Does the existence of the Heavenly Mother in Mormon theology promote heteronormativity that marginalizes gender nonconforming individuals? If so, why does the divine female, but not the divine male, bear the bulk of the blame for this marginalization? Why has her body and not his increasingly become the battleground over the nature and meaning of sex and gender for persons both human and divine in Latter-day Saint discourse and practice?Though she has achieved acceptance in Mormon theology and culture, Mother in Heaven is still marginalized by the LDS Church. She is mostly absent in church worship and everyday orthodox practice and primarily referenced not as an individual deity but as one of the heavenly parents, a vague designation that subsumes her into a divine patriarchal family, serving as model for the 1995 “The Family: A Proclamation to the World,” published by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. As a result, her nature, dignity, and godhood remain vague in mainstream Mormon discourse because her status is uncertain, her role in creation and redemption is undefined, and because even her weakened standing in Mormon theology has been used by Evangelicals as an argument that Mormons are not fully Christian. In addition, many LDS women, orthodox and feminist alike, have long worried that Heavenly Mother is emblematic of nineteenth-century LDS apostle Orson Pratt's version of a polygamist godhead consisting of a Heavenly Father joined to multiple heavenly mothers who are eternally pregnant and, like queen bees, forever reproducing offspring not in a matriarchal hive but in a patriarchal kingdom. In their 2020 article, “‘Mother in Heaven’: A Feminist Perspective,” which is a response to the LDS Gospel Topics essay on this subject, Caroline Kline and Rachel Hunt Steenblik point to hopeful, recent developments that work toward “dismantling cultural silence,” “legitimizing as authoritative church doctrine” positive statements about the divine female, and using capital letters and the singular in the printed term “Heavenly Mother.”1 Nevertheless, the authors argue that the Church's short essay does not go far enough to establish Heavenly Mother's godhood or her nature and standing in LDS practice and theology.Recently, scholars with progressive views have also questioned depictions and possibly the value of Mother in Heaven, arguing that she promotes heteronormative sexuality that privileges just one image of “woman.” In “Rethinking Mormonism's Heavenly Mother,” Taylor G. Petrey criticizes certain Mormon scholars (namely, Janice Allred, Valerie Hudson Cassler, and me): “Mormon feminists writing about Heavenly Mother have been complicit in heteronormative narratives that universalize a subset of women as the hypostasis of ‘woman.’”2 Petrey's concern has become the center of LGBTQ gender critique in current LDS theological discussions where the Mother God, rather than her male counterpart, is seen as the culpable party. This new liberal critique accepts as normative the LDS Church's simplistic view of Heavenly Mother as supportive wife of a presiding patriarchal Heavenly Father, as a female figure whose presence reinforces the structure of the conservative nuclear family that the LDS Church now projects into the eternities. Consequently, Mother in Heaven has become a stumbling block for many people.In this essay, I will interrogate the views and arguments surrounding Heavenly Mother advocated in Mormon discourse on both the right and the left. I do not have space to answer and explore all the questions raised above. Instead, I will focus on the place where mainstream and liberal discourses converge, namely on Heavenly Mother's role as the wife of the Father God and the mother of his children. I will challenge both current Church teachings as well as Petrey's simplified summary of my past work. I have explored multiple nuanced images and figures that represent the female divine, such as a trinity of Mother, Daughter, and Holy Spirit who parallel the male godhead in form and function and who “have been intimately involved in our creation, redemption, and spiritual well-being” from the beginning.3 In this essay, I will highlight Mary, Wisdom, and the Holy Ghost or Comforter as central manifestations of God the Mother who reveal her divine wisdom, justice, mercy, and love, not merely her subordinate role in the patriarchal family unit. Multiple presentations of the Mother God rooted in Mormon texts challenge the view that she merely reinforces one kind of essentialized woman or mother. On the contrary, her many roles present a polymorphous divinity who makes room for gender nonconforming people.I understand the desire of some to eliminate, as much as possible, an embodied, gendered God with physical characteristics such as skin color or sex on grounds that those who share those specifics with God are privileged over those who do not. A God beyond human attributes resolves such problems, but