What is Polytheism, and Do Mormons - or Trinitarians - Qualify?
The question has been asked a lot this week. Right Response has answers.
Well, the answer to the question, “Are Mormons polytheists?” is easy. Of course, they’re polytheists. This is not a complicated question, and it does not require a long theological education to answer. That’s because the word “polytheism” has had an accepted, undisputed definition for thousands of years.
Merriam-Webster defines polytheism as "belief in or worship of more than one god."
Dictionary.com is even cleaner, "The belief in more than one god." There’s no worship component whatsoever. Cambridge defines it as "belief in many different gods." Oxford Dictionary defines it as "the belief that there is more than one god."
Therefore, it requires only that a person read what the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints actually teaches and then compare it to the dictionary. When you do that, the case closes before it opens.
But Latter-day Saints have a habit of disputing this, and so we are going to walk through it carefully, because the dispute is built on a definition game that goes something like this: a Mormon will tell you that polytheism requires the worship of multiple gods, not merely the belief in them, and that since Latter-day Saints only worship the Father, they are technically monotheists, or at worst monolatrists, which is a word they have largely constructed and popularized themselves for exactly this purpose. We will address that argument in full.
First, though, we need to establish what Mormonism actually believes, in its own words, so that no one can accuse us of misrepresenting the tradition. The official LDS website, churchofjesuschrist.org, under its Gospel Topics entry on the Godhead, states:
“From the Prophet’s account of the First Vision and from his other teachings, we know that the members of the Godhead are three separate beings. The Father and the Son have tangible bodies of flesh and bones, and the Holy Ghost is a personage of spirit.”
Three separate beings. That is not a bizarre interpretation or a heterodox corner of Mormon thought. That is the official doctrine of the church, published on its own website under its own name.
Joseph Smith himself could not have been clearer on this point. In a sermon drawn on by BYU’s own Religious Studies Center, Smith declared, “I have always declared God to be a distinct personage, Jesus Christ a separate and distinct personage from God the Father, and that the Holy Ghost was a distinct personage and a Spirit; and these three constitute three distinct personages and three Gods.”
Three Gods. Not “three persons of one divine substance,” as Christians phrase it. Not “three modes of one being,” as the heretical Oneness Pentecostals phrase it. But, three Gods, said out loud, by the founding prophet of the religion, in a public sermon he considered one of his most important.
The Doctrine and Covenants, which is canonical LDS scripture, states in section 130, verse 22, “The Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s; the Son also; but the Holy Ghost has not a body of flesh and bones, but is a personage of Spirit.” Notice, the Father has a body of flesh and bones (psst, no, He doesn’t). The Son has a body of flesh and bones. They are not one substance. According to Mormonism, there are two physically distinct, spatially located, embodied beings, alongside a third who is a spirit personage. These are three separate Gods.
Now, we come to the King Follett Discourse, delivered by Joseph Smith on April 7, 1844, at the funeral of a church member named King Follett. This is the most famous, most theologically dense, and most consequential sermon Smith ever preached, and the LDS Church’s own history website acknowledges it as such. In it, Smith taught that God the Father was once a man like us, that He progressed to become God, and that humans can progress to become Gods themselves. He stated, according to recorded transcripts: “The head God called together the Gods and sat in grand council to bring forth the world. The grand counselors sat at the head in yonder heavens, and contemplated the creation of the worlds which were created at that time.” Notice, the head God, and the Gods - plural - sitting in council. This is Mormon cosmology.
The famous “Lorenzo Snow couplet,” which every Latter-day Saint knows and which has never been repudiated by the church, summarizes the whole system in one line: “As man now is, God once was; as God now is, man may become.” God was once a man. You may become a God. There are, therefore, Gods who came before the God of this world, and there will be Gods who come after, each presiding over their own creations, each having once been mortal men who progressed through the system. This is not monotheism. This is not even close to monotheism. This is an eternal, self-replicating pantheon dressed up in the vocabulary of Christian prayer.
