
There is no way to become un-endowed. There is no way to undo the covenants or give back the temple name. I was Lucy, for good.
…
After Lucy’s agonizing prayer, Joseph Smith, undeterred, arranged to meet with her again. He clarified that the marriage he proposed must remain a secret, but that one day he would be free to flaunt their arrangement in public.
“I have no flattering words to offer,” Joseph told Lucy, speaking as the prophet, her stand-in father, and her future husband. “It is a command of God to you. I will give you until tomorrow to decide this matter. If you reject this message the gate will be closed forever against you.” Lucy stared at Joseph, looked him in the eye. She wrote how she felt no fear, only that she was called to place herself on the altar as a living sacrifice. After a few moments, she spoke.
“Although you are a prophet of God, you could not induce me to take a step of so great importance unless I knew that God approved my course. I would rather die,” she said. “I have tried to pray but received no comfort, no light. The same God who has sent this message is the Being I have worshipped from my early childhood, and He must manifest His will to me.”
The prophet paused. He walked across the room. After a moment, he returned to Lucy. He smiled.
“God Almighty bless you,” he said. “You shall have a manifestation of the will of God concerning you; a testimony that you can never deny. I will tell you what it shall be. It shall be that joy and peace that you never knew.”
And so, Lucy returned to her room. Instead of sleeping, she prayed again.
She begged for the confirmation that Joseph promised her. Suddenly, a heavenly light filled her room, a “brilliant sun bursting through the darkest cloud.” She wrote how she knew at that moment Joseph Smith was indeed a prophet, and she was to marry him. Lucy experienced deep joy and immediate understanding of the revelation of plural marriage, an anchor to her faith and to her soul. She hurried down the stairs, where Joseph met her. He grabbed her hand.
“Thank God, you have the testimony,” he told her. “I too have prayed.” He guided her into a chair, “placed his hands upon [her] head, and blessed [her] with every blessing [her] heart could possibly desire.”17
Lucy and Joseph married in Joseph’s home on May 1, 1843. Emma Smith “did not consent to the marriage of Joseph and Lucy. In fact, Lucy writes that “she did not know anything about it at all. It was not a love matter, so to speak, in our affairs, … but simply the giving up of myself as a sacrifice to establish that grand and glorious principle that God had revealed to the world.” After the wedding, Joseph and Lucy lived together and “cohabitated … as such.”18
Joseph was killed in 1844, and Lucy was assigned to remarry another church leader. She knew that in heaven her second husband would “surrender” Lucy and her children back to Joseph Smith for time and all eternity. Lucy remained an active member of the church to her death.
…
Despite what members are taught, temple names are not divinely given, and God Himself does not whisper in the ear of temple workers the individual name for each person who takes out their endowment. Instead, there is a list of thirty-two names for men and thirty-two names for women that the temple cycles through. Around the world, at any given temple on any given day, all men are given the same name and all women are given an adjacent name from the list. The third of each month is Lucy day for women; men are named Aaron. General church membership is not taught about the list of names. It was deflating to learn that temple names aren’t special, that they come from a calendar and not from the mouth of God.
The temple names originated with even less personalization. Up until 1878, all women were Sarah, and all men were Abraham. Each Sarah and Abraham believed themselves to be the only ones. Members became suspicious when temple workers repeated the name just a little louder for those who were hard of hearing. Fanny Stenhouse wrote in 1860 she began to feel a bit disillusioned by her own name when a deaf woman had to be repeatedly told her name was Sarah. “To make the matter worse,” writes Fanny, “another sister whispered: ‘Why, that is my name too.’”19
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At twenty-years-old, I paced my small apartment and lapped the kitchen to the hallway to the bedroom and back again, counting how many years I might live with my husband. I yearned for my heart to stop abruptly from a spontaneous attack or a car accident, but I fell to the floor in the hallway when I realized that based on Mormon doctrine, my husband would still preside over me in the afterlife. Not even dying could save me. His priesthood followed me beyond death. “The noblest yearning of the human heart,” Russell M. Nelson said ten years before he became the current prophet, “is for a marriage that can endure beyond death.” Marriage, he continued, “is a divine commandment.”20 Divorce would leave me alone in this life and, my husband assured me, no one would marry a divorced Mormon. Single women in heaven will either surrender themselves to being a plural wife, or as Mormon lore tells it, exist as servants to those in upper kingdoms. For a Mormon, divorce ends not only a legal bond, but a celestial one — breaking the most important covenant of this life. And yet, I saw no other option. Eternity in a lesser heaven seemed safer than eternity with him. We divorced as quickly as we married.
When packing up my things, I found my husband had left scriptures open on his nightstand, likely a message intended for me. He’d highlighted one verse on the displayed page, a comment on Jesus’ continual forgiveness. I don’t know if he wanted me to read the verse as Jesus forgiving me or him. Still, the last message of our marriage was found in Mormon scripture. It seemed that he still believed he was following Mormon teachings, in spite of everything, and though the thought devastated me, at the very least he wasn’t the first Mormon man to use the doctrine to coerce or assault.
A few months after divorce, the First Presidency of the church mailed me a document confirming that my marriage was eternally canceled, as were the associated heavenly blessings.
I tried to carry the name Lucy for a few more years. I believed God still wanted me to be her. I began to attend the temple again, alone. Each time I returned, put on the temple clothing and became Lucy, I panicked. Inside the ornate and sacred rooms, beneath murals of the Garden of Eden and Jesus Christ and atop white cushioned seats, I sat on my hands to hide their trembling. Because I attended without a husband, an assigned temple worker stood in his place to pull me through the veil.