a totally other God introduces difficulties too. It echoes the ancient prescriptions of many early Christian fathers, who did not want to limit the divine in any way and taught that God was totally other, totally transcendent, totally beyond human attributes. Such teachings took hold as orthodox and resulted in the denigration of the physical realm, of the earth, of the human body—especially the female body of Eve, the original sinner, and of womankind in general. But they failed to erase the maleness of the God of Spirit. The disembodied God of Western philosophical theology has always disempowered women.4The Mormon doctrine of God as an embodied, gendered, glorified, anthropomorphic personage was intended to correct the orthodox view. Joseph Smith's theology puts the physical creation on an equal footing with the spiritual. It presents body and spirit, matter and mind as inextricably connected and equally necessary for a fullness of joy (D&C 93:33). Physicality has always been central to Mormon belief. Its authoritative texts, sacred ordinances, and practices are too committed to embodiment to allow for the elimination of God's resurrected, material male body, which is now a permanent fixture of the Mormon worldview. This means that if the spiritual realm, like the physical realm, is a venue for bodies, heaven must necessarily be a place for all the permutations and varieties of bodies that can exist along the gender spectrum to empower all.Though an idealistic theology that posits a God beyond male and female may seek to avoid the complex problems of gender and sexuality, a practical and effective theology will confront and deal with the complexities of physicality and not sidestep them in the hope that some vague notion of a hereafter will eventually release us from the problems that burden us in the here and now. Mormon theologians must wrestle with the reality of physicalism while actively promoting equality, spirituality, and diversity. For this reason, Mormonism should not abandon or marginalize the embodied Heavenly Mother as the coequal counterpart of the embodied Heavenly Father. To do so at this stage of Mormon history in the hope of promoting the laudable goal of gender equality and diversity would not only exchange the problems of Mormonism's concept of divine physicality for the old orthodox problems of divine immateriality, it would also intensify the deep psychological hunger for a divine female in LDS culture by erasing Heavenly Mother before she has been allowed to become fully visible.5In his 1967 pioneering book The Hebrew Goddess, Jewish scholar Raphael Patai notes that no matter how often male religious leaders tried to remove goddess figures to establish strict monotheism, divine female images would always reemerge in new identities. He traces various incarnations of the female divine in ancient Hebrew culture, such as Asherah and the Shekinah, and suggests that the female divinity meets basic human impulses that include biological motherhood and other deeper psychological and social necessities.6 It is no wonder that many Mormons on a private level seek to know, understand, and picture the Mother God, especially in visual art and poetry.7While mostly absent in mainstream LDS worship and practice, Heavenly Mother is very much alive in the everyday lives of thousands of Church members. Peggy Fletcher Stack's 2021 Mother's Day article in the Salt Lake Tribune reported: “There is a tidal wave of interest in this divine feminine among Latter-day Saints, observers say. It has become almost a movement.” But Stack also wrote that the increased talk is “where the debates and divisions begin. She remains a God of mystery. Some believers want to keep her that way. Others crave more answers. Meanwhile, LGBTQ and single members ask: Where do we fit?”8 Thus, popular Mormon culture reflects the same questions posed by scholars. How can Heavenly Mother fulfill important emotional, spiritual, and cultural needs in Mormonism while also meeting the current changing expectations about sex and gender? In response to this question, I argue that an embodied, gendered female deity can be an indispensable figure and source of hope, comfort, and liberation for all the oppressed, the vulnerable, and the powerless—whether they face discrimination for their race, their ethnicity, their sexual orientation, their transgender or nonbinary status, their status as immigrants, or their impoverished or homeless condition. But Mormon theology and practice also requires Heavenly Mother to be more than a symbol since the embodiment of the divine is a central doctrinal tenet. She must stand in time and eternity as a coequal of Heavenly Father; she must be seen as a real personage who acts as the Other to the male God, breaking out of monotheism or even dualism into a rich, wide spectrum of divine possibilities and characteristics. The goal of this essay is the near-impossible task of validating the embodied