Heavenly Mother in LDS Teaching

Latter-day Saint young women recite a theme that begins with the words "I am a beloved daughter of heavenly parents." Behind that phrase stands one of the most distinctive teachings of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: that human beings have a Mother in Heaven as well as a Father, and that she is a divine being.¹

This article sets out what the LDS Church teaches about Heavenly Mother today, where the teaching came from, and why the Orthodox Church, with the whole historic Christian faith, cannot accept it. It also explains why the Orthodox honor given to the Theotokos, the Mother of God, is something entirely different.

In brief

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints officially teaches that every human being is a spirit child of "a Heavenly Father and a Heavenly Mother," calling this "a cherished and distinctive belief." Its own essay admits there is "no record of a formal revelation to Joseph Smith on this doctrine." The best-known early statement is Eliza R. Snow's 1845 poem, now the hymn "O My Father." Since at least 1991 leaders have told members not to pray to her, and current teaching says "we do not worship Her," while honoring her "as a divine parent." It follows from the LDS doctrine of exaltation, in which God is "an exalted man" and faithful couples may become gods. The Orthodox Church answers that there is one God, the Father Almighty, whose fatherhood is not bodily or marital; that sex and marriage belong to creation, not to the being of God; that the Old Testament condemns the cult of a "queen of heaven"; and that the Theotokos, though "more honorable than the Cherubim," is a creature who worships her Son.

Thesis: Belief in a Heavenly Mother is not a recovered truth but a consequence of a doctrine of God that the Scriptures and the Church reject; the God of the Christian faith is one, uncreated and without a consort.

What Latter-day Saints teach today

In October 2015 the LDS Church published a Gospel Topics essay titled "Mother in Heaven," part of a series that, according to the Church's newsroom, was reviewed by members of the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.² It opens: "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints teaches that all human beings, male and female, are beloved spirit children of heavenly parents, a Heavenly Father and a Heavenly Mother." It calls the doctrine "a cherished and distinctive belief among Latter-day Saints" and quotes the 1995 proclamation on the family: "Each [person] is a beloved spirit son or daughter of heavenly parents."¹

The essay sets limits: "Latter-day Saints direct their worship to Heavenly Father, in the name of Christ, and do not pray to Heavenly Mother." It admits that "our present knowledge about a Mother in Heaven is limited." A later LDS topic page, "Heavenly Parents" (2023), says: "Little has been revealed about our Heavenly Mother beyond a knowledge of Her existence. Although we do not worship Her, we honor Her as a divine parent."³ In April 2022 Elder Dale G. Renlund of the Quorum of the Twelve told a general conference audience: "Very little has been revealed about Mother in Heaven, but what we do know is summarized in a gospel topic." He added, "Once you have read what is there, you will know everything that I know about the subject."⁴

{{very-strong: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints officially teaches that human beings are spirit children of a Heavenly Father and a Heavenly Mother, and it does not pray to or worship her.}}

Where the teaching came from

Eliza R. Snow and the earliest sources

The essay is frank: "While there is no record of a formal revelation to Joseph Smith on this doctrine, some early Latter-day Saint women recalled that he personally taught them about a Mother in Heaven." The earliest printed references appeared "shortly after Joseph Smith's death in 1844."¹ The most famous is a poem by Eliza R. Snow, published in November 1845 as "My Father in Heaven" and sung today as hymn 292, "O My Father":

In the heav'ns are parents single?
No, the thought makes reason stare!
Truth is reason; truth eternal
Tells me I've a mother there.⁵

Later stanzas ask, "Father, Mother, may I meet you / In your royal courts on high?" BYU philosopher David L. Paulsen and Martin Pulido, in a survey of more than a century and a half of statements, conclude that these lines, written within months of Joseph Smith's death, "give considerable evidence" that he taught the idea, "even if he did so only implicitly or restrictively to certain limited audiences."⁶ {{debated: Whether Joseph Smith himself taught a Mother in Heaven rests on later recollections and inference, since no revelation or sermon of his on the subject is recorded.}}

The 1909 statement and the logic of exaltation

In November 1909 the First Presidency (Joseph F. Smith, John R. Winder and Anthon H. Lund) issued "The Origin of Man." It taught that "all men and women are in the similitude of the universal Father and Mother, and are literally the sons and daughters of Deity." The same statement, reprinted by the LDS Church in 2002, says: "God Himself is an exalted man, perfected, enthroned, and supreme," and that "the undeveloped offspring of celestial parentage is capable, by experience through ages and aeons, of evolving into a God."⁷

