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Of Temples and Apostolic Keys

Of Temples and Apostolic Keys

Last updated on: August 14, 2024 at 8:22 pm by Dan Peterson

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Of Temples and Apostolic Keys 2024-08-14T20:22:14-06:00 Dan Peterson

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Richard N. W. Lambert, an active devotee of Latter-day Saint history who is now retired as a federal prosecutor and an Assistant United States Attorney, is featured in the newest short-video feature from the Interpreter Foundation, which is entitled “The Witnesses are Credible.” (As with the other video shorts in this series, it’s been drawn from the 2022 Interpreter Foundation docudrama Undaunted: Witnesses of the Book of Mormon, which is an accompanying sequel to the 2021 theatrical film Witnesses.)

Brother Lambert is the person who recruited me as an expert witness for the prosecution in the two-year-long federal case against Brian David Mitchell (aka Immanuel David Isaiah), the now-convicted and imprisoned kidnapper of Elizabeth Smart.

I hope that you’ll watch this little video (it’s less than a minute long) and that you’ll pass it on to others.

The Payson Utah Temple is a very visible landmark at the southern end of Utah Valley. (LDS Media Library)

I’ve been thinking about temples today, and about the apostolic keys that make them possible. For one thing, my wife and I participated in a session this afternoon in the Payson Utah Temple. I’ll only say this: We live in interesting times!

Meanwhile, the proposed McKinney Texas Temple has just been turned down for the second time, unanimously, by the McKinney town council, and, after having been unanimously approved by the mayor and city council of Las Vegas, the proposed Lone Mountain Nevada Temple and the city council’s decision in its favor are now facing a courtroom challenge. (Nearly forty years earlier, the first Latter-day Saint temple to be built in Las Vegas faced similar opposition.). And the small temple proposed for Cody, Wyoming, has thus far been blocked by legal challenges.

In that light, I’m grateful to a commenter on this blog named John Pack Lambert for having called to my attention the website for the McKinney Texas Temple. Of particular interest to me is the letter sent to the mayor and city council of McKinney by the nearly 150-year-old McKinney-based law firm of Abernathy, Roeder, Boyd, and Hullett, which is representing the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in this matter. One of the two authors of the letter — Jared J.Pace, an attorney who also holds a degree in “geographic information systems and urban planning” — is almost certainly a Latter-day Saint. The principal author, however, and the first author who is listed for the letter, is Richard M. Abernathy, who, according to the official biography for him on his law firm’s website, is a member of Stonebridge United Methodist Church there in McKinney.

You may read the letter sent by Abernathy, Roeder, Boyd, and Hullett here and then form your own opinion as to whether — as certain online critics are indignantly claiming — the Church is simply acting the part of a lawless bully in this matter, trying with its massive and utterly inappropriate temple to intimidate and overwhelm the unfortunate citizens of McKinney, Texas, and callously, even brutally, willing to do severe damage to their charming and heretofore peaceful neighborhood. I invite you to pay particular attention along the way to the various images that are included in the letter.

I found Brother Lambert’s comment on a prior blog entry worth repeating here, in the context of this topic:

The fact that the city has no zoning that allows religious buildings as of right [now?] is problematic. The fact that this site will become one of 4 religious buildings in a row with shops of some sort across the street gives the lie to claims this is a “residential” area.

The fact the city previously approved a 158-feet high bell tower on a Methodist Church is key. The fact the project was altered is immaterial. The fact that there is a 170-foot high church in the same zip code also matters.

The current Las Vegas Nevada Temple, shown here at sunset, was dedicated late in 1989, four years after ground was broken for it in the face of vocal public opposition. (Wikimedia Commons public domain photo)

We’re having regular weekly meetings now with our distribution team for Six Days in August, and plans are shaping up. (As our principal distribution planner, who also handled the very successful recent Latter-day Saint film Escape from Germany, puts it, “This is really happening!”) As details of our timing and strategy are nailed down, I’ll try to bring them to your attention here on this blog, as well as elsewhere. (Such things are among the reasons that I have a blog.)

We are, I’m afraid, going to ask you for your help in getting the word out. Our distribution budget is limited, and we’ll need to rely on word-of-mouth to a degree considerably beyond that of a big-budget Hollywood movie. We’ll eventually be posting listings of the theaters in which Six Days in August will be screened, and we’ll invite you to request that the film be shown in theaters near you. (We’ll let you know how to do that.) We’ll encourage you to take friends and family to showings of Six Days in August, to buy gift tickets for others, to take Church groups to theaters in order to watch it together. And we’ll be happy if some out there choose to rent entire theaters for screenings of the film. (In many areas, doing so is not nearly as expensive as you may think.)

We are hoping to stimulate, encourage, foster, and help to inform discussions about Brigham Young, the succession of the Twelve to the leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and the authority of the modern prophets and apostles who lead the Church today. To that end, we hope to complete a docudrama to accompany Six Days in August that will feature, among other things, interviews with prominent scholarly experts who are in a position to comment intelligently on Brother Brigham, the 1844 succession crisis, and the transfer of the keys of priesthood authority. Portions of that docudrama, including dramatic footage and several such interviews with scholars, have already been filmed — I’ll be conducting another interview with one of those experts tomorrow morning, Thursday morning, in Salt Lake City — but I confess that we still need to raise more funding in order to be able to confidently proceed with the docudrama in its “fullness.” We could even use more funds for publicity for the forthcoming dramatic film itself. So the work goes on, and we need and appreciate your help.

History and Religion

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David Whitmer

McKinney Texas Temple

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