THE BOSTON TEMPLE, PERCHED ON A ROCK OUTCROPPING, LOOMS OVER the cars whizzing by on Route 2 in suburban Belmont. Mormons like to locate new urban temples near major crossroads. The six spotlighted spires of the mammoth, white Washington, D.C., temple pierce the sky next to the capital city’s eight-lane Beltway. The St. Louis temple, its golden trumpet-blowing Angel Moroni statue atop a 150-foot spire, is poised over Highway 40 not far from the 1-270 beltway.
Neighbors aren’t always pleased. The location of the Denver temple, opened in 1986, had to be changed three times to overcome not-in-my-backyard objections. In Boston construction proceeded while nearby homeowners fought the project, especially its tall spire. Matters were not helped by the annoyance of the extensive blasting made necessary by the site’s granite ledge. Meanwhile, in a careful attempt to be a good neighbor, the church sent regular teams of window washers to scrub construction dust off the nearby upscale homes. A small dirt mountain was put in place temporarily to help contain construction noise.
The Boston temple, the hundredth to go into operation, serves a region with 63,000 saints, who were excited to have their very own temple in which to carry out their most sacred rites. They would no longer have to travel elsewhere for ordinance work or fly to Utah for a wedding. “It’s going to be unbelievably wonderful to have our children married right at home,” said devoted laywoman Margaret Wheelwright as she viewed the Boston project while it rose above her ward’s meetinghouse.
For the members of the Belmont ward, the new temple and the meetinghouse next to it were particularly poignant symbols of their faith’s growth in the region. The church acquired the fifteen-acre property in 1982 and constructed the ward building on part of the site. In 1984 the new meetinghouse was badly damaged just before its dedication by a fire of suspicious origin. Members of other local churches were horrified and fell over each other in the rush to offer facilities for Mormon use. As a result, Mormons held services in St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church, the First Armenian Church (United Church of Christ), and Plymouth Congregational Church of Belmont before they were at last able to occupy their chapel in 1985. A legal feud over the height of the steeple was only settled in 2001.
Steel for the Hub’s temple was manufactured in nearby Vermont; the granite to shield the skeleton came from Italy; the art glass for its windows was produced in England. The Moroni statue for the spire was designed by the sculptor Cyrus Dallin, some of whose nonreligious works are on display in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. The new temple, at 69,000 square feet—about one-third the size of Washington’s—is considered medium-sized and cost $26 million, not counting land and site preparation.
The temple facilities are similar to those of the temple dedicated in St. Louis in 1997. Outside, the grounds are landscaped with 22,000 plantings. There is a picturesque walkway with a fancy bronze railing that, Lyal Zaugg said, is just the spot for photographers to take their brides for a shot with the temple in the background. Elder Zaugg, a retired civil engineer from Idaho, and his wife Joyce were in Belmont as missionaries to oversee the construction.
The main-floor entrance has a security area where people are required to show their wallet-sized temple recommend cards for admission. The ground floor has administration office spaces and locker rooms where patrons change into all-white temple clothes. Men wear white shirts and pants; women wear simple white long dresses; both wear white slippers. Many worshipers bring their own temple clothes, but rentals are also available. The lower floor has the traditional huge baptistry supported by twelve carved oxen representing the tribes of Israel. It also has laundry and cafeteria facilities, more locker rooms, and utility areas.
The most sacred rooms are upstairs. As a medium-sized temple, the Boston facility has four “sealing rooms” where marriages for time and eternity take place and children are everlastingly sealed to their parents; four “ordinance rooms” used for endowment ceremonies; and one “Celestial Room” symbolizing the highest level of heaven. A temple may have any number of sealing and ordinance rooms, but there is always just one Celestial Room, the holiest space of all, where Saints may meditate and pray before leaving the temple.
“It’s been a dream to have a temple here,” said the local bishop, Grant Bennett, back when he proudly watched the crews at work. “Symbolically, you move through stages of life, and the Celestial Room represents the joy of what you can have if you lead a pure and virtuous life.” His fellow Saint Coleen Baird anticipated the joy of doing vicarious ordinances in the temple: “You finish the endowment in the Celestial Room. Everyone is dressed in white, and you are taken out of the world. There is no class distinction, and all is peace and quiet.”
