From Joseph F. Smith's Testimony to the Senate Committee

[Sleeping in EQ]

for the Reed Smoot Hearings, 1:97, 98:


"Our people are given the largest possible latitude for their convictions, and if a man rejects a message that I may give to him but is still moral and believes in the main principles of the gospel and desires to continue in his membership in the church, he is permitted to remain and he is not unchurched. It is only those who on rejecting a revelation rebel against the church and withdraw from the church at their own volition.

I should like to say to the honorable gentlemen that the members of the Mormon Church are among the freest and most independent people of all the Christian denominations. They are not all united on every principle. Every man is entitled to his own opinion and his own views and his own conceptions of right and wrong so long as they do not come in conflict with the standard principles of the church. If a man assumes to deny God and to become an infidel we withdraw fellowship from him. If a man commits adultery we withdraw fellowship from him. If men steal or lie or bear false witness against their neighbors or violate the cardinal principles of the Gospel, we withdraw our fellowship. The church withdraws its fellowship from that man and he ceases to be a member of the church. But so long as a man or a woman is honest and virtuous and believes in God and has a little faith in the church organization, so long we nurture and aid that person to continue faithfully as a member of the church, though he may not believe all that is revealed.

I should like to say this to you, in point, that a revelation on plural marriage is contained in that book. It has been ascertained by actual count that no more than perhaps 3 or 4 per cent of the membership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints ever entered into that principle. All the rest of the members of the church abstained from that principle and did not enter into it, and many thousands of them never received it or believed it; but they were not cut off from the church. They were not disfellowshipped and they are still members of the the church; that is what I wish to say...

I know that there are hundreds, of my own knowledge, who say they never did believe in it and never did receive it, and they are members of the church in good-fellowship. Only the other day I heard a man, prominent among us, a man of wealth, too, say that he had received all the principles of Mommonism except plural marriage, and that he never had received it and could not see it. I myself heard him say it within the last ten days."