An Inoffensive History of Temple Worship

Part 1 of a 2-part review of Devery S. Anderson, The Development of LDS Temple Worship, 1846-2000: A Documentary History (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2011).

Devery S. Anderson’s new documentary history of temple worship represents an important step forward for Mormon Studies, but it also has certain limitations.

Perhaps the book’s most important contribution is that it has broken the ice on this topic. Anderson takes a very “safe” approach that will be inoffensive and unobjectionable to Mormon readers: he tells the story almost entirely through the lens of official Church documents and the writings of General Authorities. He is also careful in his introduction to draw attention primarily to the banal rather than the scandalous aspects of the collection. In so doing, he circumvents the standard Mormon taboos against talking about the temple, and hopefully paves the way for future researchers to be somewhat more daring in their approaches to the topic.

One practical consequence of the focus on official documents, however, is that the book is really a history of temple policies rather than temple worship. Topics covered include the construction of temples, the rules and regulations governing the ceremonies, and the garments and formulae used. The volume is not a history of how the ceremonies were received or interpreted, or what they meant to the people who experienced them. This suggests that there is much work yet to be done on LDS temple worship from the perspective of popular or reception history. Anderson’s book could serve as an important baseline for such a study.

A more serious problem with the focus on official, publicly-available sources is that there are some important details and developments that these sources simply do not discuss. For example, only one document in the collection mentions the “sectarian preacher” character in the dramatic portion of the old endowment. Mention of the penalties is similarly sparse. More is said about the teaching of the Adam-God doctrine in the lecture at the veil, but not much. The sparseness of the sources is especially problematic for the most recent period; not a word is said about the changes to the endowment in 1990. Distasteful though the genre of anti-Mormon “temple exposé” literature may be, Anderson’s volume will not render it obsolete. Historians will still have to consult the exposés for many details about the ceremonies.

Click here to read "How A Temple Sect Became a Temple Religion (Review of 'LDS Temple Worship', Part 2)."