# Authority

Discover how Mormon theology redefines authority as relationship and what that means for technology, governance, and human flourishing.

[Image: In Mormon theology, authority is framed not as domination but as a delegated capacity meant to serve—relieving others, teaching, and participating in the renewal of creation through gifts promised within God’s kingdom.]

Connotes chosenness, authorization, and power. In God’s kingdom, authority is only to be used to serve, provide relief, and teach. Its sole purposes are to create and sustain God’s kingdom, to restore and renew the earth itself, and to confer onto humanity the gifts of immortality and exaltation within that kingdom and upon that perfected earth.

Mormon theology gives authority a distinctive shape. It roots the right to act in God, transmits it through ordination and covenant, and then, in a striking passage of modern revelation, hedges it with conditions that make unrighteous dominion self-defeating. Authority that grasps for control loses the very sanction it claims.

## The LOGIC OF POWER

Doctrine and Covenants 121 delivers the sharpest scriptural critique of authority in the Restoration canon. The rights of the priesthood are “inseparably connected with the powers of heaven,” and those powers “cannot be controlled nor handled only upon the principles of righteousness” (D&C 121:36). The moment a person exercises “unrighteous dominion,” seeking to compel or coerce, “the heavens withdraw themselves” and “the authority of that man” ends (D&C 121:37). Authority here is not a possession but a relationship, sustained only by persuasion, patience, gentleness, and love unfeigned. This inverts the ordinary logic of power. The more one forces, the less one actually holds.

## Legitimacy Against Coercion

That inversion carries directly into questions of technology and governance. Modern systems concentrate authority in new forms: platforms that shape what billions see, models that mediate knowledge, institutions that can surveil and constrain at scale. Each promises order, and each tempts its holders toward the shortcut of control. The scriptural pattern warns that legitimacy built on coercion is already decaying, whatever its apparent reach. Authority worthy of the name expands agency rather than contracting it, invites rather than compels, and answers to those it serves. Decentralized designs, transparent accountability, and consent are not merely political preferences here; they are the technical expression of a theology that ties genuine authority to righteousness.

## Toward Shared Godhood

The Mormon transhumanist reading pushes further. If the aim of existence is theosis, the distribution of Godhood among many rather than its hoarding by few, then authority reaches its purpose when it raises others into equal standing. A parent’s authority succeeds by producing adults, not dependents. Divine authority, on this account, works the same way: it labors toward a Zion in which each participant becomes a full agent and creator. Authority that refuses to share itself, whether wielded by a ruler, an institution, or an artificial intelligence, betrays the end it was given to serve.

*See also*: [Accountability](/topical-guide/accountability), [Agency](/topical-guide/agency), [Church](/topical-guide/church), [Common Consent](/topical-guide/common-consent), [Covenant](/topical-guide/covenant), [Law](/topical-guide/law), [Power](/topical-guide/power), [Prophets](/topical-guide/prophets), [Responsibility](/topical-guide/responsibility), [Revelation](/topical-guide/revelation)