This is, beyond a doubt, the most polytheistic religion in the history of mankind, with a potentially unlimited number of gods.
The church’s own Gospel Fundamentals manual, a basic instructional text, states: “They will receive everything our Father in Heaven has and will become like Him. They will even be able to have spirit children and make new worlds for them to live on, and do all the things our Father in Heaven has done.” These are not exalted humans living in God’s shadow. These are new gods, independent and generative, multiplying the pantheon through eternity.
This is polytheism. It is polytheism by any honest definition of the word. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost are three separate Gods in Mormon theology. Above the Father there are gods who preceded him. Below him there are humans progressing toward godhood. The Mormon universe is saturated with gods, was saturated with gods before this world began, and will be saturated with new gods long after it ends.
THE DEFINITION GAME
The Mormon apologist, confronted with all of the above, will say that polytheism requires the worship of multiple gods. Since Latter-day Saints direct their worship to the Father alone, they are not polytheists. They believe in other Gods, yes, but they do not worship them, and the definition of polytheism is the worship of many gods, not merely belief in them.
This argument fails on three distinct grounds. It fails historically, it fails linguistically, and most importantly, it fails biblically.
It fails historically because the argument depends on a definition of polytheism that was largely constructed by a Mormon apologist named Blake Ostler, specifically to give Mormonism a respectable classification. The Wikipedia article on monolatry, the category Ostler pioneered for Mormonism, notes that monolatry’s normalization in connection with the Latter-day Saint movement came primarily through his work. The two groups in all of human history that Wikipedia identifies as practitioners of this belief are Mormons and the followers of the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten, whose solar cult was repudiated by his own civilization, erased from Egyptian records, and extinct within a generation of his death. That is the company Mormonism keeps when it claims this label. They did not discover a category that described them. They built a category and climbed inside it.
It fails linguistically because the Greek word from which we derive polytheism, polytheos, simply means belief in many gods. The -theos root means god. The latreia root, meaning worship, is where we get the word latria, which is a different word entirely. Polytheism has never required active cultic worship as its distinguishing feature in any standard definition in the history of Western theology. A person who believes there are many gods is a polytheist, regardless of how many of them he bows to. Just like when people claim to be a “theist,” it doesn’t imply they’re in church on Sunday, worshipping. In fact, if they start with, “I’m a theist,” it’s a pretty good bet they don’t.
But it’s also a failure Biblically. The Mormon argument assumes that the Bible’s concern with false gods is exclusively one of worship. “Thou shalt have no other gods before me,” they allege, is a commandment about worship priority, not about metaphysical belief. As long as you worship Yahweh first, belief in the existence of other gods is theologically neutral. The Bible, they suggest, does not condemn the belief itself, only the misdirected worship.
This is not what the Bible teaches. Isaiah 44:9-20 contains one of the most extended prophetic attacks on idolatry in the entire Old Testament, and it is striking because the condemnation is fundamentally cognitive, not merely liturgical. The prophet writes, “They that make a graven image are all of them vanity; and their delectable things shall not profit; and they are their own witnesses; they see not, nor know; that they may be ashamed.” And the passage concludes with this devastating summary in verse 20: “He feedeth on ashes: a deceived heart hath turned him aside, that he cannot deliver his soul, nor say, Is there not a lie in my right hand?” A deceived heart and a lie held in the hand is the condemnation of a mind that has accepted a falsehood, not merely of a hand that has offered incense to the wrong altar. The man who believes in false gods is a man with a deceived heart.
Psalm 96:5 states, “For all the gods of the nations are idols, but the Lord made the heavens.” The Hebrew word translated as idols here is elilim, which means “nothings,” or “worthless things, things without substance or reality.” The gods of the nations do not merely lack proper worship. They do not exist. The man who believes in them believes in nothing. He has constructed a false picture of reality, and that false picture is itself the problem, prior to and apart from any question of what he does with it on a Sunday morning.
