Mormon Doctrine & Covenants - Official Declaration 1 (On Polygamy).

This is a collection of primary source documents centered on the 1890 LDS Official Declaration 1, commonly called the Woodruff Manifesto, comprising the declaration itself, its ratification by church conference, and subsequent explanatory discourses by church president Wilford Woodruff. The core document is a formal denial that the LDS Church is continuing to solemnize plural marriages, followed by a public pledge to submit to U.S. federal law prohibiting polygamy and to urge church members to do the same. What makes the text distinctive is Woodruff's framing of the policy change not as capitulation but as divine command: he claims God revealed to him through vision exactly what catastrophe — loss of temples, mass imprisonment of leadership, collapse of salvific ordinances for both living and dead — would follow if the practice continued. Woodruff presents the Manifesto as a pragmatic theological calculation, arguing that preserving the institutional church and its temple work outweighed continuing plural marriage under escalating legal persecution, and he explicitly invokes prophetic infallibility ("the Lord will never permit me… to lead you astray") to preempt challenges to his authority. The supplementary 1891 and 1893 discourses add layers of retrospective justification, describing private revelations and visions that supposedly confirmed the necessity of the Manifesto before it was issued. Taken together, the documents are essential primary sources for understanding how a major American religious institution negotiated the end of a defining practice under state coercion while maintaining doctrinal coherence.

Mormon Doctrine & Covenants - Official Declaration 1 (On Polygamy).

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