Hello,

I need to rant and also gain a gain some fresh perspective on how to deal with my relationship with my father from a gospel perspective. This got taken down from a different group so hopefully I can get some insight here.

I always had a solid relationship with my dad. Growing up, he was always a pretty strict parent and as I got into the teenage/more observant years, I saw that he can be quite a difficult man. As he proudly puts it himself, he's a "hard man to love".

Although I am full of my flaws, growing up and especially coming home from serving my mission, I have noticed cracks in our relationship as I developed my own personality and came to voice my opinion more often. He is pretty "old-fashioned" by which I mean he at times says things that I find sexist and ableist (and others forbidden to be mentioned by community standards). For example, he can be pretty bossy with his wife/my mom but he won't do any of the house chores although she works full-time and he only works part-time.

As I went off to college, our views parted ways even more, most of it comes down to politics but I bring it here because I do think he says things that are not in line with the gospel. He speaks against certain religions, races and sexual orientations very strongly. Recently we had a conversation and he derailed and ended up comparing gay marriage to something horrible! I asked what he would do if one of his kids or many grandkids came out and he outright said he couldn't love them any more.

I love him, he is my father. But it's hard seeing the man who joined the church and brought us up very strictly following the gospel, talk scripture and love so little.

I sometimes help him with his social media account that he rushed for business and recently I noticed he follows A LOT of younger women accounts, specifically Asian, and that he DMs them quite regularly. Nothing overly sexual, simply comments on their "looks", their smiles, hair and how they are beautiful. To my horror then, I found that he follows some of my closer friends that he meet only a couple of times and he's been messaging them out of the blue, as in, "Beautiful princess, how is your day? My wife is busy with work so she doesn't have time for me" etc.

This was a drop too much and I don't know what to do. Our relationship was good so far - we were always able to discuss our differences openly and maintained honesty. If I felt strongly about something, I would tell him and vice versa. Most of the times he gets offended and ghosts me for some days but then we get back to talking.

I want to talk to him about this but I don't know how or if it's my place. The worst thing is that my mom does so much. She has been the hard worked and brought all of the kids up. I have so much love and respect for her that this really broke me. He also holds a significant-ish calling jn our ward.

I want to talk to him but I don't know how. I know if I don't talk about it, it will simply boil inside me until I erupt at some point. I also feel horrible because he had a falling out with most of my siblings at some point and I always tried to remain a good daughter and not mix up other people's issues with how I view a person. He only really talks to me and another sibling kind of. I am really struggling with walking the fine line between setting boundaries and not judging right now.

With Come Follow Me taking us through the Old Testament this year, I've seen some posts in LDS social media spaces (YouTube, Instagram, X) about Asherah, the Canaanite goddess who some scholars believe was worshipped alongside El and/or Yahweh in ancient Israel, and who many online are now identifying as a suppressed reference to Heavenly Mother. I've also seen 's "Lady Wisdom" brought in as further evidence.

I want to engage with this seriously, because I think the underlying scholarly material is genuinely fascinating and the yearning behind the question is completely valid. Latter-day Saints have every reason to want to understand Heavenly Mother better. But I also think a lot of the posts I'm seeing are doing something intellectually sloppy: taking real but ambiguous archaeological evidence and leaping to a conclusion that the evidence doesn't cleanly support.

Note for this subreddit: This subreddit understandably doesn't allow the use of the word "c-u-l-t" (to fairly protect against antagonists to the Church, I would guess). I use "c-lt" here in the scholarly, historic sense just to mean "a system of ritual practices or devotional veneration dedicated to a specific deity, figure, or place."

What the scholarship actually says

The core scholarly facts are as follows:

• Ancient Israel's religion was far more complex than Sunday School implies. The Deuteronomists, the school of editors and reformers associated with King Josiah's reforms around 622 BC, almost certainly reshaped the Hebrew Bible significantly, consolidating worship around Yahweh alone and suppressing older, more pluralistic religious practices.

• in the Sinai and near Hebron include phrases like "I bless you by Yahweh of Samaria and by his Asherah," suggesting that at least some ancient Israelites paired Yahweh with Asherah in their devotional practice.

• Saul Olyan, in his landmark 1988 work , argues that the asherah was a legitimate part of the c-lt of Yahweh both in the north and in the south, in state religion and in popular religion, finding opposition only in Deuteronomistic circles.

• Some scholars see the feminine personification of Wisdom in as a literary transformation of the Asherah tradition, preserved in coded form after the Deuteronomists suppressed direct goddess language.

So, yes, there definitely was a practice in ancient Israel of worshipping an "Asherah" female goddes that was the consort of the primary worshipped God (be it El or Yahweh). And that worship of her was definitely suppressed by later Israelite leaders.

The question in the air is: was this correct suppression of idolatrous practices, or was it apostasy from something divine?