Paul addresses this directly in 1 Corinthians 8. In verse 4, he writes, “As concerning therefore the eating of those things that are offered in sacrifice unto idols, we know that an idol is nothing in the world, and that there is none other God but one.” He then acknowledges in verse 5 that some people believe otherwise: “For though there be that are called gods, whether in heaven or in earth, as there be gods many, and lords many.” And in verse 7, he describes the man who still believes in these non-gods as having a weak conscience, a conscience that has not yet been fully formed by the truth that there is only one God.
The correction Paul prescribes is not a reordering of worship priorities but a proper understanding of the truth: there is no God but one.
Deuteronomy 4:35 says, “Unto thee it was shewed, that thou mightest know that the Lord he is God; there is none else beside him.” There is none else beside him, and none else worthy of worship. None else in existence. The entire purpose of what God showed Israel at Sinai was that they would know, at the level of knowledge and understanding, that there is no other God anywhere.
Isaiah 45:21 repeats it: “Tell ye, and bring them near; yea, let them take counsel together: who hath declared this from ancient time? who hath told it from that time? have not I the Lord? and there is no God else beside me; a just God and a Savior; there is none beside me.”
There was no God before Him who preceded Him through a mortal progression. There will be no Gods after Him produced by His system. He did not sit in a grand council with other Gods to frame the worlds. He spoke, and it was. He is not the God of this planet, assigned here by some cosmic hierarchy while other Gods preside over other creations. He is the only God who exists, anywhere, in any plane, at any point in the eternal past or the eternal future.
THE ELOHIM
Mormons point to the Old Testament’s “divine council,” the “sons of God” in Job, the elohim of Psalm 82, the “let us” of Genesis 1:26, and declare that even the Hebrew Bible acknowledges a plurality of Gods. Joseph Smith was not inventing a pantheon, they say. He was just being biblical. This is a gross misunderstanding of what “elohim” means.
The same word is applied elsewhere to human judges in Exodus 21 and 22, and to the ghost of Samuel in 1 Samuel 28:13. Nobody argues that Samuel became a God at death. The word carried a semantic range that covered any being operating in a supernatural or authoritative capacity, which is why Jesus could quote Psalm 82:6 against the Pharisees without conceding that the judges addressed there were gods.
Elohim, like the English word “divine,” does not have to imply God. It implies “heavenly,” or “otherworldly.” A common compliment for someone’s smile or your grandmother’s biscuits and gravy was once calling it “divine.” Neither is it sacrilegious, because it’s not saying that a smile or a breakfast dish is God, but that it’s “out of this world,” or heavenly. In a similar sense, the Bible teaches that there is a great variation in what Dr. Michael Heiser called, “the unseen realm,” celestial and supernatural beings that are metaphysical in nature, rather than purely physical. They are “divine” in the same limited sense an angel might be called divine. They are celestial. They are greater (in many ways, but not all) than men, but lower than God. They are not God’s peers. Chiefly, they were created, and God is Creator.
The beings of the divine council are real, supernatural, and greater than men. They are not Gods. They die like men in Psalm 82:7. They were all created by Christ according to Colossians 1:16, which disqualifies every one of them from Godhood, because God is not made. Paul calls them “principalities and powers,” and “thrones and dominions,” spiritual hosts operating in heavenly places under Gods’ authority and subject to His judgment. They are His middle management, not His peers, and Scripture never once suggests that faithful humans will one day join their ranks as co-equal gods presiding over new worlds.
The Mormon system requires these beings to be Gods in the fullest sense, so that the divine council serves as a template for human exaltation. The Biblical text will not allow that.
PLAN B
The Mormon God is not the Christian God Almighty. He cannot be, because God Almighty has declared that He alone is God, that there is none beside Him, and the Mormon God is one of many, surrounded by predecessors above him and progressing humans below him, reigning over a single world in an infinite chain of worlds presided over by an infinite regression of Gods. These two beings are not the same being described differently. They are incompatible beings. One of them is God. The other is not.
