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Without Moroni statues, is the Church rejecting its past?

Without Moroni statues, is the Church rejecting its past?

Last updated on: August 26, 2026 at 8:28 pm by Dan Peterson

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Without Moroni statues, is the Church rejecting its past? 2026-08-26T20:28:07-06:00 Dan Peterson

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I interrupt my regular blather here to bring you something that is urgently important and that could, conceivably, save a life:

The somewhat revised poster or flyer that has just been sent out.

It seems that someone’s porch camera picked Brent Benson up walking southward on Orem’s Main Street very near to the border with Provo, or perhaps even already in Provo. Of course, we — certainly I — have no idea where he went after that sighting. Nor can we rule out the possibility that he was picked up by somebody with a car, in which case he could be just about anywhere. But the above is the best information that has been made public to this point. If you live in the general area, even looking carefully around your front yard and your back yard might be worthwhile. You can, I think, imagine something of the toll that Brent’s disappearance is taking on his wife and family.

[I’m delighted to report that Brent Benson was just found and is back, safe, with his family. That’s all I know. Thanks to any and all who paid attention to this story.]

A view of the church in Ringgenberg, the Schloßkirche, showing a bit of the ruined castle on which it sits at the edge of Lake Brienz, the Brienzersee, in the Berner Oberland area of Switzerland. (Wikimedia Commons public domain photo by Andrew Bossi, dated 2007)

In my latest column for Meridian Magazine, I reminisce about an experience from my missionary service in German-speaking Switzerland: “What a Swiss Pastor Saw in the Church That We Sometimes Miss”

Also in Meridian: “We Are Not Alone in This Work: Readers Share Their Family History Miracles,” by Scot Facer Proctor

And please don’t forget to subscribe (at no cost and incurring no obligation) to the Becoming Brigham series by going to its official website and, there, clicking on the button that’s rather mysteriously marked “Subscribe on YouTube.” And, please, alert others to the series who might find it of interest or helpful.

Монгол хэл дээрх гурвалсан судрын зураг

Up today on the website of the Interpreter Foundation: “Reprint: The Doctrine and Covenants and the Book of Moses: An Outpouring of Revelations and the Beginning of Joseph Smith’s ‘New Translation’ of the Bible,” written by Kerry Muhlestein:

Part of our book chapter reprint series, this article originally appeared in Tracing Ancient Threads in the Book of Moses — Inspired Origins, Temple Contexts, and Literary Qualities Volumes I and II, edited by Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, David R. Seely, John W. Welch, and Scott Gordon. For more information, go to https://interpreterfoundation.org/books/ancient-threads-in-the-book-of-moses/.

“We often underestimate both the complexity and the continuity of Joseph Smith’s revelatory life. His visions rolled, as he said, “like an overflowing surge before [his] mind.” Now that the Book of Moses and the Doctrine and Covenants have been compartmentalized into different sections, chapters, and books, we also tend to compartmentalize them in our minds. Such a practice has limited our ability to see how powerful and continuous this “overflowing surge” really was.”

The Cardston Alberta Temple, which was dedicated in 1923, was the first temple built in Canada and the first constructed outside of the United States of America. (LDS.org)

With few if any exceptions, recent temples announced and built by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have featured towers that are not topped by a statue of the Angel Moroni with a trumpet to his lips. (A few don’t really have towers at all.) This after literally scores of temples that included the angel.

I’ve seen complaints from people who are upset by this trend. (On the whole, I myself will miss the angel, though I actually like some of the tower-less designs.) Some even see it as yet more evidence that the Church is drifting from its foundations, which seems to me quite overwrought (although, in a few cases, those suggesting the Church’s apostasy actually seem eagerly hopeful that it is so).

To put the matter in perspective, though, it’s important to recall that, among the first eighteen still-operating temples of the Church, whose dedications stretch from St. George in 1877 through Tokyo in 1980, only three — (Salt Lake City [1893], Los Angeles California [1956], and Washington DC [1974] — included statues of Moroni atop their spires. Of the two temples built during the lifetime of the Prophet Joseph Smith, the Kirtland Temple (which no longer functions as a temple) featured no angel and the Nauvoo Temple (which was destroyed by arson shortly after the Latter-day Saints were forced from the city) included a horizontal flying angel quite unlike those that appear on many of the post-Nauvoo temples — and which, in any case, may or may not have been thought to represent Moroni.

Pretty obviously, surmounting temples with statues of the Angel Moroni was never, at least for the first century and a half of the history of the Restored Church, thought to be a requirement for temple-building nor a tradition rigidly to be observed — and the absence of such statues is scarcely proof of the Church’s being in apostasy.

A fresco in the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City of the Council of Nicea (AD 325) as it almost certainly never actually was. The Emperor Constantine is seated in the lower left hand corner. (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

William Lane Craig is a very prominent Evangelical Protestant philosopher and theologian who richly deserves his prominence, as well as a prolific and formidable debater. I say this despite his oft-expressed disdain for my own faith and notwithstanding my having participated with him in a debate between five Evangelical Protestant philosophers and scholars and five Latter-day Saint academics at a meeting of the Evangelical Philosophical Society many years ago in Denver. So this item caught my eye, and I hope to give more attention in the next while to the specifics of what he evidently said: “Apologist William Lane Craig draws backlash for questioning Nicene Creed: ‘This is really bad'”

A bedouin tent in the Syrian desert (Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph). Plainly this is how Church leaders in Salt Lake City want their brainwashed followers to live.

Finally, I give you something from the Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File™: Theists never miss an opportunity to try to blight the lives of others. Here, for example, a notorious group of religious zealots attempts to persuade people in an already-parched region of the United States to forego the use of water, no less: “Church of Jesus Christ releases statement on regional drought and the Great Salt Lake: The statement urges members across the western United States to ‘take personal steps and support public efforts’ to conserve water.” They’re clearly wanting us to go thirsty and hoping that our lawns and shrubs will die.

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