Mother God while also suggesting that she contains attributes that move godhood beyond gender.Mormon authoritative texts pointing to Heavenly Mother do not focus on her mothering role in a traditional patriarchal family but on divine motherhood as emblematic of her role in the godly work of salvation. To demonstrate this, I will analyze several presentations of the divine female. I begin with Mary's crucial appearance in Nephi's vision in the Book of Mormon, where she is revealed as the divine embodiment of God's love that must be physically enacted in the material realm to have salvific force. Mary's femaleness is not tangential but central to her mission, for without the feminine face and body of God, the divine male dominates as a monolithic picture and presence. I next address the deity called Wisdom, Hokmah in Proverbs and Sophia in Hellenistic and early Christian texts. She demonstrates that the female God encompasses all attributes necessary for full divine perfection in the godhead. Finally, I will turn to the identity of the Holy Ghost or Holy Spirit set forth in the Doctrine and Covenants and other Mormon scriptures. As Holy Ghost, God the Mother has a place in the Godhead, where she participates in the dispensation of the Holy Spirit, the glory or power of God that centers in both the Father and Mother, embraces the various potentials for life and gender, and expands the meaning of male and female. I will show that the Mormon godhead is comprised of glorified deities embodied in spirit, flesh, and bone, paradoxically encompassing gendered personhood as well as the divine power that reaches beyond male and female.To understand the centrality of Heavenly Mother in Mormon theology, the tree of life vision in the Book of Mormon is a crucial starting point because it appears early in the foundational sacred text of the Mormon Restoration. In this vision, Nephi sees Mary equated with God's love and the tree of life, a token of the ancient goddess.9 LDS scholar Daniel Peterson has made popular the idea that the tree corresponds to a female deity whom he identifies as Asherah from the Old Testament and whom he links to Wisdom in Proverbs.10 While Peterson acknowledges that Mary is also linked with the tree, still he effectively displaces Mary as a central figure in the vision by stating that it is only when Nephi sees her with a child and then connects her with the ancient goddess Asherah that the meaning of the tree becomes clear. Asherah becomes the focus rather than Mary, who is simply a mortal mother.11 The LDS Church and its members are, no doubt, reluctant to validate an elevated status for the Virgin Mary because of her place in Catholicism; however, their willingness to accept Asherah evidences their desire for finding a name and place for Heavenly Mother in the Bible. Nevertheless, she appears in the Book of Mormon in the figure of Mary as the “mother of God,” as seen with the Madonna and Child image that serves to explicate the tree, its fruit, and the love of God. I am not arguing that Mary is the Heavenly Mother, but rather that she reveals Heavenly Mother's love and compassion in Nephi's vision. Just as Mary carries Jesus in her arms, likewise God the Mother bears our burdens to bring about our eternal lives, showing the importance of the Mother's work for the salvation of her children. Mary is indispensable to the mission of Jesus as a mediator between heaven and earth in Nephi's vision.After Nephi views the tree his father saw, he asks to know its meaning; the Spirit then shows him “a virgin, and she was exceeding fair and white” (1 Ne. 11:8–13). Mary is the answer to his question; she is the meaning of the tree. It is unfortunate that she is described with the racially charged words “white” and “whiteness,” but these descriptors can be read to refer not to Mary's skin but to her unearthly, awe-inspiring divinity and beauty, which are manifest in divine glory presented as an intense white light consisting of all colors, including dark hues. It cannot be denied that the Book of Mormon contains many racist verses ascribed to its various narrators, who appear to see white skin as a sign of God's favor, thereby confusing the whiteness of glory with the whiteness of skin. In this vision, whiteness must be decontaminated from racist implications and equated with divine love and Mary's divine role.Nephi understands that the fruit-bearing tree of life and Mary are mutually symbolic of each other. This is significant because a tree is a crucial symbol of the mother goddess in the iconic depictions of many ancient Mediterranean cultures and in the Bible.12 Proverbs links the Old Testament goddess, Lady Wisdom, to this image: “She is a tree of life to them that lay hold upon her: and happy is everyone that retaineth her” (Prov. 3:18). Because the tree is Mary in the Book of Mormon and Wisdom in Proverbs, the tree links both to goddess figures, thus importing the ancient divine female