A typical temple interior resembles a luxury hotel: perhaps some paintings but no traditional liturgical symbols, domed ceilings, chandeliers, gold leaf, thickly padded upholstery, densely plush carpets. The color scheme becomes lighter and the flow of light turns brighter as one ascends toward the Celestial Room. Mormons like to say their temples are sacred, not secret, and there are no secrets about the physical plant. Before a temple is dedicated, the LDS Church holds an open house for several weeks, during which time any interested person may inspect all the facilities and learn about the rites that will be held there. After that, no non-Mormon will ever again be admitted to the temple’s precincts.
Several Boston Saints were bemused at some rumors spread among the Gentiles, such as the notion that Mormons burn all the desecrated carpet just before the dedication and replace it. Mormons, of course, are far too thrifty for such nonsense. However, all those attending an open house are required to wear plastic slippers over their shoes; like Muslims at mosques, the Mormons do not profane temple carpeting with street shoes.
Nothing expresses the Mormon diaspora more clearly than the worldwide campaign of temple building in the last two decades. The first temple, dedicated in Kirtland, Ohio, in 1836, has long been in the hands of the rival Community of Christ and is always open to the general public. The second, dedicated in Nauvoo, Illinois, in 1846, after the prophet’s murder and just before the Utah trek, was destroyed by fire and storm soon thereafter, and was rebuilt and dedicated in 2002. Then came four Utah temples, culminating with the great one in Salt Lake City, dedicated after forty years of construction.
In the twentieth century, new temples began to dot the globe, especially since 1995 under President Hinckley. It took a century and a half for the LDS Church to build forty temples, and only twenty years to add eighty-four more. In Mexico, a 1999–2002 blitz added eleven temples to the lone one in Mexico City.
Many of the newer temples, however, are of a smaller design. The baptistry, for example, may be supported by only six oxen, with the additional six suggested through artfully placed mirrors. The smaller temples may lack certain facilities, such as laundries and cafeterias, and operate on limited hours, but all will have the necessary facilities for the full range of sacred ordinances. The goal is to have temples accessible to Saints anywhere in the world and to elevate these Mormon rituals as an essential aspect of ongoing life.
When a Saint entering a temple presents his recommend card, an attendant verifies the date and signature. The bearer must pass biennial interviews with his bishop and stake president to hold this card, which, among other things, signifies that he is active in his ward and pays the full 10 percent tithe to the church. In the recommend interview the bishop also inquires whether the member is loyal to church leaders, faithfully upholds church teachings, lives a morally clean life, obeys the Word of Wisdom, and wears the sacred underclothes.
The temple concept is not rooted in New Testament Christianity. Its inspiration reaches back to the Old Testament, especially Solomon’s temple and the idea that certain sacred activities can be accomplished only in sacred space. In Joseph Smith’s day, Masonic lodges believed that their own key rituals had a direct linkage to those conducted in Solomon’s temple. Smith was an active Mason when he introduced the endowment ordinance two years before his death, and many scholars have noted the strong resemblance between the Mormon ordinance and Masonic ritual.
Temple baptism, however, has no parallel in Masonic ceremony. Ordinary living believers, both children raised in the faith and converts, undergo their own baptism by full immersion in a ward meetinghouse. Baptism in the temple, however, is a vicarious ordinance conducted on behalf of dead persons, sometimes one’s own ancestors. White-robed teenage boys and girls can serve as stand-ins during the ceremony, and this is considered an honor, much like altar service for a Catholic boy or girl. Each name presented requires a separate immersion, although the same proxy might perform twelve or fifteen in a row. This baptism does not “save” the deceased person. It provides a choice in the afterlife; using his “free agency,” the person may accept or reject the offer of receiving Christ and entering his restored kingdom.
Mormons use I Corinthians 15:29 as New Testament justification for these proxy baptisms. Paul wrote, “Else what shall they do which are baptized for the dead, if the dead rise not at all? Why are they then baptized for the dead?” The church’s Encyclopedia of Mormonism explains the verse as “part of Paul’s argumentation against those who denied a future resurrection.” Non-Mormon writers provide various explanations for this difficult verse. But they point out that Christ never mentioned baptism for the dead, Paul’s words do not contain any command or recommendation to carry out the practice, and the rest of the New Testament is silent on the subject, so there is no reason to regard this as a usual or required practice. The Mormon interpretation is that baptism for the dead was an early Christian practice that was lost with the early apostasy of the church and restored by Joseph Smith.
