Scott Woodward:
Welcome to our special bonus episode, where Casey and I interview a friend of our show, Lon Tibbitts. In our previous episode we discussed at length the relationship between masonry and the development of the temple endowment in Nauvoo, a topic people have a lot of questions about. So we thought you might enjoy hearing from Lon Tibbitts, who has served both as an LDS ward bishop and as a master of his Masonic Lodge in Utah. Lon is a keen student of both Masonic and LDS history, and in this interview he sheds light on the origins of Freemasonry; on why so many Nauvoo Latter-day Saints joined the fraternity; on connections between Masonry and the endowment, the Relief Society, and the martyrdom of Joseph Smith; as well as the later fraught relationship between Freemasons and Latter-day Saints in Utah. We hope you enjoy it. I’m Scott Woodward, and my co-host is Casey Griffiths, and today Casey and I dive into this bonus episode in our series about the development of Latter-day Saint temple worship. Now, let’s get into it. Hi, Casey.

Casey Griffiths:
Hi, Scott. How are we doing?

Scott Woodward:
We’re doing so good and excited for a special episode today.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah! This is kind of like our, you know, network special surprise. I don’t know exactly how to describe it, but we are pausing in the middle of our series on temple worship to do a special episode because we have a special guest with us.

Scott Woodward:
Yes.

Casey Griffiths:
Lon, do you want to say hi to the good people out there in podcast land?

Lon Tibbitts:
Love to. Hello.

Scott Woodward:
Perfect. Yes, we’re excited to have with us Lon Tibbitts, who is both a practicing Latter-day Saint and a practicing Mason. And we look forward to hearing a lot from you today, Lon. Casey, do you want to tee him up? Tell us a little about Lon Tibbitts.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah. Let me share a little bit about Lon’s biography. 2018, while serving as the Grand Master of Masons in Utah, Lon retired from American Express after nineteen years in roles in marketing and operations management of traveler’s checks and prepaid cards. Lon grew up traveling the western United States, France, and England as an Air Force military brat. His parents were natives of Salt Lake City, and his family goes back through five generations of Mormon pioneers. He spent less than a year living in Salt Lake while his father flew night missions out of Thailand during the Vietnam War. Prior to serving a mission in the late ’70s, he started his education at the University of Maryland. Served a full-time mission in Scotland and Ireland, and then continued his education at LDS Business College, the University of Utah, and Brigham Young University. Lon and his wife, Lana, are the parents of three daughters and a son. They have twenty delightful grandchildren and three and a half great grandchildren, and Lon has also served continuously in his wards in Utah. He’s served as an Elder’s Quorum President three times, Gospel Doctrine instructor, Bishop and Branch President’s counselor, Executive Secretary, and High Counselor. Now, for our interests, Lon has been a Freemason in Utah for the last seventeen years and has served as Master of his Lodge three times, Grand Steward, Deacon, and Orator, Junior Grand Warden, Senior Grand Warden, Deputy Grand Master, and Grand Master of Masons. He’s in his sixth term as Grand Secretary. He’s also served as President of the Rocky Mountain Masonic Conference and Vice Chairman of the Conference of Grand Masters of Masons in North America in 2018. He is currently a member of the Conference of Grand Secretaries of North America and also serves as Secretary General of the Scottish Rite of Utah. He has been published on a number of Masonic topics and is routinely asked to speak at National Masonic Conferences on a variety of topics. He enjoys the brotherhood he finds there among good men from various creeds, occupations, backgrounds, and classes. So, Lon, we are excited to have you with us, because we’re interested in primary sources, and we just did an episode where we talked about the connection between Latter-day Saints and Masons. You are both a Latter-day Saint and an active Mason, so we’re excited to have the opportunity to talk to you.

Lon Tibbitts:
Well, thank you. It’s good to be here with you.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. So great to have you here with us, Lon. And now, Casey, you made this interview happen, so tell us how you met Lon in the first place.