Even with repetition, the ceremony continued to bother me. Attempting to reignite my faith after divorce, I learned more about my religion, the stuff kept in journals and newspaper articles and never spoken of in Sunday School. I learned of Lucy Walker, who became Lucy Walker Smith. How she wished to reject the prophet’s proposal, but he wore her down until she said yes. And I learned how my husband’s coercion and use of the priesthood was not a fluke, that he was following in the steps of the prophet.
I learned of Joseph Smith’s other wives—many of whom did not consent—many of whom were teenagers.21 I learned the names of his known wives’ were:
Emma Hale
Fanny Alger
Lucinda Morgan Harris
Louisa Beaman
Zina Huntington Jacobs
Presendia Huntington Buell
Agnes Coolbrith
Sylvia Sessions Lyon
Mary Rollins Lightner
Patty Bartlett Sessions
Marinda Johnson Hyde
Elizabeth Davis Durfee
Sarah Kingsley Cleveland
Delcena Johnson
Eliza R. Snow
Sarah Ann Whitney
Martha McBride Knight
Ruth Vose Sayers
Flora Ann Woodworth
Emily Dow Partridge
Eliza Maria Partridge
Almera Johnson
Lucy Walker
Sarah Lawrence
Maria Lawrence
Helen Mar Kimball
Hanna Ells
Elvira Cowles Holmes
Rhoda Richards
Desdemona Fullmer
Olive Frost
Melissa Lott
Nancy Winchester
Fanny Young
I stopped attending the Mormon church. I continued learning and studying the gospel because I discovered that I wasn’t the only person harmed in the name of a religion that wasn’t true, because the beliefs and sacred secrets weren’t benign. I studied because I could not become apathetic to Mormonism after years of complete orthodoxy and loyalty turned to pain. I studied, and I wrote, and I talked because I learned in scripture to “take care of these sacred things,” to “go unto this people and declare the word.”22
After I left Mormonism, I began telling people my temple name.
“Lucy,” I whispered to a friend who’d also left the church. My purported shot at heaven collapsed with the vocalization. My reveal broke the covenants I’d made in the temple, a sacrilege I postponed not only to avoid offending the God I’d once worshipped, but because I didn’t want to devastate any Mormon member who heard my whisper. Yet saying the name softened the wound. I reclaimed Lucy. I may not know my ex-husband’s temple name, but I would tell everyone mine. I spread the name like seed, each utterance taking away the last secret he knew of me. I told the name because Lucy trapped me. And so, I freed her. And Lucy left.
1Kimball, Clint, “Temple Name Oracle,” Fuller Consideration, accessed September 24, 2021, https://www.fullerconsideration.com/TempleNameOracle/?fbclid=IwAR0Rnw9IkBS7Aoqq3lbH4j9X_K5DUhVe8fbZaD-CZm0AYN1MSIH1dQzN4DA.
2Hales, Brian and Laura Hales, “Lucy Walker,” Joseph Smith’s Polygamy, accessed October 1, 2021, https://josephsmithspolygamy.org/plural-wives-overview/lucy-walker/.
3Hales, Brian and Laura Hales, “Lucy Walker.”
4Park, Lindsay Hansen, “Lucy Walker: Remembering the Forgotten Women of Joseph Smith.” Feminist Mormon Housewives, February 14, 2012, http://www.feministmormonhousewives.org/2012/02/lucy-walker-remembering-the-forgotten-women-of-joseph-smith/.
5“Endowment,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, accessed October 1, 2021, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics/endowment?lang=eng.
6“Temples,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, accessed October 1, 2021, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics/temples?lang=eng.
7Fleming, Esther, “How Many Chapels Does the LDS Church Have?” Sidmartinbio, April 22, 2020, https://www.sidmartinbio.org/how-many-chapels-does-the-lds-church-have/ – How_many_chapels_does_the_LDS_Church_have.
8“Covenants, Ordinances, and Temples in the Plan of Salvation,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Accessed June 1, 2023, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/introduction-to-family-history-student-manual/chapter-10?lang=eng.
9“Calling the Wife on the Resurrection Day,” Mormonism Research Ministry, accessed June 1, 2023, https://www.mrm.org/calling-the-wife.
10Lucy Walker recalls the year to be 1842. Lucy’s brother cites Joseph asking his blessing in 1843.
11“Plural Marriage in Kirtland and Nauvoo,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, accessed October 1, 2021, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/introduction-to-family-history-student-manual/chapter-10?lang=eng.
12Hales, Brian and Laura Hales, “Lucy Walker.”
13Park, Lindsay Hansen, “Lucy Walker: Remembering the Forgotten Women of Joseph Smith.”
14“LDS (Mormon) Temple Penalties,” About the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon), accessed October 1, 2021, https://www.lds-mormon.com/penalty-shtml//.
15“The Garden (1990),” The LDS Endowment, accessed October 1, 2021, http://www.ldsendowment.org/1990garden.html.
16Doctrine and Covenants, 1835, 132:64.
17Hales, Brian and Laura Hales, “Lucy Walker.”
18Park, Lindsay Hansen, “Lucy Walker: Remembering the Forgotten Women of Joseph Smith.”
19Kimball, Clint, “Temple Name Oracle.”
20Nelson, Russell M, “Celestial Marriage,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, October 2008, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2008/10/celestial-marriage?lang=eng.
21“Remembering the Wives of Joseph Smith,” Wives of Joseph Smith, accessed October 1, 2021, http://www.wivesofjosephsmith.org/.
22The Book of Mormon, March 1830, Alma 37:47.
ALYSSA WITBECK holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Montana where she was an editor for CutBank. She is published in Fiction Attic Press, Miracle Monocle, Rupture, Chestnut Review, and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and won the Original Utah Writing Competition. Based in Utah, she teaches university English composition courses. She crochets an unsustainable number of stuffed animals, for no real reason. Find her online @alyssawitbeck.