The Knock at the Door
Most people meet Mormonism on a front porch or in a short ad between television programs. Two young missionaries in pressed shirts and name tags ask if they can share a message about Jesus Christ, or a commercial shows a family laughing around a dinner table and invites the viewer to learn more. The appeal is warm and usually sincere, and it centers on families that last forever and a place to belong for anyone who feels unmoored.
What rarely comes up in those first conversations is the history that produced the church, or the doctrines that set it apart from every branch of historic Christianity. A person can go a long way into the missionary lessons without hearing that God the Father was once a man, or that the church’s founding prophet took dozens of wives while denying it in public. None of that makes the missionaries dishonest, since most of them are nineteen or twenty and believe what they’ve been taught. Even so, anyone weighing Mormonism’s claims deserves to see the whole house, and the rooms in back tell a different story than the front parlor.
A Prophet in Upstate New York
Joseph Smith was fourteen, by his later account, when he went into the woods near Palmyra, New York, in 1820 to ask God which church he should join. He said God the Father and Jesus Christ appeared and told him to join none of them, because all had gone astray. Smith recorded the vision several times over the following years, and the accounts don’t agree on who appeared or what was said, a variation the LDS church now acknowledges in its own published essays.
A few years later Smith reported that an angel named Moroni led him to golden plates buried in a hillside. He produced the Book of Mormon in 1830, and witnesses described him dictating it with a seer stone placed in a hat, a method the church has since confirmed. In 1835 he and his associates bought a set of Egyptian papyri from a traveling exhibitor, and Smith later published a translation he called the Book of Abraham, which remains canonized scripture. When fragments of those papyri resurfaced in the 1960s, Egyptologists identified them as ordinary funerary texts with no connection to Abraham. The church’s current explanation is that the papyri served as a catalyst for revelation rather than a source to be translated.
If the church Christ founded truly vanished after the apostles, a new prophet would be needed to restore it, and his word would carry the full weight of Scripture. Smith’s authority holds up the entire system for exactly that reason. Historic Christianity has always believed the opposite, trusting Christ’s promise that the gates of hell wouldn’t prevail against his church and receiving the apostolic gospel as complete. Paul anticipated the claim of a fresh gospel delivered from heaven and answered it long before it arrived.
Galatians 1:8
But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed.
The Revelation That Came With a Marriage Command
Smith began taking additional wives in the 1830s and continued in Nauvoo, Illinois, through the early 1840s. An official church essay on the subject says he may have married as many as thirty or forty women. Some of them already had living husbands, and one, Helen Mar Kimball, was sealed to him several months before her fifteenth birthday. Most of these marriages happened in secret, several without his wife Emma’s knowledge, and Smith was still denying the practice publicly in May 1844, a month before his death.
In July 1843 Smith dictated the revelation now printed as Doctrine and Covenants 132, which presents plural marriage as a command from God and ties it to the highest exaltation. The same section addresses Emma by name, telling her to receive the wives given to her husband and warning that she’ll be destroyed if she refuses. After Smith’s death, Brigham Young led the Saints to Utah, where the church announced the practice openly in 1852 and Young himself married more than fifty women. Federal pressure eventually grew heavy enough that church president Wilford Woodruff issued the Manifesto in 1890, though church leaders quietly authorized new plural marriages until a second manifesto in 1904. Section 132 was never removed, and it still forms the scriptural basis for eternal marriage in LDS temples today.
Scripture does record polygamy among the patriarchs and kings, but it never holds it up as a pattern for God’s people. Jacob’s home fills with rivalry between Leah and Rachel, and Solomon’s many wives turn his heart after other gods. When Jesus was asked about marriage, he pointed back past all of it to the design God established in the garden.
Matthew 19:4–6
He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”
Peter warned that false teachers would rise from within the community of faith, and he named one of their marks with uncomfortable precision.