Casey Griffiths:
I had the opportunity to tour the Masonic Temple in Philadelphia back in 2019, before the pandemic, and it was such a cool experience that ever since then I’ve wanted to tour the Masonic Temple in Salt Lake. And so I had a few misfires . . .

Scott Woodward:
Okay.

Casey Griffiths:
I’ve connected with the Masons in Provo, near where I work, but I always wanted to go to the Temple in Salt Lake, and a couple months ago I emailed the Masonic Lodge of Utah. Lon emailed me back. A few weeks later Scripture Central team and I came up, and we filmed in the Masonic Temple. There’s going to be a video up on Scripture Central that shows you that. And since then Lon has very graciously toured fifty of my students through the temple, and just recently fifty members of the faculty, the religion faculty from BYU, through the temple as well, and he is a pretty knowledgeable fellow, so I figured there’s nobody better to answer our questions about Latter-day Saints and Masons than Lon, so . . .

Scott Woodward:
That’s wonderful. That says a lot about Lon, that he passed the Casey Griffiths test and, so that’s wonderful. Well, Lon, tell us a little bit about your background as both a Freemason and a Latter-day Saint.

Lon Tibbitts:
So I think—let me start with as a Latter-day Saint because that is probably the most important relationship, other than that with my wife and my children, in my life. But I greatly enjoy my experiences with the fraternity and the fraternity here in Utah, and as a Latter-day Saint I work very hard to be a good man. I work very hard to overcome my weaknesses, my sins, my problems, my issues, and do what it is that the Lord would have me do. And I will say, I think first and foremost, for those who ever wonder, if push came to shove and one of those things, Freemasonry or the church had to be chosen, it’s a no-brainer for me. It would always be The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. As a Freemason, I’ll tell you that I had an interest since I was a young man. Growing up as a military brat, I saw Masons quite a bit in my life. I don’t know that I have the same observation skills that Mormon might have had and is talked about in the Book of Mormon, but—

Scott Woodward:
Quick to observe.

Lon Tibbitts:
Yeah, I was always an observant child, and I kind of noticed that the officers, the flyers, the NCOs that I met as a child growing up and living almost all of my first nineteen years on a military base, an Air Force base, I noticed that a lot of them wore a ring with a square and compass on it, so I was always a little bit fascinated by that and fascinated by the connection between good men and that, and serving a mission in Scotland and Ireland, Scotland is really—for those who try to study the real history of Freemasonry, most of us come back to Scotland eventually and believe that’s where it all started. That’s where it began. What we would call Grand Lodge Freemasonry began in 1717 in London, but before that, lodge masonry, that is groups of masons who gathered together in a lodge, was alive and well and had been for several hundred years in Scotland, so there I was, not really realizing it, but in the birthplace, if you will, and saw an awful lot of it. One of my companions during the pandemic who caught up with us on Facebook and started to build a group of us from the Scotland Glasgow Mission together into what’s become about 400 people on a page these days, he made a comment when somebody commented on my Facebook page and the fact that it showed my experience with the fraternity, his comment to me was, “Well, we all knew you were going to be a Mason sooner or later. It always fascinated you.” So I didn’t think I’d been that overt about it, but apparently I had.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Lon Tibbitts:
My first attempt to join the fraternity was actually in about the mid-’80s. And I approached a friend who I found out had—was a Mason, and I had been on active duty with the Air Force myself just prior to that, and had thought about joining a lodge in another state but decided to wait, and when I approached him, he told me that he would be happy to sign my petition. However, they won’t take you. And I pointed out to him that I knew members of the church who were Masons in California and in England, and that that was just not true. And he said, well, yeah, anywhere but Utah.

Scott Woodward:
Uh-oh.

Lon Tibbitts:
And sure enough, there had actually been a ban in place. It had been unofficial from 1872 until about 1924, and it had been official and in our constitution from 1924 to 1984. It was rolled back out of the Constitution in a series of two votes over 1983 and 1984. The first official, if you will, successful vote to admit a man happened in about 1989.