Saints normally concentrate their proxy activities on their own ancestors, but their activities have reached beyond their own families. Ordinances have been carried out for dead U.S. presidents and signers of the Declaration of Independence, among others. In 1926, however, the First Presidency reaffirmed the church policy that temple ordinances could not be performed “for people who had any Negro blood in their veins.” The policy was affirmed again in 1966 with a First Presidency letter. According to D. Michael Quinn, the church’s genealogical department flagged the names of “those of known Negro blood” to prevent their use in proxy endowments and sealings, but the General Authorities quietly changed the policy in 1974 after learning of a potential NAACP lawsuit and Congressional investigation of racially discriminatory use of U.S. Census records.
The church’s “name extraction” program uses volunteers to take the names of deceased persons from public records and submit them for ordinance work. This program yielded 13 million names between 1985 and 1990 alone. One Catholic journalist, covering the 1998 October LDS General Conference, spent a lunch break visiting the genealogical library and returned to the press gallery visibly shaken and muttering angrily because she had just discovered that her late and very Catholic Irish mother had been vicariously baptized Mormon. Some Catholics have been disturbed to discover that many famous Catholic saints have been given Mormon ordinances posthumously. Officially, the Catholic Church ignores the matter.
The practice is especially offensive to Jews. A highly sensitive vicarious baptism issue erupted publicly in the mid-1990s when baptism for Jewish victims of the Holocaust—some 380,000 of them—created an angry backlash from the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors. The names had all been submitted by nine zealous Mormons who had visited concentration camps and Holocaust museums in Europe. The situation surfaced when Ernest Michel, a founding member of the survivors’ organization, discovered in the genealogical library that his parents, both of whom died at Auschwitz, had been given Mormon baptisms. In 1995, after a year of negotiations, the church agreed to remove all such names and to refrain from baptizing deceased Jews unless they were ancestors of living LDS Church members or the church had written permission from all living members of the person’s family. But Jewish groups protested in 2004 and again in 2006, arguing that Holocaust names and proxy baptisms persist.
Vicarious ordinance activities, not only baptisms but sealings and endowments, account for the Mormons’ passionate interest in genealogy. It would be splendid to have all of one’s family tree enjoying eternity together so that death does not sever these most sacred relationships. The church, in fact, teaches that Saints have a moral obligation to trace their families and perform temple ordinances on their behalf.
The task of baptizing and endowing all the billions upon billions of humans who ever lived is unimaginably vast, and records before a.d. 1600 are scant, so fulfillment awaits the millennial kingdom. But in the meantime, Saints are expected to do what they can to provide spiritual assistance to their forebears. The result is the most astonishing and extensive genealogical library in the world, religious or secular, staffed by 700 paid workers and trained volunteers. The Family History Library based in Salt Lake City has more than 2 billion names on various kinds of records, ranging from Korean clan genealogies to Scottish church records to the American Social Security death index. The microfilmed holdings alone are equivalent to more than 7 million books of 300 pages apiece.
This collection expands by 5,000 microfilm rolls a month. Eastern Europe is currently the big area of exploration since it recently opened up to genealogical workers, who photograph everything from church to civil records. The collection has more than doubled in size just since 1985, when the Temple Square library building was completed. To protect the originals of its genealogical records from nuclear holocaust or other disaster, in 1966 the church opened a massive, humidity-controlled vault 700 feet below the surface of a granite mountain at Little Cottonwood Canyon. Besides the Salt Lake operation, which handles 1,900 visitors a day, the church operates 4,500 branch centers in 70 nations and went on the Internet in 1999 (www. familysearch.org). The Web site gets some 10 million hits a day. By mail or computer, the branches have access to all headquarters records. Gentiles and Saints alike have free use of this vast collection, with nominal fees for photocopying or mailing. Never in the history of organized religion has a doctrinal tenet produced such an elaborate and expensive archival effort.
Temple sealings are ceremonies for living Mormons as well as vicarious ordinances for the deceased. Spouses are joined or “sealed” for eternity in a five-minute rite conducted by a “sealer.” Rings may be exchanged but are not required, and there is no music. The church has guidelines for wedding gowns, and brides who arrive for the ceremony in insufficiently modest attire are provided with temporary cover-ups to insert in their dresses. Large temples have several rooms that can be used for weddings, scheduled fifteen to twenty minutes apart. The great Salt Lake Temple has fourteen sealing rooms and ten sealers on staff; its all-time wedding record was 167 in one day. Across the street, next to the church office building, is a cement stoop where photographers snap the bridal parties in a continuous parade, posing them in front of a picturesque temple view with fountains, spires, and the gleaming golden Angel Moroni.
