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Contra Latter-day Saint Temples

Contra Latter-day Saint Temples

Last updated on: November 12, 2024 at 9:40 am by Dan Peterson

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Contra Latter-day Saint Temples 2024-11-12T09:40:00-07:00 Dan Peterson

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I cannot confirm this, but it is commonly reported that all United States nuclear submarines rise to periscope depth every Sunday evening between 7 PM and 9 PM, Utah time, so that their crews can listen live to the Interpreter Radio Show. They are able to do so in reasonable safety because all Russian and Chinese submarines, and most submarines of other fleets, do exactly the same thing. Or so it is said. (Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph)

Newly posted on the website of the Interpreter Foundation: Interpreter Radio Show — November 3, 2024, including “The Book of Mormon in Context” for Ether 12-15

In the 3 November 2024 installment of the Interpreter Radio Show, Martin Tanner, Brent Schmidt, and Hales Swift discussed Come, Follow Me Book of Mormon lesson 48, the Interpreter Foundation’s Margaret Barker seminars, Saints Volume 4, the new Church garments, the recent articles in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship by Diane E. Wirth and Matthew Bowen, and other topics.

Recorded, archived, and now made available at no charge and at your sovereign pleasure, these recordings have been edited to remove commercial breaks.

The Interpreter Radio Show can be heard in the Valley of the Great Salt Lake each and every Sunday evening from 7 to 9 PM (MDT), on K-TALK, AM 1640, or you can listen live on the Internet at ktalkmedia.com.

The Deseret Peak Utah Temple, near Tooele, Utah, during its pre-dedicatory open house. (Hence, the temporary tents attached to the building.) This is a Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph.

“President Nelson, 100, dedicates the 200th Latter-day Saint temple: ‘This is the Lord’s house. It is filled with His power,’ President Russell M. Nelson says of new Deseret Peak Utah Temple in Tooele, Utah”

The news that the centenarian president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints dedicated the Church’s two-hundredth temple on Sunday has led to very pleased rejoicing among many members of the Church, both generally and, in particular, in the Tooele Valley. Not so, however, in certain other wearisomely predictable quarters. Among those whose lives currently revolve around disdaining the Church, its leaders, its members, its efforts, its teachings, and its values, the newly dedicated temple has aroused indignation and sneering. In fact, for certain critics who may perhaps have their own unresolved personal issues with vanity and with what Sigmund Freud (in his letters to Wilhelm Fließ) called Projektion, the rapid building of temples under the administration of President Russell M. Nelson is merely President Nelson’s “vanity project” — an accusation that they have also leveled against me, in connection with the Interpreter Foundation’s films Witnesses (2021), Undaunted: Witnesses of the Book of Mormon (2022), and Six Days in August (2024) — and is possibly even his subtle method of attempting to show up, supersede, and, thus, defeat his predecessor in the presidency of the Church, Gordon B. Hinckley (who presided over the last major wave of temple building).

On the Peterson Obsession Board, in particular, my recent mention of a visit to the Villahermosa México Temple inspired a small flurry of attacks on the very idea of temples. Jesus, it was pointed out, built no temples. Instead, they said, he served the poor. Were he alive today, he would be establishing soup kitchens, not temples.

But, of course, today’s Restored Church builds both “soup kitchens” — that is, it serves the poor and the needy — and it builds temples. And Jesus didn’t build any temples because a temple already stood in Jerusalem, which he plainly venerated. (See also Hugh Nibley’s classic 1967 article on “The Passing of the Primitive Church.”) Here, for instance, is an account from the Gospel of John:

And the Jews’ passover was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.

And found in the temple those that sold oxen and sheep and doves, and the changers of money sitting:

And when he had made a scourge of small cords, he drove them all out of the temple, and the sheep, and the oxen; and poured out the changers’ money, and overthrew the tables;

And said unto them that sold doves, Take these things hence; make not my Father’s house an house of merchandise.