Scott Woodward:
Wow. In Utah, you’re saying?

Lon Tibbitts:
In Utah.

Scott Woodward:
So—

Lon Tibbitts:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
—1989 is the first successful Latter-day Saint since the 1800s.

Lon Tibbitts:
Yep. There have been members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who’ve been Masons in other places, going all the way back to before Nauvoo.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Lon Tibbitts:
So this was groundbreaking for us in Utah, but it wasn’t groundbreaking anywhere else. So my second attempt happened in 2006, and it came after a period I had some time to do some pretty extensive study. By then I’d served as a bishop, and I’d served as a elders quorum president and other things at that point, and I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t joining the Gadianton robbers, that this wasn’t a secret combination.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Lon Tibbitts:
All you have to do with some people is to say it’s got secrets, and immediately they jump to nefarious. I have not found it to be that way. My Masonic resume, I guess if you want to call it that, my Masonic resume allows people to see that I’ve seen the secrets that we have and been admitted to the echelons that would allow me to see whether or not we were nefarious and hiding things, and we are not.

Scott Woodward:
And so what drew you to Freemasonry? Like, why did you want to apply and then reapply? What was it about it that called to you?

Lon Tibbitts:
I am not sure. I would love to say that there was something definitive. Other than, I think, the respect I held for those men that I saw who wore that ring when I was growing up, I’m not sure what it was that drew me to begin with. I know that after I got involved, what’s drawn me to stay involved has been the quality and caliber of men that I get to rub shoulders with, both members of the church and those who are not. The thing that keeps me, I think, more than anything else, are the friendships. I feel very much at home. I will say first of all that not being a Utah Mormon, although I grew up with parents who were, having moved here after my mission, I have never really felt like I completely fit because I didn’t grow up here. This has been one of those things that has allowed me to feel like I really fit in Utah, maybe for the first time.

Casey Griffiths:
And Lon, that’s one of the advantages of Freemasonry, right? Is it kind of creates this brotherhood that allows you to feel like you belong.

Lon Tibbitts:
Yep. Exactly.

Casey Griffiths:
Well, let’s back up a little bit, because I think our listeners are pretty well informed, but most people don’t know that much about masonry to begin with. You know, they’ve watched National Treasure with Nicolas Cage, which is an excellent movie, but they probably haven’t heard very much directly from a Mason about what Masonry actually is. Give us a little background on what Freemasonry is and where it comes from.

Lon Tibbitts:
I think the right place to start with that is kind of our origin stories, and there’s a very serious writer, as opposed to somebody who’s just a Mason who sat down and wrote what he thought was where we came from, but there’s a fairly serious Mason and author, Alan E. Roberts, who has actually identified the possibility of twenty-four different origin stories for us.

Scott Woodward:
Wow. Wow.

Lon Tibbitts:
He does note that they really shake out into three. There’s three real categories. So the first one is that we’re the descendants, the modern and, if you will, we call them speculative. I’ll explain that in a moment, but speculative Masonic child, if you will, of the medieval stonemasons guilds. So that would be the first channel, and I’ll come back and tell you a little bit about how we think that unfolded over time. The second one is that there’s a direct connection between the Freemasons of today with the Freemasons or the stonemasons at Solomon’s Temple. I’ll tell you right now, we just, we have not—you know, it’s entirely possible that’s true. It’s entirely possible, as at least one theory has it, that the medieval stonemason guilds were the connector between that and modernity, but the fact is we can’t find a historical connection. We can’t see where the two of them came together. The last big one is that we were descendants of the Knights Templar, that when they were suppressed back in medieval times, that they, that some of them escaped. We—and we know from a historical point of view, some of them escaped. Some of them reached Scotland. They’re blamed for the building of Rosslyn Chapel—blamed or given credit for: whichever. And there are some grave sites of men who had served as Knights Templar with the Catholic Church and that particular organization, but again, we can find no evidence that they started the fraternity in any form as we would view it today, and that they shared their secrets and it carried on as a result, so when we get to the bottom of those three major origin stories, we find that only one has any real credence going forward, and that one is the medieval stone guilds. The evolution of those over time started in about the 15th or 16th century, when stonemason guilds began to invite leading men in their community to join their fraternity, their guild, or as some might put it today, their union, in order to give them a little leg up over the plasterers and the carpenters and the others, and sometime between beginning the first initiation of what we would call today a speculative masonry as opposed to an operative masonry. Between then and about 1717, when the first Grand Lodge was formed by four lodges in London, we went from where what we call Freemasonry today was operative stonemasons to where there was nothing but speculative Freemasons, and it’s very rare today for us to have an operative mason in a lodge, at least in Utah.