For a temple wedding, both parties must be temple-worthy church members. Any future children will be automatically sealed within the covenant. Married converts can have sealing rites performed, binding themselves as a unit for eternity, kneeling with their children around the altar. Mirrors on opposing walls exchange infinite reflections, symbolizing eternity. Proxy sealings performed for deceased persons provide the possibility of uniting for eternity a family that may have been religiously split in life.
A temple bridegroom probably received his endowment before leaving on his two-year mission. The bride typically receives hers a day or so before her wedding. The sacred underclothes are received at the endowment, and a secret name is bestowed as a type of password into the eternal world. The male may know his bride’s sacred name; the female does not know the man’s. This complex ceremony, which at one time took six to nine hours and is still more than two hours long, is a singular, once-in-a-lifetime ritual. The endowment may also be experienced by unmarried mature adult Mormons, as well as by adult temple-worthy converts. Pious Mormons, officially encouraged to do temple work each month, will repeat the endowment many times as proxies for deceased persons who are candidates for vicarious endowments.
The temple rituals are the most devoutly protected of all the LDS Church’s secrets. Sensitive about the secrecy issue, Mormons frequently repeat the “sacred not secret” refrain. But official policy is to guard them as secret, and that policy became a matter of widespread church discipline in 1990 following published reports of changes in the endowment ceremony. Mormons are not supposed to describe the specifics of the actions, recitations, or vows to nonbelievers. Stories about the revised ceremony appeared that year in the Salt Lake Tribune (its story originated with Vern Anderson of the Associated Press) and many other newspapers and national magazines. Some of these articles were quite general. Others reported considerable detail, and a number of the pieces compared Mormon and Masonic ritual.
These stories quoted anti-Mormons and former Mormons, including the well-known Sandra Tanner, as well as current Mormons in good standing. Most of the latter made only general remarks indicating that they liked the changes, statements that would strike non-Mormons as innocuous. But the church made it clear that individual Mormons were not to comment publicly on such matters, even in bland, general terms. All persons known to have done so were questioned by their bishops, stake presidents, or General Authorities. As news of these meetings spread, the church communications department felt it necessary to release a statement defending the interrogations.
Most of these visitations were reportedly low-key, though they undoubtedly served as warnings, but Sunstone reported that at least two were not. One Saint, F. Ross Peterson, former editor of Dialogue, visited by all three Seventies for his area, was questioned at length about his loyalty to church authorities and shown a thick church file of clippings collected on him since his college days. His temple recommend was removed and “further action was intimated” if he spoke or wrote anything further about the temple. His recommend was restored after he wrote a protest and several members petitioned authorities on his behalf. Keith Norman, who holds a Duke University Ph.D. in religion, had presented a paper on the subject at the 1990 Sunstone Symposium in Washington, D.C. Norman’s bishop later said that he had been instructed to deny Norman a temple recommend for one year. When Norman asked his bishop what it was for which he needed to repent, the bishop reportedly responded, “I don’t know.”
The endowment ceremony was introduced in Nauvoo in 1842. It was a far more complex ceremony than the simple washings and anointings that had been followed in the Kirtland, Ohio, temple, and the general shape of the ritual remains faithful to the Nauvoo version. The 1990 changes softened the symbolic violence of the revenge referred to in penalty oaths; modified some of the resemblance to Masonic rituals; moved somewhat toward more equality of the sexes; and eliminated the drama segment in which the Devil hires a Protestant minister to teach false doctrine.
The endowment ceremony today, as described publicly by the church, has four main segments: a drama, formerly by live actors but since the 1950s presented on film, which presents the story of salvation and redemption as a human journey moving from pre-earthly beginnings, through the Creation and Fall, and Christ’s life and death; progression to a brighter room, where believers learn about God’s blessings; an exchange of promises with God, then moving through an opening in a curtain or veil to represent the passage from this life into immortality; and entrance into the Celestial Room, representing the highest level of heaven.
The relationship between Masonry and Mormon ritual, especially in the endowment, remains a sensitive matter in the church. Extensive research on this has been done by Mormons using published statements by church leaders and historical documents that the church made available for a time in the 1970s, as well as by non-Mormons using widely published writings by former Mormons. The latter includes books by Jerald and Sandra Tanner, whose polemical tone is resented by loyalist Mormons, though their work is generally acknowledged to be factually accurate and honest. Other writers on the subject who were Mormons at the time of publication included David John Buerger and D. Michael Quinn.
