“Mormonism has developed the notion of a self-made deity, who through activism and effort has achieved a relative mastery over the world … a God whose transcendence is merely relative to human perception and whose relatively transcendent position with regard to man and other uncreated elements of the universe is the result of a conquest. God is God because he has risen to ‘Godhood’ by his own labor.”

Thomas O’Dea, The Mormons (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1957), 124.