2 Peter 2:1–2
But false prophets also arose among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the Master who bought them, bringing upon themselves swift destruction. And many will follow their sensuality, and because of them the way of truth will be blasphemed.
A revelation that arrived after its prophet had already been sealed to other men’s wives and to a girl of fourteen, and that threatened the one wife who objected, raises questions about its source that no outside critic needs to invent.
A God Who Was Once a Man
Smith’s teaching on plural marriage belonged to a larger vision of God that he laid out publicly in the last months of his life. In April 1844 he preached what’s now called the King Follett discourse, teaching that “God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man.” Lorenzo Snow, who later became church president, summed up the idea in a couplet Latter-day Saints still repeat: “As man now is, God once was: as God now is, man may be.” Section 132 promises couples sealed in the temple that they’ll become gods and enjoy a continuation of their seed forever, which binds eternal marriage directly to the hope of godhood.
Jesus has a place within that same framework, since LDS teaching holds that every human being lived before birth as a spirit child of Heavenly Father and identifies Jesus as the firstborn of those children, with Lucifer among the spirit siblings who rebelled. Latter-day Saints honor Christ as sinless and divine, but in their system his divinity belongs to a family of beings who share one kind of existence, and even the Father reached his position through progression.
The God of Israel speaks of himself in a way that shuts the door on any history of becoming.
Isaiah 43:10
Before me no god was formed, nor shall there be any after me.
John places the Son on the Creator’s side of that line from the first verse of his Gospel.
John 1:1–3
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.
If all things were made through the Word, he can’t be one of the things made, and no spirit birth in a premortal world can account for him. Christians confess a Son who has always been God and who took on flesh for our sake. Human beings bear God’s image and are invited to share in his life, but they remain creatures forever, and the distance between Creator and creature is what makes worship possible at all.
Climbing Toward the Celestial Kingdom
Salvation in Mormonism is laid out across three kingdoms of glory described in Doctrine and Covenants 76. Nearly everyone will inherit one of them, so LDS teaching can speak generously about grace, but the highest level of the celestial kingdom, called exaltation, belongs only to those who’ve received the temple ordinances, including eternal marriage, and kept their covenants to the end. The third Article of Faith says mankind may be saved through Christ’s atonement “by obedience to the laws and ordinances of the Gospel,” and the Book of Mormon teaches that we’re saved by grace “after all we can do.”
Grace in that system works mostly as divine help, the enabling power that makes obedience possible, while the believer’s faithfulness remains part of what finally secures the reward. Many Latter-day Saints feel that pressure keenly, because no one can be sure they’ve done all they can. Paul describes a gift that comes before any work and depends on none.
Ephesians 2:8–9
For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.
Obedience follows salvation in the Christian life as its fruit, and the whole weight of the final hope rests on what Christ has already finished. The hope waiting at the end of that road differs as well, since faithful Latter-day Saints look toward exaltation as gods presiding over their own eternal families. Christians look instead toward resurrection with Christ and life with God as forgiven, adopted children, glad to remain creatures in the presence of their Creator.
When the Missionaries Are on Your Porch
The young people who knock on the door have usually left home at eighteen or nineteen and given up two years of their lives to share what they believe. They deserve patience and kindness, and they also deserve honesty, because agreeing over shared vocabulary without defining the words leaves everyone exactly where they started.
A Christian can ask whether God has always been God or whether he was once a man. It’s fair to ask how a Latter-day Saint reads Doctrine and Covenants 132 and what they make of Joseph Smith’s marriages to other men’s wives, since the church’s own essays discuss them openly. Asking whether anyone can know they’ve done all they can often opens the most personal ground of all, and none of these questions needs to be asked with heat. Peter’s instruction still governs the tone.
1 Peter 3:15
but in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect,
What a Christian has to offer at the door is Christ himself, the eternal Son who finished the work of saving sinners and welcomes them into his family without waiting on a temple recommend. For a young missionary who has spent two years trying to do all they can, that may be the most surprising news they’ve heard all day.