into scriptural texts and traditions, joining together the old and new covenants, which is a central goal of the Book of Mormon. It is significant that Mary appears twice in Nephi's vision: first alone, then again with an infant in her arms. Her first appearance alone and in the exceeding whiteness of divine glory reveals her as a goddess before she is revealed as a mother. This means that Mary is not divine because she birthed Jesus. Rather, she birthed Jesus because she was divine. Her divinity preceded the conception of Jesus in her womb.While Nephi beholds the vision, the angel asks him a seemingly random question: “Knowest thou the condescension of God?” Nephi answers: “I know that he loveth his children; nevertheless, I do not know the meaning of all things.” The angel then says: “Behold, the virgin which thou seest is the mother of God after the manner of the flesh” (1 Ne. 11:16–18).13 Though the connection between the angel's question about the “condescension of God” seems unrelated to the vision of Mary, she in fact is the answer to the angel's question because she, as the mother of the condescending God, is herself a condescending deity; and as the fruit-bearing tree, she is the embodiment of the love of God.I am using The Earliest Text version of the Book of Mormon because most scholars acknowledge it as closest to the original manuscripts.14 In this version, Jesus is called “God himself” and the “everlasting Father.” The current LDS published scriptural text of the Book of Mormon changes most of the original references to Jesus as Father: “eternal Father” becomes “Son of the eternal Father,” etc. While these changes reflect mainstream LDS belief, the earlier versions suggest other possible interpretations not just of Jesus but of the status of Mary within the Mormon tradition. Mary as “the mother of God,” rather than the mother of the Son of God, elevates her position and emphasizes that, as the mother of the incarnated “everlasting Father,” she herself is not merely a subordinate human vessel but a goddess, a mother God, of whom the tree of life is symbolic. Mary, then, is envisioned as the mother of the new creation, just as Eve is the mother of the old creation.In Nephi's vision, the Virgin is carried away by the spirit, then returns “bearing a child in her arms” (1 Ne. 11:19–20). In this foundational text, the LDS Church is presented with the iconic Madonna and Child image famous throughout Christian art. The angel proclaims to Nephi: “Behold the Lamb of God, yea, even the Eternal Father.” Then he asks, “Knowest thou the meaning of the tree which thy father saw?” Nephi answers, “Yea, it is the love of God, which sheddeth itself abroad in the hearts of the children of men; wherefore, it is the most desirable above all things.” The angel adds that it is “most joyous to the soul” (1 Ne. 11:21–23). Then the term “condescension of God” is employed by the angel one more time (1 Ne. 11:26), after which Nephi sees the ministry and death of Jesus: And the Lamb of God went forth and was baptized of him [John]; and after that he was baptized, I beheld the heavens open, and the Holy Ghost came down out of the heaven and abode upon him in the form of the dove. (1 Ne. 11:27)Verses 16 and 26 of 1 Nephi 11 contain the only two occurrences in the Mormon canon of the phrase “condescension of God.” In current English, “condescend” negatively connotes the patronizing act of arrogantly looking down on another. In this vision, however, “condescension” is invoked closer to its Latin root to mean “descend” or “come down with.” Nephi perceives that the love of God is the “condescension of God,” the coming of God to us because we could not ascend to God. This vision is corroborated by the following revelatory language from the Doctrine and Covenants: “He [Jesus Christ] that ascended up on high, as also he descended below all things, in that he comprehended all things, that he might be in and through all things, the light of truth” (88:6). By descending below all things, Christ suffers with mortals to understand our plight, to forgive our sins, and to remedy our mortality. This condescension symbolized in Nephi's vision by the tree of life and its fruit applies both to the Virgin Mary and Jesus, each of whom condescends into mortality to redeem us. Even for those who are hesitant to accept Mary as a premortal goddess, she is nevertheless the representative or embodiment of the ancient Mother Goddess as symbolized by the tree.Nephi's vision presents the female deity in three figures: as tree of life reaching to heaven and rooted to the earth; as Mary, first alone as virgin and then as mother bearing Jesus in her arms; and finally, as dove, representing the Holy Ghost descending on Jesus at his baptism. Mary, at the center of the narrative, links the tree with the dove. The reference to the dove's appearance to declare Jesus’ divinity is recorded by all the Gospel writers and is not merely a peripheral or