And his disciples remembered that it was written, The zeal of thine house hath eaten me up. (John 2:13-17)

And here, representing the Synoptics, is a passage from the Gospel of Matthew:

And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves,

And said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves. (Matthew 21:12-13)

And please note that the very next verse, Matthew 21:14, reads as follows in the King James Version: “And the blind and the lame came to him in the temple; and he healed them.” Reverence for the temple and concern for the needy.

Moreover, unless one is a Marcionite or is simply (whether ingeniously or disingenuously) making up a god according to his own preferences and without reference to history or the Bible, it was the God of Jesus (or even, in some sense or another, Jesus himself) who commanded the building of the Jewish tabernacle and temples in the first place.

Another argument deployed against the Latter-day Saint concept of a temple on the Obsession Board is that Jesus welcomed everybody, including publicans and sinners, into his church and that he would not have excluded anyone. And today, the argument continues, sinners are welcomed into Catholic and other churches, whereas the self-righteous and exclusivist Latter-day Saints require certification of “worthiness” for entry into dedicated temples.

But, of course, there is no worthiness requirement for entry into ordinary Latter-day Saint chapels. And here, too, the criticism betrays willful or inadvertent innocence of history and the Bible, or even a predilection for Marcionism. For the ancient tabernacle and its successor-temples, with such features as a “court of the Gentiles,” a court for Israelite women, a court for Israelite men, and a holy of holies into which only the high priest could enter (and, even then, only once a year) were most definitely not open to the general public.

I don’t have the time or the energy or the space here to make a full argument for what follows, but it can certainly be contended that the modern Latter-day Saint temple represents a much more expansive admission into the symbolic presence of the Lord than did its ancient Israelite counterpart: Not merely the single high priest but all men and women who are permitted access into the temple are allowed to pass through the veil. In Catholic churches, the priest and those who assist him are allowed proximity to the altar, in a ritual that clearly derives in some sense from the liturgy of the ancient temple. But congregants attending a service are certainly not free to wander about the altar or to mingle with the officiants during the mass. In the Latter-day Saint temple, nobody who enters the endowment room is barred from approaching the altar and participating in priestly activity.

It has even been suggested by reputable scholars that, in ancient Christendom, non-Christians were excluded from the worship space during baptisms, and that the term mass derives from a Latin “dismissal” of unbaptized worshipers. This can be debated, and it has been, but there is plenty of reason to doubt the claim that there have never been barriers between congregants and clergy in Christian history and practice. In the Latter-day Saint temple, however, the congregation is composed not of mere lay spectators but of priests and priestesses.

The eponymous Christopher Hitchens, whom I actually rather enjoyed and who passed away much too young, speaking in Colorado in 2005. (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

I conclude, as is my wont, with some material drawn from the Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File™:

“Religious communities can help solve our social isolation crisis: In a society increasingly isolated by technology, do religious communities hold the answer?” This is a thoughtful essay by Josh Good, who serves as director of the Aspen Institute’s Religion & Society Program.

And I append to it this short piece from the Deseret News, written by Scott Anderson and Michael Parker, which, although it doesn’t actually mention religion, seems to me to have come from somewhere in close proximity to the Hitchens File: “Opinion: Utah’s moment is about being Utah” See also this item from WalletHub about “Most Charitable States.” I could quibble about some of its categories and metrics, but the overall high ranking of my adopted home state seems to me pretty much correct. And what makes Utah unique? Is it not its culture? But what created its culture, if not its distinctive and very religiously influenced history and its demographics?

Finally, Stephen Cranney and Joshua Coates have published an article in the most recent issue of BYU Studies [63/3 (2024):35-47] that offers up truly disheartening news about the impact of religion and religious beliefs on marriage: “Temple Marriages Are Less Likely to End in Divorce: Insights from the B. H. Roberts 2023 Current and Former Latter-day Saint Survey.”

“It is a commonly held truism,” the authors begin, “that temple marriages are less likely to end in divorce. But is it true? How do we know? The fact is that this popular belief is primarily based on surveys that are now forty to fifty years old.” However, Cranney and Coates provide much more recent evidence indicating that, painful and unfortunate as it may seem, the truism remains . . . well, true: Temple marriages continue to be less likely to end in divorce.

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