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Originally Posted by MikeWaters
So it's 5 times more prevalent than we have been told?
I didn't believe the 3% number anyway.
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Maybe one just needs to construct a favorable denominator? The 15-30% is the percentage of church members living in plural households. If you do something like married polygamous mormon men divided by adult mormon men, the fraction will be smaller I think.
The recent research also suggests a time trend which I think is interesting (although one should be careful about drawing too strong of inferences). Hardy makes the following comment:
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While both Logue and Bennion emphasized that their findings were greater than traditional church estimates and that polygamy played a more significant role in Mormon society than previously believed, one might still question the importance of the practice since, on average, no more than between a sixth and a third of the church’s membership lived in plural households. In other words, couldn’t one say that inasmuch as a majority remained monogamous, polygamy must have been relatively unimportant? This would seem to be reinforced by Professor Kathryn Daynes who found that, in the community of Manti after 1860 the percentage of those living in polygamy steadily declined from 43.1 percent in that year to 7.1 percent in 1900.
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