In LDS doctrine, God the Father is "an exalted man" who was once a man. The LDS Church's essay "Becoming Like God" quotes Joseph Smith's 1844 King Follett sermon, that God "was once as one of us," and Lorenzo Snow's couplet: "As man now is, God once was: As God now is, man may be."⁸ A revelation recorded in 1843 promises couples sealed in the "new and everlasting covenant" of marriage "a fulness and a continuation of the seeds forever and ever," and adds: "Then shall they be gods, because they have no end." Another says that a man who does not enter this order of marriage "cannot have an increase."⁹ If exaltation means a divine couple producing spirit children, then the God whom Latter-day Saints worship must have a wife. The essay itself says: "Men and women cannot be exalted without each other."¹ The site's articles on exaltation and the LDS doctrine of God and on eternal marriage treat these foundations in more detail.

One mother, or many?

In the era of plural marriage some leaders went further. In his periodical The Seer (November 1853), the apostle Orson Pratt wrote: "We have now clearly shown that God the Father had a plurality of wives, one or more being in eternity, by whom He begat our spirits as well as the spirit of Jesus His First Born."¹⁰ Fairness requires adding that in 1865 the First Presidency and the Twelve publicly disowned parts of Pratt's writings, saying that The Seer and some other works "contain doctrines which we cannot sanction, and which we have felt impressed to disown."¹¹ The passages the leaders singled out concerned Pratt's speculations about God's knowledge and attributes and about the Holy Spirit; his teaching that God has plural wives was not among them.²¹ The LDS Church today speaks of one Heavenly Mother and does not teach divine polygamy.

Prayer, silence and the limits of the teaching

By 1991 some Latter-day Saints had begun praying to Heavenly Mother. President Gordon B. Hinckley, then a counselor in the First Presidency, addressed this first in a training meeting and then, in September 1991, at the general Relief Society meeting. He said: "Logic and reason would certainly suggest that if we have a Father in Heaven, we have a Mother in Heaven. That doctrine rests well with me." But he continued: "I regard it as inappropriate for anyone in the Church to pray to our Mother in Heaven," and "The fact that we do not pray to our Mother in Heaven in no way belittles or denigrates her."¹² {{strong: Since at least 1991 the leaders of the LDS Church have taught members not to pray to Heavenly Mother, and current LDS materials say she is not worshipped.}}

Many members came to speak of a "sacred silence" about her. Paulsen and Pulido disputed this, reporting that they "found no public record of a General Authority advising us to be silent about our Heavenly Mother," and that past statements describe her as "a fully divine being, a creator of worlds with the Father, a coframer of the plan of salvation."⁶ The result is a being called divine, a parent and a creator, who is neither prayed to nor worshipped.

The Orthodox answer

The Orthodox Church receives the faith confessed in the Creed: "I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth and of all things visible and invisible."¹³ Measured by that faith, the doctrine of a Heavenly Mother is false. It is not a further truth added to the Christian revelation but a sign that the God being described is a different God. Joseph Smith was not a prophet of God, and the revelations of the Doctrine and Covenants are not Scripture. For this reason the Orthodox Church does not regard the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as Christian in the historic, Nicene sense, while respecting the sincerity and decency of its members. The site's article One God or a Council of Gods? sets out the wider contrast.

There is one God, and He has no consort

The Scriptures do not leave room for a second divine being beside the Father. "Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one!" (Deuteronomy 6:4). "Before Me there was no God formed, Nor shall there be after Me" (Isaiah 43:10). "Is there a God besides Me? Indeed there is no other Rock; I know not one" (Isaiah 44:8). St Paul writes that "for us there is one God, the Father, of whom are all things" (1 Corinthians 8:6).¹⁴ In Orthodox teaching the Father is the one source of the Son, who is eternally begotten, and of the Spirit, who eternally proceeds. The Holy Trinity is one God because there is one Father, one divine nature and one will, not because three beings agree. A divine Mother would be a second source of divine life, which the Scriptures exclude.

God's fatherhood is not bodily or marital

The LDS argument from "logic and reason" assumes that divine fatherhood works as human fatherhood does. The Church has always denied this. "God is Spirit" (John 4:24); "God is not a man" (Numbers 23:19); "I am God, and not man" (Hosea 11:9).¹⁴ St Gregory the Theologian, defending the eternal generation of the Son in his Theological Orations, wrote: "The Father is the Begetter and the Emitter; without passion of course, and without reference to time, and not in a corporeal manner." He asked how such a generation can be passionless and answered: "In that it is incorporeal."¹⁵ St John of Damascus states the point directly. In God, he says, generation is "without time and beginning, passionless and not liable to flux, nor dependent on the union of two," because God "is incorporeal" and "the one and only God, and stands in need of no co-operation."¹⁶ The Father begets the Son without a mother, and He creates the world without a partner.