fanciful description. It is essential to the presence of a female deity in Christianity because the dove is an ancient sign of the Mother Goddess, as many scholars document.15 A long tradition connecting the divine female with the Holy Spirit can also be traced from the ancient Hebrew Shekinah to certain Christian Gnostic texts, to the writings of medieval mystics, to the works of contemporary Mormon scholars like Janice Allred.16 Even for those who reject the view of Jesus as Eternal Father and Holy Ghost as Mother, it should be obvious that in Nephi's vision, the tree is Mary and its fruit is the incarnated Jesus. These visionary images serve the same sacral functions as do the birth symbols of water, blood, and flesh that are instantiated in Mary's body. Thus, Mary's womb is as much a site of redemption as the empty tomb.All these images of love and life are made concrete in the vision's revelation of the Madonna and Child, which also suggests the Pietà, Mary embracing the dead Jesus, an image that links death and rebirth. With Jesus in her arms, Mary connects heaven and earth. She is a human embracing divinity and a deity embracing humanity. She appears in the vision first as a woman alone, a virgin. Her virginity is stressed not as moral rectitude but as signifier of power. The word “virgin” or “maiden” in ancient texts commonly referred to an unmarried woman but, significantly, could refer to an independent woman whose status is not dependent on a husband or father.17 If Mary's role as mother was of sole importance, she would not appear first as a lone woman. Because she does, this signifies that she alone in her own right, not as wife or daughter of a male, bears the love of God. In the vision, she returns as a mother, but not in a patriarchal framework. Rather, she is a single mother, a singular Mother, the symbol of the cosmic creative feminine, whose motherhood, though secondary to her identity, is paradoxically essential to the revelation of God's love as real and relational, not merely abstract.The theological implications of the Mormon canon insist that divine love must be embodied in physical personages who live among us. God's love must be present and active, not remote and passive. It must be manifest concretely in bearing the burdens of others, in embracing the outcast, in mourning with the grief-stricken, in attending to the needy, in acknowledging others’ desires by seeking their happiness and esteeming them as equals in dignity and worth (Mosiah 4:26, 18:8–9). This love, embodied in the Mary of Nephi's vision, is what the Virgin Mary has signified in Catholic tradition for hundreds of years. Some liberal Catholic theologians have tried to remove Mary entirely from Catholic worship to promote a genderless, inclusive God. But, as scholar Charlene Spretnak observes, this effort has neither been embraced by most Catholics nor has it led to the elevation or greater inclusion of women or of marginalized groups. Most Catholics continue to feel a powerful and compelling need for Mary because she is perceived as actively dispensing the nurturing power of God that daily sustains them from birth to death.18 Many LDS feel the same need for the Mormon Heavenly Mother, as demonstrated by the recent popular movement noted by Stack in the Salt Lake Tribune.In Old and New Testament traditions and in other Jewish and Christian texts, the Mother God appears as Wisdom, Hokmah in Hebrew and Sophia in Greek. Many Mormons now accept the goddess Asherah as a legitimate manifestation of the Heavenly Mother in the Old Testament.19 But equally important is Lady Wisdom in the book of Proverbs because she expands the picture of the female God from a fertility or mother goddess to a god with an ethically principled core. Wisdom is the foundation for all other divine attributes because it moderates, mediates, and balances all other powers and engenders the gift of discernment. Many scholars have documented the widespread worship of Asherah in ancient Israelite folk practice and her place as the wife or consort of Yahweh, where her name is linked with him in inscriptions.20 However, Hokmah or Wisdom appears not as God's wife but as a deity of equal status in her own right. She lived with God from the beginning in an independent life of her own. Her divine status is revealed in the authoritative manner she addresses humanity in Proverbs, where she issues commandments and speaks in the first person to Israel: “Now therefore harken unto me, O ye children: for blessed are they that keep my ways” (Prov. 8:32). She does not act or speak as God's subordinate but as God's coequal in power and dominion. She addresses all, not just the rich and powerful; for she stands at the crossroads at the entrance of the city, ready to bless any who will heed her (Prov. 8:1–3). In her hands are eternal life, honor, peace, riches, power, and justice for all her children.21 She declares: “For whoso findeth me findeth life, and shall