>>12412452It's not anymore a part of the religion than it is for Judaism or Christianity. It was brought back because the LDS people tried a lot harder to follow the Old Testament than almost anyone else. If you read a lot about Joseph Smith like I have, you will find that he actually studied Kabbalah with a Jewish convert to the LDS faith early on. He was actually a very knowledgeable guy about occultism of various types, and believed in sincerely reviving the temple tradition. White people are lost tribes of Israel, so it is about raising "an ensign to the nations" to gather all the tribes back under one banner again. As Lost Tribes, we needed to fully take up our Israelite heritage, which included reviving polygamy from the Old Testament.
Anyway, polygamy isn't that important. The reason it got banned is because the US government threatened to basically invade Utah militarily and seize all church property and money and put everyone in prison. So the church chose survival over polygamy, and a lot of people continued to practice polygamy in secret rather than break up their families, but for the sake of protecting the Church it was all kept quiet.
People make too much of a big deal about Polygamy. Mormonism has very little to do with polygamy in actuality. It is just a minor feature of the whole thing, but it set them apart from everyone else, so that is what people latched on to. Really, the LDS Temple and its initiation rites are what people out to really care about. They've revived the Temple of Solomon tradition, restoring it out of the hands of the Freemasons. The rites aren't actually "stolen" from Freemasons but they both claim to be revivals of the rites of Solomon's Temple.
>>12412454Not going to argue that. Anyway, since I almost got excommunicated and then moved to a different city (unrelated) I stopped going to church very often. As I said, I'm a terrible representative of the LDS church's beliefs but the church is great.
