Some of my reasoning for seeing it this way is:

1) D&C 132 brings up Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, David, Solomon, and the 1 bride for 7 brothers scenario recorded in Matthew and other places. Isaac was known as a monogamist. Therefore we can identify the celestial marriage spoken of (or the new covenant) as a monogamous marriage performed by the proper authority. Plural marriage would include multiple instantiations of this covenant.

2) It was understood in 1843 that covenants had to be “sealed” in order for the blessings associated with that ordinance to be guaranteed. Bruce R. McConkie demonstrated a great grasp of this concept in his June 1978 New Era article. The original performance of an ordinance involved a 2-way promise with blessings conditioned on continued faithfulness. The “sealing” removed that condition.

3) It is somewhat anachronistic to call marriages sealings, as Gregory Prince notes in Power from on High. It wasn’t until January 1844 that we have contemporary records that marriages were called sealings. (However some retrospective accounts used such terminology.) D&C 131 and 132 should be read in that light.

4) In practice, we have a handful of incidences where church authorities recognized that the calling and election of some monogamous couples was made sure prior to any plural marriage. This practice started with Joseph Smith and continued in the Utah period. Basically there were other Abrahamic tests that could be passed to prove faithfulness besides practicing plural marriage.

The “faceless heaven of theocentric Protestantism” (wherein everyone gets a CK smoothie) holds little appeal to me. In fact, it sounds downright creepy. I don’t share D. Fletcher’s blithe acceptance of ministering angel status, though. What if I wind up assembling Ronan’s Ikea furniture for all eternity????

Sam, if you don’t do it in that article (or book), please explore that line of thought elsewhere.
(btw, so far we’re enjoying your old stomping grounds, I hope you like SL as much).

As Smith made clear more of his Elijah temple theology, the specific contours of the latter definition became increasingly clear. I treat this briefly in a paper on Elias in a recent Dialogue, and though the Elijah discourse is somewhat late, it is quite clear that Smith had in mind a sense of an intimate but broad society robust to death. He fully intended, via what I have elsewhere called a sacerdotal genealogy, to establish all humanity into a single family.

But Smith had to grapple with the remnants of Calvinism as expressed in the conflict with Universalism. He could not maintain that everyone would simply be together again no matter what; it offended pious and religious sensibilities, and from a human perspective ran counter to their experience with their unfriendly neighbors in the West (Ohio, Missouri, Illinois). But he would also not maintain the horribly sad heaven of Calvinist predestination and theocentrism. his solution was the sealing of humanity through Priesthood and the mystical power of Elijah, as expressed in his evolving temple theology.

Polygamy is a component of this system, certainly. But so is a) monogamous covenantal marriage, b) adoption, c) baptism for the dead, d) the resurrection rites, e) second anointing, f) physical Zion/law of consecration, and g) the Quorum of the Anointed. These are integrated into the endowment process itself, but they simultaneously expand its scope.

I will admit that with the exception of (a) and (c) (perhaps (d), but that doesn’t get much press now), these are no longer a part of normative Mormonism, but the strong emphasis on polygamy reflects an 1850-1890 bias and is at least somewhat sensationalistic.

This has not always been my position. In the past, I have felt that attempts to read the revelation as eternal monogamy are inconsistent and obscurantist. As I have spent the last few years trying to understand what Smith was attempting to do during his religious career, I am much more skeptical of this claim and less strident in my denunciations of the monogamic model.

Mike: I keep trying to decide whether to include in the conclusion of a treatment of Smith’s afterlife community whether his afterlife is better able to accommodate gay men and women (not just as angelic assistants unable to “generate”) as nodes in the vast family tree of heaven than the faceless heaven of theocentric Protestantism.

To summarize in a single sentence: Polygamy was one part of a broader effort to unite all humanity into an eternal family, and eternal monogamy is a reasonable replacement for polygamy within the broader (temple-based) project, even in light of the scripture from Steve’s post.

I’m perfectly happy with the middle-class Terrestrial community, with clean air, good schools and other ministering angels like myself.