A View From Outside the Temple
by Brian Montopoli
Mormons don’t let outsiders into their temples, and they themselves must be deemed in good standing to enter. That means submitting to a lengthy interview process that includes testimony to the Gospel, a declaration of pure bodily condition and evidence that they are keeping up with their tithing. If they pass, they enter wearing all white-suits or full-length white dresses, focused on interacting as directly as possible with God.
Despite the strict rules for entrance, the church still wants curious outsiders to get a sense of what they’re missing. At the Salt Lake Temple, which I attempted to visit on a recent Sunday evening, one can enter a visitors’ center, pass an animatronic Joseph Smith, handsome and asexual, and see a large-scale model of the Temple, cut in half so you can see all the rooms.
In the basement are 12 cows, standing symmetrically in a circle. I asked my guides, two young female missionaries who quickly befriended me upon my arrival, if Mormons actually kept cows in the basement. The actual Temple, one told me, contains 12 statues of what she unselfconsciously called “golden oxen.” The model shows that the Temple baptism pool rests directly above the oxen — it looks as if it’s held up by their strong golden oxen heads.
The Mormon temple is central to the process of becoming more like God, a process very much focused on the family unit. The controversial practice of baptizing the dead is necessary, Mormons believe, because it’s the only way to allow family members who did not accept the church to be with their families in heaven. The Temple is also where families of the living are bound together in sealing ceremonies that ensure they will be together in heaven, and where marriages are performed between two committed, chaste Mormons, marriage being a central step in the journey toward godliness.
Next to the Temple is the Tabernacle, a turtle-shell-shaped building whose stunning acoustics derive in part from the almost impossible lack of support beams. I entered not long after interfaith celebration had let out and took in the massive pipe organ towering over the pews below. Owl-faced older women with black name tags roamed the aisles, making stragglers feel like they’d done something wrong.
My guides were Sister L. and Sister R., both perhaps 20 years old, the former a blond onetime hairdresser and the latter a Japanese-American young woman with a black mole just off the tip of her nose. Sister R. corrected me when I asked why Mormons don’t drink caffeine, a conclusion drawn after a fruitless search for a coffee shop near the Brigham Young University campus in Provo two days before. “We can’t have coffee but we can have Coke,” she said, grinning like a teenager who had just broken an unimportant rule. “Just no strong drinks.”
I couldn’t help but like Sister L. and Sister R., and be drawn to their earnestness, their charm, their lack of moral ambiguity. They carried with them a happy self-assurance that made skeptical questions about their pitch feel irrelevant, maybe even pitiable. When I asked if there are gay Mormons, they responded sure, of course; there are probably some around here right now.
“It’s just,” Sister L. said, “that the Church feels strongly about marriage, and you can’t have sex before marriage.”
I asked if that meant gay Mormons just don’t have sex.
She nodded and smiled and said: “Uh-huh!”
There was no subtext in that affirmation, nothing but pure enthusiasm: I got it. Asked about the Church’s political activity, specifically California’s Prop. 8, Sister L. said the Church isn’t political, it just gets involved in issues it cares about. “It’s not a Republican or Democrat thing,” she told me.
I didn’t know much about Mormonism when I visited, but I did know Mormons believe Jesus came to America after his resurrection, so I asked exactly how he got here. Not for the first time, Sister L. tried to press a copy of the Book of Mormon into my hands.
“We don’t know!” Sister L. said, her eyes wide and wonder-filled. “We just get to imagine it!”
The sisters told me on three separate occasions that Mormons are just like normal people, a note struck repeatedly on the Church’s website, which is peppered with photos of people just like you who happen to be Mormon. This is true from a religious perspective: The vast majority of Americans believe in God, a communal leap of faith that seems far more significant than the differences among believers.
And yet the otherness is undeniable. Mormonism is a relatively young religion, and people are, rather dramatically, either in or out; the middle-ground option available in older Christian faiths, the acceptability of casual and compartmentalized belief, is simply not an option.
Indeed, the rules are strict and many, and they must be followed. That means no alcohol, a two-year pause in life for missionary work (the church chooses where), fealty to an honor code that recently resulted in one of BYU’s best rebounders being suspended for premarital sex. It means wearing the “special underwear” worn by Mormons after completion of the Temple endowment ceremony, and ignoring the smirking references to it by outsiders.
And yet while I came away from the visit convinced that Mormonism isn’t really built for the modern world, I did understand the appeal. It starts with the Sisters themselves, content in their unshakeable faith and clear path forward, and extends to the massive Temple itself. It looks benevolent at night, the lighting perfectly appointed, but it’s also a massive presence, incongruent among the low buildings and wide streets of Salt Lake — a Disney castle that escaped from the fantasy realm and, refusing to accept its nature, remains in the real world.
Brian Montopoli last wrote for the Awl about porn valley .
Photo by Bjørn Graabek, via Wikipedia Commons.