When Mormons are called on these facts, they will then, almost always, go to Plan B. Plan B is to tell you that, as a Christian, you’re a polytheist, too. Longer threads on X are sometimes funny, when one Mormon is denying they believe in other gods at all, another is admitting they believe in other gods but are denying being polytheists, and yet another is arguing that everybody is a polytheist and it’s not a big deal. Usually, the latter is because of Trinitarianism.
TRINITARIANISM
The Nicene Creed, hammered out in 325 AD and refined at Constantinople in 381, was not a committee of bishops inventing a new doctrine to settle a political dispute. It was a council of men who took the text of Scripture with total seriousness, who read “I and the Father are one” in John 10:30, who read “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” in John 1:1, who read “the Lord our God is one Lord” in Deuteronomy 6:4, and who asked what all of it meant taken together without discarding any of it.
The answer they arrived at, that the Son is homoousios with the Father, of the same substance, was not imposed on the Text. It was the only logical deduction the text supports if you refuse to throw any of it away. Logical deduction is how many historic Christian doctrines - and several Old Testament ones - are confirmed, because they are so self-evident in the Text, they don’t need to be didactically delivered (even if we wish they had been).
Nicaea did not create Trinitarianism. They articulated what the Apostles had preached, what the earliest Christians had confessed, and what Scripture had always taught, and they drew a line against heretics who sought to make the Son a lesser or subordinate being rather than to deal honestly with what His Apostles said of Jesus and what Jesus said about Himself. The minutes, or recordings from various sources about what transpired there, show in great detail what its attendees had wrestled with, and their only and primary concern was what the Bible said and being truthful with its teachings (and even came to at least one fist-fight, when St. Nicholas felt that Arius was twisting the Bible).
Because opinions differed and Arius's, in particular, undermined the teachings of Christ, the church was forced to convene to determine the official teaching of the Holy Bible as it pertained to that controversy. That’s what a worldwide church has to do from time to time when it’s not led by a supposedly infallible prophet: hand-deliver a new revelation whenever a controversy arises. Every time the Mormon church has been at the crossroads, like when the Federal government clamped down on them for polygamy, or when the IRS threatened their tax exemption for racist teachings, their prophets “got a new word.” Ours has councils, where they open the Bible.
Even before then, but certainly after, Christianity has recognized that the Father is not the Son. The Son is not the Spirit. The Spirit is not the Father. They are three real, eternal, distinct persons, sharing one divine nature. The simple way of teaching this concept, so simple that children readily comprehend it, is that the Triune God, or Godhead, is “one what, and three who’s.” There are three persons, and one God. And any Christian theologian for two millennia would emphatically deny three gods.
REALITY MATTERS
At the end of the day, this controversy exists because Mormonism wants two things at the same time.
It wants to teach that there are many Gods. It wants to teach that God the Father was once a man. It wants to teach that men may become Gods. It wants to teach that there are Gods above our God, Gods below our God, and Gods yet to come. It wants to teach that the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are three separate Gods. It wants to teach that exalted humans will one day create worlds and populate them with spirit children. Mormonism teaches all of these things openly, officially, and repeatedly.
But it also wants to avoid the word that has described such beliefs for thousands of years. That is why the discussion always drifts away from doctrine and toward definitions. The facts are not disputed. Official LDS publications teach exaltation to divine status. The controversy begins only when someone uses the obvious word for what has just been described: Polytheism.
The reason for the discomfort is understandable. Mormonism emerged in a culture shaped by Christianity and still desires recognition as a Christian faith. The problem is that historic Christianity has always confessed that there is one eternal, uncreated God who has no predecessors, no rivals, no peers, and no successors. Mormonism teaches something fundamentally different. Its God is one member of a larger cosmic order. The Christian God is the source of all reality itself.