Problem 1: Israel wasn't bitheistic; it was polytheistic, and not even coherently so

This is the main issue I keep coming back to. When ancient Israelites worshipped Asherah alongside Yahweh, they weren't operating in a tidy "Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother" theological framework. They were embedded in the broader Canaanite-Semitic religious world, which included Baal, Astarte, Anat, Mot, Shamash, Yarikh, and other gods. . This was a full, Hellenistic-style pantheon where each deity governed a domain, not a bitheistic theology that maps onto LDS cosmology.

If you want to argue that Asherah worship preserves a vestige of true doctrine about Heavenly Mother, you need a principled reason for why she specifically is the surviving truth while Baal, Astarte, and the rest are just idolatry. "She was paired with Yahweh" isn't quite enough. Baal was also deeply integrated into Israelite syncretistic practice, and nobody is suggesting he preserves a truth about the Godhead.

And it gets more complicated. Yahweh-worship itself was geographically fragmented, with meaningfully different regional expressions. There was no single coherent national theology that had everyone worshipping Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother together. What we see is a patchwork of local Yahwisms: some with Asherah, some without, some with Baal, some with neither. That looks much more like ordinary ancient Near Eastern syncretism than like a unified preserved revelation.

Problem 2: The Asherah c-lt was entangled with idol worship in ways that are hard to spiritualize away

across Israelite settlements. Ritual asherim poles and stone pillars were erected at shrines.

I want to be fair here: the existence of corrupted, idolatrous worship doesn't prove the underlying theological concept was false. Israel made golden calves to represent Yahweh himself (, ), and we don't take that as evidence Yahweh wasn't real. So I'll concede: the idol problem is an argument against the form the worship took, not necessarily against the underlying claim.

However, if Asherah's c-lt had become so thoroughly corrupted (idolatrous, sexualized, entangled with folk fertility practice) by the time the Deuteronomists arrived, then their suppression of it looks less like villains destroying revealed truth and more like reformers responding to something genuinely problematic. The question isn't only "did Asherah represent something real?". We also have to ask "was this particular c-lt, in this particular form, worth preserving?"

Similarly, Asherah was sometimes worshipped independently, with her own shrines, her own priesthoods, and her own devotional traditions entirely separate from Yahweh. I'll grant that apostasy is rarely clean. A teaching about a real divine being could fragment into independent folk c-lts over centuries, much as Latter-day Saints might understand Marian veneration as an over-correction from something real into something that became its own independent movement. So independent Asherah worship doesn't by itself disqualify the Heavenly Mother reading. What it does undermine is the romantic narrative of a coherent, nationally shared theology about a divine couple, which simply wasn't the reality on the ground.

Problem 3: The Book of Mormon's silence is significant

Josiah's reform is dated to approximately 622 BC. . He was an eyewitness to the Deuteronomic upheaval; his entire adult life in Jerusalem straddled the reform, and he was an active proponent against the mainstream post-Deuteronomistic religious life in Jerusalem. , that he was precisely the kind of figure who carried pre-Deuteronomistic teachings out of Jerusalem. That's definitely a plausible reading, and there are strong evidences for it in many respects (e.g., the Book of Mormon emphasizes Ephraim a lot and even suppresses David and Judah a lot).

It's worth acknowledging the one place people do find a potential Asherah reference in the Book of Mormon: the sacred Tree of Life. Lehi and Nephi both vision a beautiful tree whose fruit is desirable above all others (, ), and some scholars (notably Daniel Peterson in his essay ) have argued that the sacred tree imagery is directly connected to the Asherah tradition, and that the tree represents the divine feminine or Heavenly Mother. The Asherah-as-sacred-tree connection has lots of evidence in both the Old Testament and archeology, so it's definitely not outside the realm of reason,

But notice what this concession actually gives you: even the strongest candidate for an Asherah / Heavenly Mother figure in the entire Book of Mormon is an implicit symbol, not a name, not a doctrine, not a form of worship, not an instruction to pray to her or honor her. If the Book of Mormon is carrying forward pre-Deuteronomistic truth about a divine feminine, it's doing so in the most veiled possible way, with no elaboration, no teaching, and no c-ltic instruction attached. And the angel's interpretation of the tree in identifies it explicitly with the love of God and the condescension of Jesus Christ, not with a feminine divine being. Whatever symbolic resonance the tree carries, the Book of Mormon itself doesn't point the reader toward Heavenly Mother when it has the chance to.

And then there is . When the resurrected Jesus Christ appears to the Nephites, he reorganizes ordinances, expounds the gospel from first principles, establishes the Church, and teaches everything that matters. If the suppression of Asherah was the apostasy-level loss that these posts imply, that was the moment to restore it to the Nephites and Lamanites. He doesn't.