Human beings are God's children in two ways the Scriptures name: by creation and by adoption. "Have we not all one Father? Has not one God created us?" (Malachi 2:10). "You received the Spirit of adoption by whom we cry out, 'Abba, Father'" (Romans 8:15).¹⁴ When St Paul quotes the Greek poet in Athens, "For we are also His offspring," he draws the opposite conclusion from the LDS one: "we ought not to think that the Divine Nature is like gold or silver or stone, something shaped by art and man's devising" (Acts 17:28-29).

Male and female belong to creation

Latter-day Saints often cite Genesis 1:27: "in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them." The verse says that man and woman together bear God's image, not that there are two gods, one of each sex. Christ teaches that "in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels of God in heaven" (Matthew 22:30), which leaves no place for eternal procreation.¹⁴

Nor does the one God lack what a mother gives. Through Isaiah He says, "Can a woman forget her nursing child ... Surely they may forget, Yet I will not forget you" (Isaiah 49:15), and "As one whom his mother comforts, So I will comfort you" (Isaiah 66:13).¹⁴ The tenderness that the LDS doctrine places in a second divine being belongs, in the Scriptures, to the one God Himself.

The "queen of heaven"

Paulsen and Pulido note that "many Mormons look at the 'queen of heaven' mentioned in Jeremiah and the queen in Psalm 45:9 as referring to the wife of God."⁶ The text of Jeremiah points the other way. God rebukes Judah because "the women knead dough, to make cakes for the queen of heaven; and they pour out drink offerings to other gods, that they may provoke Me to anger" (Jeremiah 7:18). When the people insist on serving "the queen of heaven," the prophet answers with judgment (Jeremiah 44:17-19).¹⁴ Psalm 45 is a royal wedding psalm, and the Epistle to the Hebrews applies it to the Son: "Your throne, O God, is forever and ever" (Hebrews 1:8). It says nothing of a wife of the Father.

Some Latter-day Saint scholars have drawn on research into Asherah, the Canaanite goddess. Daniel C. Peterson describes her as "El's wife and the mother and wet nurse of the other gods," notes that "at least some Israelites worshipped her," and connects her with the tree in Nephi's vision in the Book of Mormon.¹⁷ The Bible itself records that worship, and its verdict on it. The Law forbade setting up such a tree beside the Lord's altar (Deuteronomy 16:21), and King Josiah "brought out the wooden image from the house of the Lord ... burned it at the Brook Kidron and ground it to ashes" (2 Kings 23:6), where the NKJV's "wooden image" renders the Hebrew Asherah.¹⁴ What the prophets called idolatry cannot be restored as truth.

The Theotokos is not a goddess

The Orthodox Church does not have a heavenly mother of its own in the Virgin Mary. It honors her as the Theotokos, the Mother of God, ever-virgin and all-holy by grace, because the One born of her is God the Son made man. She herself sings, "my spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior," and "henceforth all generations will call me blessed" (Luke 1:47-48).¹⁴ She is the first of the redeemed, not a divine parent of human souls.

The Church drew this line early. In his Panarion, a catalogue of heresies written in the 370s, St Epiphanius of Salamis wrote against the Collyridians, "who make offerings to Mary." He answered that "Mary's body was holy, but she was not God," and that "she worships Him who, though born of her flesh, has come from heaven, from the bosom of his Father."¹⁸ The Seventh Ecumenical Council (787) gave the rule: the saints and their icons receive "honourable reverence," "not indeed that true worship of faith [latreia] which pertains alone to the divine nature".¹⁹ The site's article on Mary in the early Church traces this teaching.

Objections and replies

"A father without a mother makes no sense"

This is the argument of Snow's hymn and of President Hinckley's "logic and reason." It works only if God is a being of our kind. If God is uncreated Spirit, the Creator of all things from nothing, His fatherhood needs no partner. The starting point, God as "an exalted man," not a gap in the Bible, is what produces a Heavenly Mother.

"Theosis is the same as exaltation"

The Fathers taught that human beings may become "gods" by grace, sharing in God's life without ever ceasing to be creatures. They never taught that the saved become new sources of divinity who beget spirit children. The site's article on theosis and exaltation explains the difference.

