It has always been easier for Latter-day Saints and their leaders to talk about the construction materials and furnishings of the temples than what actually happens inside of them. The church produced a twenty-one-page press kit for the 2022 Washington, DC, open house. The first two pages included vivid details about the landscaping, art glass, and millwork of the temple. It included a brief history of temple growth across the world, biographies of Latter-day Saint leaders, and statements of belief. What the press kit did not include was any mention of the ceremonies Latter-day Saints perform in their temples. The way the Saints have guarded their speech about the temple over nearly two hundred years is complicated. The temple is sacred and holy, but it is also separate. It is true that participants in the temple commit to never disclose certain aspects of the ceremonies outside of the temple, but those aspects are an extremely limited proportion of the overall experience. Often, however, Latter-day Saints have viewed most or all their experiences in temples as private. There are aspects to life—relationships or health, for example—where most people have an expectation of privacy (social media notwithstanding). Culturally, the temple is found in this space—beyond public access.
In 2018, Oxford University Press published my The Power of Godliness: Mormon Liturgy and Cosmology. A primary argument of that volume was that in conjunction with the temple liturgy, Joseph Smith revealed an expansive cosmology, where “kinship, priesthood, government, and heaven all became synonymous.” For Smith, heaven was not a reward or destination. It was relational—a network of people materialized through the rituals of the temple, a “cosmological priesthood.” Expanding from The Power of Godliness, a primary argument of this book is that throughout the nearly two hundred years since Smith introduced it, the temple has remained a liturgical space where Latter-day Saints generate a sacred, cosmic identity. The temple is a site where Latter-day Saints order their bodies, their communities, and their universe. Moreover, this work has not been static; this identity generation is the product of continual adaptation in response to cultural change.
Throughout his ministry, Joseph Smith repeatedly identified biblical archetypes which he ritualized. The culmination of this process was his expansion of John of Patmos’s apocalyptic vision. In describing his theophany, John quoted a heavenly hymn to Jesus, who “redeemed us to God by thy blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation; And hast made us unto our God kings and priests: and we shall reign on the earth” (Rev. 5:9–10). Elsewhere the vision included “a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues” who stood before the heavenly throne “clothed with white robes” having been cleaned in the blood of the Lamb (Rev. 7:9–14, also 1:5–6). This was temple imagery from the Hebrew bible appropriated and recast to describe the Christian heaven. Through Joseph Smith, this vision of heaven became the concrete product of the Latter-day Saint temple liturgy. The temple created a kingdom of priests and priestesses in heaven and on earth—performed biblicism on a cosmic scale.
For Smith, this heavenly concourse necessarily incorporated men and women. He promised a gathering of the church’s women’s organization in 1842 that he would make them into “a kingdom of priests.” In the temple liturgy, women dressed in the clothing of the ancient Israelite temple priests, just as men did. Then through relational sealing rituals Latter-day Saints fixed their family relationships for all eternity. They planned on extending those relationships through the entire history of humanity. They constructed the eternal past, present, and future in a timeless network of relationality. For Latter-day Saints, identity as eternal kin is inherent to the identity as members of the heavenly priesthood.
The Latter-day Saint experience with the temple has shifted in important ways since a mob murdered Joseph Smith in 1844. Still, this vision of kings and queens, priests and priestesses, remains imprinted on the temple liturgy and its material culture to the present. The temple has functioned as a dynamic map that orients church members as they move through space and time. This movement necessarily requires change in the individual, but also in the community more broadly and in the temple itself. For example, the way temple access has regulated Latter-day Saint foodways and sexuality has differed dramatically across generations. The possible family relations created through temple ritual have similarly varied. Building from the procession of twentieth-century sociologists of religion, Armand Mauss argued that Mormonism’s historical persistence is the result of a balanced tension of change—retrenchment to insider peculiarity on one hand and accommodation with the broader culture on the other. The temple remains a central liturgical site for Latter-day Saint identity formation. As will be demonstrated in this book, it has also been a central location for this balanced adaptation in the face of cultural change.
This book is a description and history of the Latter-day Saint temple liturgy. It is a study of women, men, and children who have ordered their lives in relation to it. There are aspects of the Latter-day Saint temple and its practice that are like the freeway overpass beneath the Seattle temple. In many cases, structure–function relationships are observable and evident. There are also elements like those red and white streetlights—facets of belief, practice, or material culture where function is not immediately clear. The chapters that follow integrate documents from across diverse archives and repositories to illuminate both the accessible and the obscured. They historicize and contextualize the work of the temple liturgy—the Latter-day Saint construction of a kingdom of priests and priestesses in heaven and on earth.
Jonathan Stapley is an award winning historian and scientist. Oxford University Press recently published his volumes, The Power of Godliness and Holiness to the Lord: Latter-day Saint Temple Worship, from which this essay was adapted.
Art: Manhattan, Brigham City, and Boston by Deb Fox.
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