obtain favour of the Lord” (Prov. 8:35). The image of Lady Wisdom resists essentialization because it connects a distinctly female deity with divine attributes rather than with the female reproductive body, thus empowering both women and gender nonconforming people.Hokmah becomes Sophia in the Septuagint version of the Hebrew Bible read by Greek-speaking Jews from the second century BCE. Both are feminine nouns for the abstract concept of wisdom and can be interpreted restrictively as personifications or attributes of the Hebrew God, Yahweh, or the Christian or Gnostic male God rather than as the names of a separate and independent female deity. But, as scholars have pointed out, there are rich traditions in both Jewish and Christian non-canonical texts that depict Wisdom as a goddess and connect her with the Holy Spirit, the dove, and the bride of God.22 Equating the Mother God with wisdom does not eliminate it as an attribute of the male God but extends it beyond traditional rational restrictions into the realm of the intuitive. In their monumental study of the Western history of the Goddess, Anne Baring and Jules Cashford emphasize the important correspondence between the goddess Sophia and the Black Madonna in late medieval tradition: “Black is the colour that is associated with Wisdom, as the dark phase of the lunar cycle, where light gestates in the womb, is transformed and brought forth anew to illuminate the soul on its journey toward divination.”23 The Mother God as Wisdom reveals the fullness of her godhood, which encompasses all divine characteristics necessary for harmonizing and dispensing mercy and justice on earth to all people, regardless of personal bodily and sexual identities.Since Mormon tradition has commonly presented the Holy Ghost as a male personage of spirit who is one of the three male supreme beings, how can the Mother be understood by Mormons to be part of the Godhead or as an equal God who participates in the creation of the world and the redemption of her children? Is it legitimate to connect her with the Holy Ghost, as some Mormon feminists have argued? The answer to both questions is yes for two principal reasons.First and astoundingly, none of the references to the Holy Ghost in the Mormon canon (not including the Bible) identify the third person of the Godhead as male. Most of these references are either anonymous or neutral. Doctrine and Covenants 130:22 states that the Holy Ghost is a personage of spirit without mentioning any gender: “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. Were it not so, the Holy Ghost could not dwell in us.” In verse 23, the Holy Ghost is referred to as “it”: “A man may receive the Holy Ghost, and it may descend upon him and not tarry with him.” A careful study of all these scriptures reveals that out of 156 occurrences, three are neutral, using the pronoun “it” (D&C 130:23, Alma 34:38, and Moroni 2:2). In the remaining 153 instances, the pronouns are indefinite: “who,” “which,” and “that,” used with phrases such as “by the power of,” “the gift of,” “moved by,” “given by,” “baptism of,” and “full of.” While not conclusive, the absence of the male pronoun in these verses opens a canonical place in Mormonism for Heavenly Mother as Holy Ghost. Thus, she can be imaged as an actual personage who dispenses the power of God to her children in their mortal journey toward a fullness of glory. In stark contrast to Mormon scripture, current LDS discourse insists on identifying the Holy Ghost and Holy Spirit with male pronouns as occurs on the official Church web site: “The Holy Ghost is the third member of the Godhead. He is a personage of spirit, without a body of flesh and bones. He is often referred to as the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God, the Spirit of the Lord, or the Comforter.”24 The Church presents a male Godhead of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, while Mormon scriptures leave open the identification of the Holy Ghost, thus creating a possible place in the Godhead for Heavenly Mother.Second, although the current dominant LDS perception of the Godhead envisions the Holy Ghost as male, there are other, older traditions, some based in scripture, that depict the Spirit as female, which can create at least a linguistic space for the female in the Godhead. Nevertheless, the Christian tradition in the West has mostly identified the Holy Spirit as male since antiquity, though there have been ongoing debates both because the grammatical gender of the word “Spirit” is varied in biblical languages (where all nouns show gender that is not necessarily connected with sexed persons) and also because the noun “Spirit” does not have the strong masculine connotation associated with “Father” and “Son.” In Hebrew, the word for spirit is the feminine ruach, which has influenced some; but Jewish scholar Raphael Patai relies on the Talmudic and Midrashic term shekhina to show how this created a feminin