"Orthodox Christians pray to Mary, so they treat her as divine"

Orthodox Christians ask the Theotokos to intercede, as they ask any saint, and their hymns call her "more honorable than the Cherubim."²⁰ But they offer worship to God alone and confess her as a creature who needed and received salvation from her Son. That is the opposite of a goddess.

What we can say confidently

• The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints officially teaches a divine Heavenly Mother and, since at least 1991, has told members not to pray to her.
• Its own essay records no formal revelation to Joseph Smith on the doctrine; the earliest printed references date from 1845, the best known being Eliza R. Snow's poem.
• The teaching follows from LDS doctrines that God is an exalted man and that exaltation includes eternal marriage and "a continuation of the seeds."
• Orson Pratt taught in 1853 that God had plural wives; parts of his writings were disowned in 1865, and the LDS Church today does not teach this.
• The Scriptures, the Creed and the Fathers teach one incorporeal God whose begetting of the Son is not "dependent on the union of two"; the prophets condemned the worship of a "queen of heaven."
• The Orthodox Church honors the Theotokos as a creature exalted by grace and gives worship to God alone.

What remains disputed

• Whether Joseph Smith privately taught a Mother in Heaven, and in what form, since the evidence consists of later recollections.
• Whether a tradition of "sacred silence" about her ever existed; LDS scholars disagree.
• How far the 1865 statement, which singled out Pratt's speculations on God's knowledge and attributes and on the Holy Spirit, was meant to reach his other teachings, including his teaching on God's plural wives.
• How far Asherah was paired with the God of Israel in popular Israelite religion, a question argued among historians of ancient Israel. The prophets' judgment on that worship is not in dispute.

Conclusion

The longing behind the doctrine of a Heavenly Mother is understandable. People want to know that the heart of reality is tender and that womanhood is not shut out of heaven. The Christian faith answers both longings, but not with a goddess. The one God comforts "as one whom his mother comforts," and a woman, the Virgin Mary, is honored by every generation because she bore God in the flesh.

Nor is God lonely without a consort. The Father has eternally loved the Son in the Holy Spirit, one God in three Persons, before any world existed. To be adopted into that life by grace, through Christ and in His Church, is the inheritance the Gospel offers, and it is greater than any exaltation a divine couple could promise.

