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Because polygamy continued in secrecy to a small extent, a second "official statement" on the practice was issued by LDS Church President Joseph F. Smith in 1904, ending authorization for plural marriages on pain of excommunication from the church. Current LDS leaders acknowledge the practice as part of their early history, and LDS scripture still contains passages that fundamentalists use to defend its continuation.

Groups are diverse

In the first few decades of the 20th century, several LDS Church members — including a few leaders — were excommunicated as they continued to advocate polygamy and/or practice it. Some were later reinstated in the church, while a handful split from the faith to form their own groups under separate leadership. The ins and outs of those complex relationships are documented in a new 500-page book just off the press this week, "Modern Polygamy and Mormon Fundamentalism: The Generations After the Manifesto," by Layton physician and historian Brian Hales.

The dissenters said the true priesthood authority to perform plural marriage came to them in a variety of ways, most tied to either their early ancestors as acquaintances of church founder Joseph Smith or one of his successors, President John Taylor. (See related story link)

"We feel it's the priesthood that created the church, not the other way around," Wilde says, adding the mainstream LDS Church went "out of order" with the 1890 Manifesto. God knew the Manifesto was coming and set out this lineage to preserve plural marriage, she says.

According to Wilde, who says she obtained her numbers from surveys of polygamous leaders, 10,000 of the 37,000 current fundamentalists affiliate with the FLDS Church under Jeffs; 7,500 with the Apostolic United Brethren, formerly headed by Rulon Allred, who was murdered by members of a rival polygamous clan (and now led by J. LaMoine Jenson); 1,500 affiliate with the Kingstons, who made headlines last year with court proceedings in a child abuse and custody dispute; and 3,000 affiliate with smaller groups of a few hundred or less. The once-prominent LeBaron group seems to have splintered since it was tied to a string of assassinations in the 1980s, with some in Mexico and others scattered throughout the United States.