Scott Woodward:
Okay, and what’s the difference between speculative and operative?

Lon Tibbitts:
Okay, so an operative Freemason is the guy who works in stone or who works in bricks and builds buildings.

Scott Woodward:
Like what you think of if you think of masonry work, if you go to Home Depot and get masonry blocks.

Lon Tibbitts:
Exactly.

Scott Woodward:
That’s operative.

Lon Tibbitts:
That’s operative.

Scott Woodward:
Okay.

Lon Tibbitts:
Speculative is the gentleman, or at least supposed gentleman, who is now a member of a lodge and uses the implements and the practices of operative Freemasonry as a practice upon which to build a good life, build a life that is good, moral, and upright.

Scott Woodward:
Is that the connection with speculative masonry and, like, the idea of operative masonry? It’s almost a metaphor of building a good life? It’s brick by brick, block by block, creating this life of goodness and virtue and contribution?

Lon Tibbitts:
It is.

Scott Woodward:
Okay.

Lon Tibbitts:
And there are in every lodge, at least in Utah, I get careful about speaking about the whole of the United States or even the whole of the world, because there are various practices.

Scott Woodward:
Sure.

Lon Tibbitts:
But in every lodge in Utah there are two stones. One we’ve called—we call them ashlars, and those ashlars, one is rough and one is perfect. They sit in the front of the lodge at the feet of the worshipful master or honorable master of the lodge, and they are emblematic of our building our life with the rough or rude stone, transforming that into the perfect stone, one that can be shown to be perfect by using implements that stonemasons would use to determine whether or not that stone went well.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah, and having toured through the lodge, in your ceremonial rooms there’s a symbol that I think a lot of our listeners would probably be surprised that they’ve seen in public several times of a compass and a square and a G. Can you explain that symbolism and how it relates to the practice of Freemasonry?

Lon Tibbitts:
Yes. So we try to live our life on the square. That is a good life. We try to live it uprightly, and we try as Masons to meet on the level. So when we talk about squares and compasses, they have to do with morality. They have to do with goodness. They have to do with trying to be those kinds of things. I think the fact that the stone—we start with this rough ashlar. I think that is an admission that we know we are all coming short. Honestly, some of us may never get to perfectly square, perfectly upright, and we may have a difficult time from time to time meeting on a level with everybody that we meet. Pride and other things enter in. Sin enters in. Mistakes and the rest of it enter in. So I think we recognize that the men sitting in our lodge with us together are just like we are, with rough edges that need to be knocked off. So each of the symbols that we use, that an operative mason would use, each of the tools, has some meaning to us in how it is that we fashion and fix and repair and bring our lives closer to the perfect.

Scott Woodward:
Lon, that’s super interesting. It makes me think of that Joseph Smith quote where he says, “I am like a huge, rough stone rolling down from a high mountain, and the only polishing I get is when some corner gets rubbed off by coming in contact with something else, striking with accelerated force against religious bigotry or priestcraft or lawyercraft or doctorcraft.” He goes on—there’s a list of really tough stuff that he’s experienced. He says, “all hell knocking off a corner here and a corner there, and thus I will become a smooth and polished shaft in the quiver of the Almighty.” And I’ve never thought about that as a Masonic metaphor, but I just looked at the date on that quote, and he said that on May 21, 1843, a year and two months after becoming a Mason. So I wonder if he got that metaphor from Masonry.