Mormon loyalist Reed C. Durham Jr. was silenced by the church after his 1974 presidential address on the subject to the Mormon History Association (MHA) meeting in Nauvoo. He told the MHA that Joseph Smith received “immediate inspiration from Masonry” in designing the endowment ceremony and that the similarities were too clear to be denied. Durham was then director of the LDS Institute of Religion near the University of Utah. He issued a public apology after being censured by church education administrators, and his MHA speech was not published, though unofficial versions of the address have been printed. Durham thereafter maintained silence on the subject.
The best study currently available is probably an article by Michael W. Homer in the Fall 1994 issue of the independent LDS intellectual journal Dialogue. Masons may believe that Smith “stole” the ritual, and anti-Mormons may accuse him of plagiarism, but Homer maintains that for “those who believe in continuing revelation, the divine origin of the LDS temple endowment does not depend on proving there is no relationship between it and Masonic rites or that Joseph Smith received the endowment before his initiation into Freemasonry.”
Early Mormons were fairly open in recognizing the connection between the endowment ritual and Masonry. Apostle and First Counselor Heber C. Kimball wrote that Smith believed in the “similarity of preast Hood in Masonary.” Other early church leaders taught that the Masonic ceremony was a corrupted form of temple rituals that had descended directly from the biblical Solomon and were restored to the true, pristine form by the inspired Joseph Smith. Early Mormons believed in the antiquity of the Masonic ritual, at least before Robert Freke Gould’s History of Freemasonry (1885) and other studies debunking the ancient origins of the ceremonies. Gould did admit that some of the associated symbolism adapted by Masons probably had ancient origins.
Scholars today are generally agreed that Masonic ritual developed largely in the seventeenth century or so as a syncretistic mixture of influences from ancient Egyptian rites, symbols borrowed from alchemy, astrology, the occult, the Bible, Rosicrucianism, and Jewish kabbalistic mysticism. Joseph Smith became a Mason in March 1842, advancing all the way to Master Mason the next day. This was highly unusual since the normal minimum wait between each of the three degrees is thirty days. In the weeks that followed he observed Masonic ritual degree advancements thirteen times before introducing the endowment ceremony on May 4 and 5, 1842.
The essentially British version of Masonry as probably practiced in Nauvoo included such elements as ritual anointing of body parts; a creation drama as a metaphor for a spiritual journey; bestowal of a secret name (as a password into eternity); special garments (in Mormonism, sacred undergarments) when stepping through a veil in a glorified ascent to a Celestial Lodge; secret handshakes and tokens; promises to fulfill moral obligations; penalty oaths to protect secrecy; progression through three degrees toward perfection; the use of special temple robes and aprons; and the word exalted to signify becoming kings in connection with the Royal Arch degree. Masons regard the lodge as a temple. All these elements have strong parallels in Smith’s endowment ceremony. In addition, Masonic symbols that have been adapted by Mormons on everything from temples to gravestones to logos include: the beehive, the square and compass, two triangles forming a six-pointed star, the all-seeing eye, sun, moon, and stars, and ritualistic hand grips. Traditional Christian liturgical symbols such as the cross, crucifix, Chi-Rho, or ichthys (fish) are absent.
Women were not Masons, but according to Homer, some American and British Masons favored female participation, and in 1774 French Masonry recognized female auxiliary lodges. Smith extended the endowment to women in 1843.
The endowment ceremony was always performed in English until 1945, when a Spanish ritual was introduced; now it is performed in dozens of languages. A filmed version of the drama was first provided in 1953 when a presentation suitable for the new, small Swiss temple was needed, according to David John Buerger. This production included 350 feet from Disney’s Fantasia to provide lava for the creation episode. Three revised versions followed. Buerger reported, “According to the actor who portrayed the minister in the third filmed version, the role of Satan was to have originally been filled by an African American, but due to protests by LDS Polynesians, a Caucasian filled the role.”
Even more mystery than usual surrounds another of Smith’s temple rites known as the “second anointing” or “second blessing” subsequent to the endowment. According to Buerger, these rites were conducted for thousands of Saints early in the twentieth century. But in 1926 President Heber J. Grant (who ruled until 1945) said they could thenceforth be performed only by the president of the church on the recommendation of one of the Twelve Apostles. The restriction to an elite reduced the number of anointings precipitously. According to Apostle George F. Richards, only eight were performed in the years from 1930 to 1942. Buerger said there are only “bits of information” about the practice in recent times, but he assumed that the authorities do not consider such a limited ceremony to be a prerequisite for exaltation in the afterlife.
