Gnosticism, or mainstream Catholic/Orthodox/Anglican/Protestant Christianity?

[DC Al Fine]

Not the one based on special esoteric knowledge for a secretive elite few.

BUT MUH SACRED FEMININE!

Technically Mormonism has a Heavenly Mother to go along with a Heavenly Father/God the Father.

So you don't need Gnosticism for that.

Mormonism is basically a superficially-Gnostic heresy.

Not really? I mean, we don't believe that God is evil, we don't believe that flesh is evil (indeed, we celebrate mortality), while we do have "secret" ordinances in which you have to be authorized to take part in, it's theoretically open to any baptized member of the church, we definitely don't see procreation as evil, there's no such thing as the Demiurge in Mormonism, and etc.

Well, Mormons aren't exactly Gnostic (hence the "superficially"), but they do share more than most of Christianity: the Mormon version of God is very similar to the concept of the Demiurge in that the Heavenly Father is not the highest God but only one in a long series of exalted men; Mormon exaltation is essentially a version of gnosis; the way Mormonism treats knowledge and revelation is pretty Gnostic; Mormon ideas of pre-existence have Gnostic roots, as does the idea of Jesus and Lucifer being brothers; etc. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of other heresies syncreticized into the mix (like Arianism), but the Gnosticism is pretty strong.

Technically Heavenly Father is the highest God in the sense that if there are others, we don't really care about them.

I'll give you the exaltation/gnosis issue. Pre-existence, I haven't studied gnostic views on that, though Mormons tend to brag whenever evidence of pre-existence views comes up in early Christianity. Jesus and Lucifer being brothers seems logically sound if the rest of us are spiritual siblings.

As for Arianism, how does that come into the picture? Also, dang, that's pretty impressive for a faith that originated with a fairly uneducated farmboy.

You believe Jesus is a created being, no?