Though this article is about Mormons, I would find it applicable to the WTBTS as well.
Another essay has been posted on the LDS.org topics page, this one on “Becoming Like God.” Ostensibly seeking to clarify what is meant by the LDS doctrine that the righteous can someday be gods just like the God Latter-day Saints worship now, it only confuses the matter.
“Latter-day Saints see all people as children of God in a full and complete sense,” it announces—a much more euphemistic statement than the claim that “we are all literal spirit children of our Heavenly Father,” meaning that we were all conceived in the preexistence through some act of spiritual procreation. However guarded its wording, the essay does at least acknowledge LDS belief in a Heavenly Mother: “Latter-day Saints have also been moved by the knowledge that their divine parentage includes a Heavenly Mother as well as a Heavenly Father.”
The doctrine that male and female human beings may become gods has been absolutely foundational to LDS belief—it’s the reason behind the emphasis on family, since one point of becoming a god is that that status alone enables you to maintain family ties throughout the eternities. The essay acknowledges that this doctrine is grounded in LDS scripture “that linked exaltation with eternal marriage,” but edits the verses very carefully rather than quote them. Here is Doctrine and Covenants 132: 20:
Then shall they be gods, because they have no end; therefore shall they be from everlasting to everlasting, because they continue; then shall they be above all, because all things are subject unto them. Then shall they be gods, because they have all power, and the angels are subject unto them.
That doesn’t seem very metaphorical. But the essay works hard to hedge on what “then shall they be gods” actually means.
The previously unequivocal doctrine that men and women may become gods is softened to something much more vague: “men and women have the potential to be exalted to a state of godliness.” Godliness, a state so attainable that mere cleanliness is next to it, is referenced five times in the essay. But righteous Latter-day Saints weren’t promised godliness; they were promised godhood, and that term appears only once:
Latter-day Saints tend to imagine exaltation through the lens of the sacred in mortal experience. They see the seeds of godhood in the joy of bearing and nurturing children and the intense love they feel for those children, in the impulse to reach out in compassionate service to others, in the moments they are caught off guard by the beauty and order of the universe, in the grounding feeling of making and keeping divine covenants.
I’m all for being caught off guard by the beauty and order of the universe, but you don’t need to abstain from tea, coffee and alcohol to do that. The sort of godhood promised by LDS teachings requires strict adherence to LDS commandments and is the reward for doing so.
The essay complains that “Latter-day Saints’ doctrine of exaltation is often similarly reduced in media to a cartoonish image of people receiving their own planets,” and argues that “few Latter-day Saints would identify with caricatures of having their own planet.” But “having our own planets” is absolutely a matter-of-fact way Latter-day Saints have discussed this doctrine amongst ourselves, probably because of statements like this one from Brigham Young:
All those who are counted worthy to be exalted and to become Gods, even the sons of God, will go forth and have earths and worlds like those who framed this and millions on millions of others.
This belief hasn’t been caricatured by the media; the media have accurately reflected the way Mormons characterize it themselves. It’s deceitful of the church to claim otherwise.
And the essay actually deflects rather than answers this question: So, can we get our own planets, or not?
The essay asks, “Does belief in exaltation make Latter-day Saints polytheists?” and is careful not to answer this simple yes/no question with a yes or no. Instead, it claims that “disunity is impossible between exalted beings” without explaining what that means. It also states that “God the Father, Jesus Christ the Son, and the Holy Ghost”—but not God the Mother, despite her shout-out in the previous section—“though distinct beings, are unified in purpose and doctrine.”
The unity among the Father, Son and Holy Ghost seems to differ from the unity between Heavenly Mother and Heavenly Father; that seems closer to coverture, the concept in British and American law under which a woman’s legal identity was erased upon marriage, because “a man and a woman are one, and that one is the husband.”
I’m waiting for the church to explain how men and women can be equal partners for all eternity when it’s so obvious that Heavenly Mother and Heavenly Father are not. Worshiping Heavenly Father is the basis of LDS belief and practice; worshiping Heavenly Mother is grounds for excommunication.
I’ve written about Heavenly Mother and even guest-edited an issue of Sunstone that included articles about her by prominent LDS feminists Janice Allred and Margaret Toscano (as well as terrific depictions of her on the cover and inside by artist Galen Dara). While I’m glad that through a BYU Studies article entitled “A Mother There,” the church disavowed the foolish, insulting rationale that we don’t discuss her because she is too sacred to acknowledge, that still leaves the question of her obviously inferior status. I really hope the next essay on the topics page will address this.
At least the equivocation in this essay isn’t as bald and insulting as President Gordon B. Hinckley’s reply when asked by a reporter for Time in 1997 about the core doctrine that “As man now is, God once was: As God now is, man may be”:
I don't know that we teach it. I don't know that we emphasize it. I haven't heard it discussed for a long time in public discourse. I don't know. I don't know all the circumstances under which that statement was made. I understand the philosophical background behind it. But I don't know a lot about it and I don't know that others know a lot about it.
It was an utterly disingenuous statement, given that only three years earlier, in the midst of a sermon on the evils of pornography (it’s like they can’t leave the topic alone!), Hinckley himself affirmed the centrality of this belief:
the whole design of the gospel is to lead us onward and upward to greater achievement, even, eventually, to godhood. This great possibility was enunciated by the Prophet Joseph Smith in the King Follet sermon and emphasized by President Lorenzo Snow. It is this grand and incomparable concept: As God now is, man may become!
In an interview with ABC, Terryl Givens, professor of literature and religion at the University of Richmond, said, “Many of these things can be unsettling to members who have grown up with a typically manicured narrative, but it's a necessary part of the maturation for the church membership.”
But the pushback on obfuscating revisions of core doctrines isn’t from people used to “a typically manicured narrative,” but from those of us who grew up or otherwise came to terms with large, flowery, somewhat messy doctrines and are now shocked to see them trimmed and pruned and trained into tidy, less challenging shapes without any acknowledgment from the church that that’s what’s being done.
This is why President Thomas S. Monson was charged with fraud and why there’s an open letter calling for more transparency in various aspects of the church, such as “Inclusion of publication dates, authorship attributions, and an indication of the content being or not being official policies or doctrines of the Church, for all online and print content”—meaning undated, anonymous articles like the one discussed here or the recent article about DNA evidence and the Book of Mormon.
The fact that members are willing to confront the consequences of such transparency but the leaders aren’t indicates that it’s the leaders who find “maturation” an “unsettling” process.