The widespread practice of polygamy and polyandry among the 19th-century Saints is one of those thorny topics that no one in LDS studies can avoid for long. Far be it from me to attempt any sort of resolution of this incredibly fraught topic here. Rather, I’d only like to contribute just one additional wrinkle to the conversation, by means of Giles Deleuze and Félix Guatarri’s 1980 work of French high theory Capitalism and Schizophrenia, vol 2: A Thousand Plateaus. I do so not to disentangle this mass, but to ponder if perhaps the tangled mass is itself the point.

Before getting too lost in the theoretical weeds, an anecdote: some time in the ’80s, my Dad was a Bishop up in the Pacific Northwest. A recently-divorced woman in his ward had applied for cancellation of Temple sealing. The application was denied by the First Presidency. My Dad got on the phone with Salt Lake to demand an explanation, since he was the poor sap who had to break the news to the lady. He never told me who he got on the phone that day (and he either no longer remembers or never knew in the first place), but the quick and dirty he received was this:

1. The War in Heaven was fought over Free Agency.
2. Lucifer and his allies wished to overthrow Free Agency.
3. God the Father however preserved our Free Agency.
4. Therefore, Free Agency is sacred, an eternal principle that we will continue to exercise in the next life.
5. Therefore [and this is the doctrine I had never heard before], we will still have choice as to who to spend Eternity with, even if we are sealed to only one spouse in this life.
6. Therefore, this woman would not be required to stay with her husband in the next life, or at any other point in Eternity.
7. And since the Temple Sealing ordinance is necessary to achieve the highest level of the Celestial Kingdom (cf. D&C 131:2-4), and since her ex-husband would have no more claim on her in the next life than in this one without her consent (thus rendering the question of who she is married to moot), the First Presidency was unwilling to cancel her Sealing until she got remarried.

My Dad didn’t share with me this anecdote till I was well into grad school, and I had certainly never heard this doctrine taught before nor since in all the manifold Primary, Seminary, Institute, and Sunday School classes I have participated in throughout my church-attending lifetime. Now, whether this is official doctrine or simply the personal interpretation of some random General Authority or secretary who happened to pick up the phone that day, is a question for another day (as is the question, for that matter, of whether this interpretation is even a good or desirable way to resolve the sticky gendered questions of Temple divorce in the Church). For now, I will restrict myself solely to contemplating the rhizomatic nature of this singular doctrinal interpretation.

In the aforementioned vol. 2 of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guatarri (and this is a gross over-simplification of a complex argument) offer the “rhizome”—from the Greek rhízōma, meaning an entangled mass of roots—as a model for a non-hierarchical organization of ideas and interpretations. They oppose it to an aborescent (or tree-like, hierarchical) conception of organization; indeed, this top down organizational tree is what we normally find is the default of governments, corporations, non-profits, large churches, and all other forms of bureaucracy. For that matter, our own very thought patterns are typically organized in these deeply hierarchical patterns, prioritizing and compartmentalizing our ideas in very stratified manners, organizing all of life itself into “kingdom, plylum, class, order” (as though nature and wilderness itself consents to our rigid categorical thinking), with “a place for everything and everything in its place”. This has been the default mode of organizations for so long, that it’s sometimes difficult to conceptualize any other way.

Hence the radical nature of the rhizome: as Deleuze and Guatarri explain in A Thousand Plateaus, in a rhizomatic organization and/or mode of thought, hierarchies are rendered not only irrelevant but inconceivable (what is the head root in a rhizome, after all?), that in fact “any point of a rhizome can be connected to any other, and must be”.

You see where I’m going with this: that anonymous GA my Dad talked on the phone with one days in the ’80s was inadvertently expounding upon a rhizomatic interpretation of Eternal Marriage, wherein there is no longer a hierarchy of distinct units patriarchally subordinated one to another, but an ever expanding entanglement of sealings connecting to each other at any and all points: for again, “any point of a rhizome can be connected to any other, and must be”. Who you are sealed in this model would indeed matter less than the fact that you are sealed, since the sealing ordinance would in fact ensure that you sealed to everyone. Such a conception of sealings might perhaps go a long ways towards explaining Joseph Smith’s polygamy and polyandry, as a manner by which to rhizomatically undermine hierarchy and erase barriers between peoples by expanding the number of potential connections and relationships between all peoples everywhere to a radical degree.

It is of course a little rich to discuss LDS doctrine as rhizomatic; in the centerfold of every Liahona (née Ensign) magazine, after all, we see a First Presidency looming over the Quorum of the Twelves, the Presidency of the Seventy, the Seventies, Area Authorities, Stake Presidents, Bishops, all so forth. Church organization is at present thoroughly aborescent. Yet it is also worth here remembering that Joseph Smith not only sought to erase distinctions and boundaries familiarly, but also economically: the classless systems noted in Acts 2:44-45 are endorsed by 4 Nephi 1:3, outlined in D&C 42:31-38, and attempted (with varying degrees of success) in Kirtland, Independence, Far West, and Nauvoo as the United Order, with Joseph’s successor Brigham Young then attempting to reproduce the same in Utah territory (particularly in the showcase cities of Ordersville and Brigham City).

The fact that the broader LDS Church is not currently practicing, and has no present plans to implement, the United Order, does nothing to erase its injunction in our scriptural record, nor can it elide the fact that we covenant to keep the Law of Consecration in our Holy Temples–where, not coincidentally, we also perform our marriage sealings. It is worth pondering whether the Temple endowment, indeed the gospel in general, can be read rhizomatically–as a ceremony not to sift people apart, but to connect them altogether, in an inexhaustible churn of infinite possibilities in infinite combinations, where all are equals, all are At-One.

Lest anyone accuse this of being a bunch of French theoretical naval-gazing, allow me to bring this back full circle: my Dad is a widower. He got remarried in the Temple 3 years after my mother’s passing. I caught up with my old mission president shortly thereafter and confided to him my misgivings, about how my father is now technically a polygamist under Church doctrine, of how the specter of polygamy still hangs like a pall over us, even over a century after Declaration 1. He took my concerns seriously, and all he said to try and reassure me was, “I am convinced it will be different. I mean, yes, I know that ‘the same sociality which exists among us here will exist among us there,’ but I’m still convinced it will be different in the next life, in ways we can’t even imagine yet.”

Having read A Thousand Plateaus, I think I know what he means now. If there is not just one family but endless and multiple potential families to connect with throughout the Eternities–not in static growth, but, again, in an inexhaustible churn of infinite possibilities in infinite combinations, all interconnected through a dynamic and effervescent United Order–then the next life might prove to be rhizomatic in a manner that even Deleuze and Guatarri (let alone us) have yet to conceptualize. Our family roots are already an entangled rhizome anyways.