Notes

1. "Mother in Heaven," Gospel Topics Essays, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics-essays/mother-in-heaven (quoting Snow, the 1909 First Presidency, the 1995 proclamation on the family, Hinckley and Oaks, with its own source notes). The Young Women theme is quoted in the LDS Church's essay "Becoming Like God" (note 8).
2. "New Essays Address Topics on Women, Priesthood, Mother in Heaven," Newsroom, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 23 October 2015, https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/new-church-essays-women-priesthood-mother-in-heaven.
3. "Heavenly Parents," Topics and Questions (2023), The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics/heavenly-parents.
4. Dale G. Renlund, "Your Divine Nature and Eternal Destiny," General Conference, April 2022, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2022/04/36renlund.
5. Eliza R. Snow, "O My Father," Hymns, no. 292, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/hymns/o-my-father; first published as "My Father in Heaven," Times and Seasons 6 (15 November 1845): 1039 (as cited in note 1).
6. David L. Paulsen and Martin Pulido, "'A Mother There': A Survey of Historical Teachings about Mother in Heaven," BYU Studies 50, no. 1 (2011): 70-97, https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/byusq/vol50/iss1/7 (quotations from pp. 71, 85, the abstract, and n. 39).
7. First Presidency (Joseph F. Smith, John R. Winder, Anthon H. Lund), "The Origin of Man," Improvement Era, November 1909, 75-81; reprinted with standardized spelling in Ensign, February 2002, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/2002/02/the-origin-of-man. The "similitude" sentence is quoted as given in note 1.
8. "Becoming Like God," Gospel Topics Essays, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics-essays/becoming-like-god.
9. Doctrine and Covenants 132:19-20 and 131:1-4, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/132 and /dc/131.
10. Orson Pratt, "Celestial Marriage," The Seer 1, no. 11 (November 1853), transcribed at Wikisource, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Seer/Volume_1/Number_11/Celestial_Marriage.
11. Proclamation of the First Presidency and Twelve, published in the Deseret News, 23 August 1865, and the Millennial Star, 21 October 1865 (excerpt), as quoted by FAIR, "Question: Was the newspaper called The Seer published by the Church?", https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/The_Seer.
12. Gordon B. Hinckley, "Daughters of God," Ensign, November 1991, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/1991/10/daughters-of-god.
13. Orthodox Church in America, "Symbol of Faith (Nicene Creed)," https://www.oca.org/orthodoxy/prayers/symbol-of-faith.
14. Scripture is quoted from the New King James Version: Deuteronomy 6:4; Isaiah 43:10; 44:8; 49:15; 66:13; 1 Corinthians 8:6; John 4:24; Numbers 23:19; Hosea 11:9; Malachi 2:10; John 1:12; Romans 8:15; Acts 17:28-29; Genesis 1:27; Matthew 22:30; Jeremiah 7:18; 44:17-19; Hebrews 1:8; Deuteronomy 16:21; 2 Kings 23:6 (with the NKJV note "Heb. Asherah, a Canaanite goddess"); Exodus 32; 1 Kings 12:28; Luke 1:47-48.
15. Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 29 (Third Theological Oration) 2 and 4, trans. Charles Gordon Browne and James Edward Swallow, NPNF2 7, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/310229.htm.
16. John of Damascus, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith 1.8, trans. S. D. F. Salmond, NPNF2 9, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/33041.htm.
17. Daniel C. Peterson, "Nephi and His Asherah," Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 9, no. 2 (2000), abstract at https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/jbms/vol9/iss2/4.
18. Epiphanius of Salamis, Panarion 79 ("Against Collyridians, who make offerings to Mary"), 4.6, trans. Frank Williams, The Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis, Books II and III: De Fide, 2nd rev. ed., Nag Hammadi and Manichaean Studies 79 (Leiden: Brill, 2013), text at https://archive.org/details/EpiphaniusPanarionBksIIIII1.
19. Second Council of Nicaea (787), Definition, trans. Henry Percival, NPNF2 14, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3819.htm.
20. The irmos of St Cosmas the Hymnographer sung with the hymn "It Is Truly Meet"; see Orthodox Church in America, "'It Is Truly Meet' ('Axion Estin') Icon of the Mother of God," https://www.oca.org/saints/lives/2023/07/13/102022-it-is-truly-meet-axion-estin-icon-of-the-mother-of-god.
21. Gary James Bergera, "The Orson Pratt-Brigham Young Controversies: Conflict Within the Quorums, 1853 to 1868," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 13, no. 2, https://www.dialoguejournal.com/articles/the-orson-pratt-brigham-young-controversies-conflict-within-the-quorums-1853-to-1868/ (describing the passages the 1860 and 1865 statements quoted).

Bibliography

Primary sources

• The Holy Bible, New King James Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982.
• Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series: vol. 7, Gregory of Nazianzus, Orations; vol. 9, John of Damascus, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith; vol. 14, The Seven Ecumenical Councils.
• Epiphanius of Salamis. The Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis, Books II and III: De Fide. Translated by Frank Williams. 2nd rev. ed. Leiden: Brill, 2013.

Orthodox and patristic sources

• Orthodox Church in America. "Symbol of Faith (Nicene Creed)."
• Orthodox Church in America. "'It Is Truly Meet' ('Axion Estin') Icon of the Mother of God." Lives of the Saints, July 13.

Other scholarship

• Paulsen, David L., and Martin Pulido. "'A Mother There': A Survey of Historical Teachings about Mother in Heaven." BYU Studies 50, no. 1 (2011): 70-97.
• Peterson, Daniel C. "Nephi and His Asherah." Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 9, no. 2 (2000).
• Bergera, Gary James. "The Orson Pratt-Brigham Young Controversies: Conflict Within the Quorums, 1853 to 1868." Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 13, no. 2.

Sources from the Latter-day Saint tradition

• The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Gospel Topics Essays: "Mother in Heaven" (2015) and "Becoming Like God."
• The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. "Heavenly Parents." Topics and Questions, 2023.
• Newsroom. "New Essays Address Topics on Women, Priesthood, Mother in Heaven." 23 October 2015.
• Doctrine and Covenants, sections 131 and 132.
• Snow, Eliza R. "O My Father." Hymns, no. 292.
• First Presidency. "The Origin of Man." Improvement Era, November 1909; reprinted in Ensign, February 2002.
• Pratt, Orson. "Celestial Marriage." The Seer 1, no. 11 (November 1853).
• First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve. Proclamation on Orson Pratt's writings. Deseret News, 23 August 1865; Millennial Star, 21 October 1865 (excerpt as quoted by FAIR).
• Hinckley, Gordon B. "Daughters of God." Ensign, November 1991.
• Renlund, Dale G. "Your Divine Nature and Eternal Destiny." General Conference, April 2022.