In fact, one of the very first things Jesus does upon appearing is address prior doctrinal confusion head-on. In , he declares: "there shall be no disputations among you concerning the points of my doctrine" and "he that hath the spirit of contention is not of me, but is of the devil." Then he says plainly: "I will declare unto you my doctrine." What follows in verses 32–38 is the complete, definitive statement of the gospel of Jesus Christ: faith, repentance, baptism, the Holy Ghost, and the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost bearing record. That's it. "Asherah" is not part of the doctrine he declares, and this is the passage where he is explicitly settling doctrinal disputes and laying everything out without ambiguity.

He then repeatedly and explicitly instructs them to pray to the Father in His name (, , ). The disciples follow this pattern the very next morning (). There is even a notable moment where the disciples, overwhelmed in the physical presence of the resurrected Lord, begin praying directly to Jesus rather than the Father (). Jesus, in his subsequent intercessory prayer, gently explains this to the Father rather than rebuking them: "they pray unto me because I am with them" (). The entire theological architecture of 3 Nephi (its doctrine, its prayer, its ordinances) is oriented toward a Father and a Son, no "Asherah" in sight.

Silence isn't proof of absence, so I shouldn't overstate this. But within an LDS framework that treats the Book of Mormon as the most correct book on earth concerning the doctrine of Christ and 3 Nephi as a pinnacle of revealed truth, the complete absence of this theme is worth considering.

Problem 4: The LDS doctrinal mapping doesn't work as cleanly as the popular posts imply

This last point is more internal to LDS theology, so take it for what it's worth.

In LDS doctrine, Jesus Christ is Jehovah / Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament. Heavenly Mother would be the consort of Elohim, Heavenly Father, not the consort of Yahweh/Jesus Christ. So the archaeological evidence most commonly cited in these posts, which pairs Asherah with Yahweh, doesn't straightforwardly support the Heavenly Mother reading even on LDS terms.

Notably, however,(an older god worshipped by at least some Israelites before Yahwehism). And in LDS theology, Elohim is Heavenly Father.

So if there's a kernel of preserved truth anywhere in this tradition, it's actually in the El-consort material from Ugarit, not in the Yahweh-consort inscriptions from Kuntillet Ajrud that go viral every few months. The more theologically coherent version of the Asherah argument within LDS doctrine would focus there. I just wish the people making this argument were making that version of it, because it's genuinely more defensible inside LDS theology.

Conclusions

I don't want to be dismissive of what's driving these posts, because some of it is legitimate:

• The Deuteronomists almost certainly removed, suppressed, or reframed things from older Israelite religion.

• The existence of queen-goddess figures across virtually every ancient culture (Asherah, Hera, Isis, Ishtar) does speak to something in human religious intuition that seems, to me, to not be accidental. A universal yearning for a divine feminine figure isn't nothing. Our own hymn recognizes this: "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" .

• The El/Asherah pairing in the oldest sources is at minimum suggestive within an LDS framework, even if it falls well short of confirmation.

• Latter-day Saints have every reason to want to understand and honor Heavenly Mother. It's part of to the World, which we have been told in General Conference

My concern is simply this: in our eagerness to learn more about Heavenly Mother, we shouldn't be throwing ourselves at the nearest available female deity and declare the search over. The worship of Asherah, whatever kernel of truth may or may not lie behind it, was by the time of the archaeological record a polytheistic, idol-entangled, regionally fragmented folk practice, not the coherent preserved theology many of the viral posts suggest.

Remember :

"Very little has been revealed about Mother in Heaven, but what we do know is summarized in a gospel topic found in our Gospel Library application. Once you have read what is there, you will know everything that I know about the subject. I wish I knew more. You too may still have questions and want to find more answers. Seeking greater understanding is an important part of our spiritual development, but please be cautious. Reason cannot replace revelation. Speculation will not lead to greater spiritual knowledge, but it can lead us to deception or divert our focus from what has been revealed."

I’m 36F and I’ve been a member my whole life.
I served an amazing mission (2015-2017) and met some incredible people there

Everything declined when I got home. I’m not kidding it was one thing after the other - job loss, sickness, family death - I mean everything.

I moved to the US to attend BYU thinking being in a church centered place would reignite my faith. At this point I was still going to church but I was exhausted (mentally, spiritually and emotionally)

The adjustment to the States was harder than I could manage and I too feel into the worldly ways.
Fast forward to now - I have a child (yes out of wedlock) and I can genuinely not see a clear path back to church.

I felt most fulfilled at church it’s such a big part of my identity. I love the structure and purpose you have as a member.

I feel I’ve been aimlessly kinda drifting on and I know the solution is repairing the relationship with God but how.

I have also fallen on hard times now (financially) and I hate for that to be the reason I return (because I’m low). I had no idea being less active and going back to church would be this hard

So my question is - how do you get back into it?
I mean the literal steps to take because just going to church still feels empty to me