Whatever his reliance on the Masonic tradition, in developing ceremonies for his Latter-day Saints Smith probably knew little of traditional Christian liturgies as preserved in Eastern Orthodox, Catholic, Episcopal, and Lutheran worship, except as included in modified Methodist forms. His own early background was in Protestant nonliturgical or “low church” worship. This influence has been retained in Mormon congregational worship, with its Evangelical-style songs, testimony talks, and icon-free chapel design.
Sunday may be the high point of the week in a traditional Christian cathedral, but on Sunday all Mormon temples are closed. Important as temple rituals are to Mormons, the local congregation (ward) is central to the worship and community life of the faith. On Sunday the Saints are busy in their local meetinghouse. It is there that babies are presented for blessing several weeks after birth; that tots lisp their first testimonies; that eight-year-olds are baptized and confirmed to receive the gift of the Holy Spirit with the laying on of hands; that parents and friends speak at missionary farewells; and women bring green Jello salad and potato casseroles for the meal that follows a funeral.
In each ward communion is distributed weekly by young priesthood holders, using water instead of grape juice or wine along with the bread. Weekly frequency was a mark of the Protestant “restoration” movement that arose just before Mormonism and gave birth to today’s Churches of Christ, “instrumental” Christian churches, and Christian Church—Disciples of Christ.
Mormons call communion “the sacrament,” but theologically it is an ordinance of reminder and remembrance, not a rite to bestow spiritual grace as that term is used in mainstream Christian churches. The sacramental prayers enjoin Mormons to “eat in remembrance of the body” and to “do it in remembrance of the blood.” The traditional Christian words of institution used by mainstream churches from Luke 22:19, “this is my body” and “this is my blood,” are never spoken in the Mormon sacrament. The two prayers recited before distribution of the bread and the water are virtually the only fixed liturgy in Mormon ward worship. The wording was part of the Native Americans’ Christianity, as reported in the Book of Mormon (Moroni 4:3 and 5:2). If even one mistake is made in the scriptural recitation, the LDS officiant must repeat the entire prayer.
A sacrament meeting in the Northridge ward of Sandy, Utah, was typical. It is the first Sunday of the month, so the Saints have skipped breakfast and lunch in order to give the equivalent expense as fast offerings for the needy. Three wards use this meetinghouse; a typical block is from 9:00 a.m. to noon or from noon to 3:00 p.m. The required schedule includes an hour each for sacrament meeting, Sunday school for all ages, and priesthood sessions for males with simultaneous auxiliary meetings for females. Families will eat their evening meal together.
Clothes are formal Sunday best; even the littlest boys wear shirts and ties. Since this is the first Sunday of the month, it is also testimony meeting. A red-haired twelve-year-old Scout talks haltingly of having been on a mini-trek, and cutting himself while whittling, and says he is “grateful to be in a neighborhood where so many people go to church.” Next comes a five-year-old blonde in a blue dress who adjusts the mike with aplomb and announces: “My name is Amy. I’d like to say I know how to obey the scriptures. I know this church is true. In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.” A stream of young teenagers follows, then the mother of a missionary currently serving in Germany. A pony-tailed seven-year-old gives thanks for her family, ending, like all the others, with the formula, “I know the church is true. In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.”
A well-dressed and attractive mother of eight children comes next to testify with tears, “I want my children to know how grateful I am for them.” She reaches into the tissue box judiciously located on the podium and dabs at her eyes before continuing. “I want them to know I have a testimony. I know Joseph Smith was the true prophet. I feel overly blessed.”
Another woman in her fifties takes a tissue as she begins talking about family matters, including a recent death, thanking the ward for love and support. “We are not left alone. We are carried by our Father’s love. I am grateful for trials that have helped me see the hand of the Father.” Another parade of teenagers follows, varying considerably in polish, some indicating awkwardly that their priesthood leaders had done some pump-priming in getting them to speak. They talk about being thankful for believing friends, their families, the gospel, the prophet. They know the church is true.
