I am already sealed in the New and Everlasting Covenant of Marriage, anyway. If the prophet begins to issue temple recommends for plural marriage, I would comply.

If ultimately plural marriage were ultimately required for my exaltation, then that work would then have to be done for me in the temple, seeing as how I have not had the opportunity to receive it. In any case, it is out of my hands.

All I need to do is be faithful to what I have received, and to be willing to receive all that the Lord would command. That is all anyone can do.

To me, it makes sense that up until James E. Talmage, the two would be considered lumped together if the law of plural marriage under the New and Everlasting Covenant was operative on the whole church. Therefore, any time they spoke of the New and Everlasting Covenant of Marriage then, it would naturally be assumed that you are referring to polygamy.

(By the way, I am that new Alex and will refer to myself as Alex 1 in the future to avoid confusion.)

Alex: Nineteenth-century Latter-day Saints did not make the distinctions that you make between the New and Everlasting Covenant and plural marriage. To them, the two were two terms for the same principle. It is well documented that during the first few decades following the Manifesto that church leaders such as James E. Talmage presented an interpretation of D&C 132 that separates the two concepts, an interpretation that is fully accepted today.

Also, church leaders insisted in the 1800s that polygamy was a commandment for all Saints and was necessary for the highest degree exaltation. The numbers (which varied from time to time–in the 1850s perhaps 45% of Mormons in Utah were part of polygamous households) were so low not because the Prophet kept the numbers down, but because the people, whether for financial reasons or simple distaste for plural marriage, did not embrace the principle to the degree that the brethren would have preferred. But it is well documented that the vast majority of leaders in the church were polygamists.

I suggest that, rather than relying on 20th-century folklore to make arguments about 19th century polygamy, you check out Kathryn Daynes’ More Wives than One: Transformation of the Mormon Marriage System, 1840-1910, the best scholarly treatment of plural marriage out there as well as Stephen C. Taysom’s “A Uniform and Common Recollection: Joseph Smith’s Legacy, Polygamy, and the Creation of Mormon Public Memory, 1852-2002,” Dialogue 35, no. 3 (Fall 2002): 113-44.