The members carefully use the thee/thou second-person pronoun in their prayers, as required by denominational policy. Even on nontestimony Sundays, there is never a prepared sermon delivered by an educated professional, as would be the case in most other churches. Instead, there are brief amateur talks by ordinary local members that provide a mixture of personal testimony and inspirational advice.
The Sunday school lesson comes next, divided by age. The adult class this Sunday covers II Kings 2, taught by Patty Howells, the wife of then Utah Jazz basketball manager Tim Howells. She rotates teaching duties with a male teacher. The lesson is interrupted by twenty youngsters coming in to sing lustily for the grown-ups, “Follow the Prophet.” After Sunday school the sexes separate into priesthood and auxiliary meetings.
Although Northridge is home to the Mormon upper crust, the expanding church incorporates many kinds of neighborhoods. The mission branch in Bayonne, New Jersey, is in a working-class area with Spanish signs, store-front Pentecostal churches, and neat if aging frame houses. In one of these modest homes the Saints have gathered for their Sunday morning services, an abbreviated two-hour version of the Sunday bloc. A Spanish congregation of similar size meets there in the afternoon.
About forty people squeeze into the tiny living room of this rental home occupied by the married missionaries Elder Kent and Sister Loujean Walker. The Walkers left their nine children and twenty-eight grandchildren in the Intermountain West to accept this mission call. Sister Walker has shed a few tears this week: she has missed her family tradition back home of giving the first bath to each new grandbaby. Her oldest daughter will be her stand-in for the newest arrival while she stays at her New Jersey mission post.
For the morning’s English service, Paul Prestwich is at the Yamaha keyboard. Hymns include some familiar to Protestant Evangelicals, such as “I Stand All Amazed” and “How Great Thou Art,” but others are unique to Mormons, including “Families Can Be Together Forever” and the children’s song “I Am a Child of God,” with its reference to preexistence in the line “I’ll live with him once more.” Frankie Salcedo, a thirteen-year-old priesthood holder of Puerto Rican and Dominican background, helps distribute the sacrament. This morning’s talks are given by a local member and by a visiting missionary who describes the activities at the nearby genealogical branch center.
Those in attendance include Sonia Molina, a single mother here with her teenage son. She moved from the Bronx to Bayonne a year ago, seeking a safe area for her son. Some time back she had been baptized Mormon in Puerto Rico, then drifted away, but here in Bayonne she was drawn back into the church by a pair of young missionaries. Four young elder missionaries assigned to the area are present.
Most of those attending today’s service are wearing Sunday best, the four elder missionaries in their trademark suits and ties, but one man is in a leather jacket, and another is dressed in a windbreaker imprinted with the logo of a neighborhood deli, worn over a plaid flannel shirt. A young black man in a wheelchair is carried up the concrete stairs into the house and back to the street. Worshipers are invited to attend the baptism of a new convert in the baptistry at a Union City meetinghouse later in the day. After a Sunday school lesson on the Holy Spirit, a young Hispanic couple thanks people for bringing them meals the preceding several days. It has been quite a week for them: they were baptized just the previous Sunday, and they are here today with their four-day-old newborn in their arms. In several weeks the newborn will be given the traditional infant blessing during a testimony meeting.
Blessings are another important form of ritual for Mormons. In times of stress it is traditional for fathers in the Melchizedek priesthood to lay hands on the heads of their wives or children and pronounce a blessing. But a special and mysterious event, unique to the Mormon religion, is the Patriarchal Blessing, which bears some resemblance to prophecies in Pentecostal religion, just as early Mormons practiced speaking in tongues. The “Patriarch to the Church” once had the power to give blessings for anyone in the entire denomination and was a church-wide General Authority. These patriarchs held office through a hereditary line going back to Joseph Smith’s family. But no church-wide patriarch held the chair from 1932 to 1942, and since 1979 the office has fallen into disuse, perhaps never to appear again.
The patriarchs are officers of the regional stake, appointed with the approval of the Quorum of Twelve. The noted Columbia University historian Richard Bushman has held this post for the New York City area. During the sacred session a patriarch is led to declare a person’s literal lineage tracing back to the Twelve Tribes of Israel. As the First Presidency defined the role in 1957, he also provides “an inspired and prophetic statement of the life mission of the recipient, together with such blessings, cautions, and admonitions as the patriarch may be promoted to give.” A patriarch bestows the Lord’s blessing sensitively within a knowledgeable context of the recipient’s personality, abilities, aspirations, and spiritual life.
Cayr Lewis, the oldest daughter of Bruno and Cari Vassel, and her husband had difficulty as they attempted to start a family. As Cayr struggled with becoming pregnant and carrying a child successfully to term, her Patriarchal Blessing predicted she would become the mother of children. Today, as she watches curly-haired Jayd, age two, tear around the house with her four-year-old brother Justin, Cayr remembers how she clung to the comfort of the Patriarchal Blessing during her time of discouragement.
If rituals related to family, from the weekly Family Home Evening all the way to vicarious temple ordinances, are a special mark of Mormonism, perhaps the biggest ritualistic family reunion this side of mortality is the semiannual General Conference in Salt Lake City, held for two days each April and October. For 133 years, it convened in the venerable Tabernacle on Temple Square. But since 2000, sessions have met across the way in Hinckley’s $240 million, 1.4 million-square-foot Conference Center. Even that capacity is far below ticket demand and conferences are sent via satellite TV and the Internet worldwide. Some sessions are translated into numerous languages, with sign language and closed-caption TV for the hearing impaired. Mormons around the world assemble to watch and listen.
At one of the last Tabernacle conferences, a typical conference scene, as always thousands thronged into the city, the lucky ones with passes, others happy to hear the closed-circuit proceedings piped into the Assembly Hall nearby or to sit on blankets spread over the grass in Temple Square. Both the Deseret News and Salt Lake Tribune run headlines like “Faith, Family Dominate General Conference,” or, “Tabernacle Choir Truly Electrifies.” Media are advised to dress appropriately for the religious services. They are also advised that landscapers will have thousands of petunias, geraniums, marigolds, datura, begonia, coleus, dahlias, cosmos, heliotrope, crepe myrtle, zinnias, snapdragons, verbena, vinca, nicotiana, and lobelia in bloom on Temple Square and the adjacent plaza of the church office building for the occasion.
Outside, people on the sidewalk waiting for the Tabernacle doors to open break spontaneously into song. “How Great Thou Art” and “Count Your Blessings.” It is raining outside, but umbrellas are not permitted inside. By the thousands, umbrellas are piled onto folding tables. A dubious reporter is assured that her umbrella will be there after the session. It is.
Inside, President Hinckley, members of the Quorum of Twelve, and other General Authorities give what Mormons call “talks.” Each session is opened and closed with prayer; the talks are separated by prayer, congregational singing, and choir music. The text of each talk is distributed to journalists beforehand; the complete set of talks fills each May and November issue of Ensign, and taped sets of talks from previous conferences can be purchased at the nearby ZCMI Center’s Deseret Bookstore. Saturday night talks are for male priesthood holders only, so ZCMI keeps the stores open late for special “ladies’ night” sales.
Newcomers to the ranks of the General Authorities are always sustained by unanimous vote, a ritual unchanged from the early days of the church. Talks treat such subjects as the importance of tithing, commitment to one’s family, and obedience to the standards of chastity. In October 1998 President Hinckley raised the sensitive subject of whether Mormons are Christians: “Are we Christians? Of course we are Christians. We believe in Christ. We worship Christ.” Responding to recent reports of polygamous activities by splinter-group Mormons, Hinckley reaffirmed the modern LDS opposition to the practice: “I wish to categorically state that this church has nothing whatever to do with those practicing polygamy,” he said. “They are not members of the church. Most of them have never been members.” The “gathering” to Zion used to mean that Saints physically relocated to Utah. Today the church officially encourages believers to stay living in their homelands and to build the kingdom there.
To the non-Mormon the inspirational talks are routine, even banal. Nothing ever happens at a Mormon General Conference. No issues are discussed; anything decided in Mormonism is decided in secret, far from the eye of the membership, much less the general public and the press. To the average Mormon believer, none of this matters. The General Conference is an important Mormon ritual, a homecoming and reunion for those in Salt Lake City and a worldwide Mormon family gathering for those who are not.
On Temple Square more than 200 volunteer ushers serve the visitors. An estimated 35,000 pass through the square on conference Sunday. Some anti-Mormon Protestant Fundamentalist young people are picketing on the sidewalk and buttonholing conference-goers. But reverse proselytizing is fair game, and the mood is cheerful, respectful, polite on all sides. After the last session the faithful pour out of the tabernacle and past a beggar seated outside the east Temple Square gate with a big plastic bowl. Begging is hardly the Mormon style, but everyone’s mood is happy. The beggar’s bowl is full.