Lon Tibbitts:
Very easily could have.

Scott Woodward:
That’s super cool.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah. Sounds very Masonic. I’m going to press a little bit harder the G in the Masonic symbol. Do you have to be religious to be a Mason? “Is Masonry a religion?” is the question that gets asked a lot.

Lon Tibbitts:
It’s a good question. It’s a good—it’s a very good question. So the G has two meanings for us: they are not a Masonic secret. So one of them is God, and the other is geometry. So is it a religion? And the answer to that is no. Do we have men who treat it as a religion? And the answer to that is yes, we do. We do have some men who would treat Masonry as their substitute for a religion because they haven’t been able to find one that meets their requirements, and this comes close enough for them. Does it have some spiritual elements? Yes. Does it teach some very important spiritual lessons? It does. Does it have a system of salvation? No, it does not. And if you were to take that as one of the more important ways to differentiate a church from another organization, then you would have to say that it fails miserably on that one very, very important principle. We call ourselves a moral society. In one of our very first lectures, there is, early on, and it’s—I will tell you, we call it clear text. I’m going to explain that real quickly to you. Our secrets are ciphered. When I say ciphered, I’m saying something that we’re not allowed to share with the rest of the world. When I say clear text, that means that it’s something that’s written out, and we can speak those words in public. So one of the first lectures that a man ever gets is in the preparation room when he’s getting ready to go through as an entered apprentice. That lecture is called the—in Utah, it’s called the Senior Steward’s Lecture, and that’s because the senior steward is the officer in the lodge who would deliver that lecture to him, or them, if there’s more than one that’s going to go through that day. That lecture is the first opportunity for us to introduce ourself to the potential Mason, the candidate. So in that lecture he is told that Freemasonry is far removed from all that is trivial, selfish, and ungodly; that it’s a beautiful system of morals veiled in allegory, and illustrated by symbols; that its tenets are brotherly love, relief, and truth; and that it is built upon an abiding foundation of an unfeigned belief in the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, and the immortality of the soul. It goes on to say that Freemasonry welcomes to its doors and admits to its privileges worthy men of various creeds and classes, but it insists that all men should stand upon an exact equality. So that is about a paragraph’s worth of the very first time we ever identify ourself to anybody officially as to who we are, and you’ll notice in there that there are three tenets, and they are brotherly love and relief, and relief as we would understand it in the Relief Society.

Scott Woodward:
Like being a benefit to those around you.

Lon Tibbitts:
Being a benefit to those around, yes.

Scott Woodward:
Okay.

Lon Tibbitts:
And often people think of this only in terms of monetary value or feeding and clothing, but sometimes it’s as simple as just being a friend when a friend is needed. It’s being a listening ear. And in this time that we live in where there’s so much loneliness, and we know that one of the great benefits of belonging to an organization like the Freemasons is that you’ve got a whole room full of friends and that you develop great friendships and that those great friendships then carry on from there. So brotherly love, relief, and truth. The truth part of that three tenets is that we are always to be looking for truth. I would say that most of the Masons I know don’t have much respect for the thoughts that have become very political in a part of our society these days where we worry about “my truth” and “your truth.” We actually believe that there are things that are truths and that we ought to be seeking to learn them and understand them. And that—so that’s really a part of where we come from and what we believe. All of those things are moral, but we have no system of salvation. We would like to think that Masons are living the kind of life that would make them acceptable to God, but we don’t promise them that they’re going to end up in heaven as a result of living the principles they learned in Masonry.

Scott Woodward:
One analogy that has been helpful for me, and I’d love your critique on it, is that Masonry is for grown men what Boy Scouts is for young men, that it’s about doing your duty to God, your country, being virtuous, honest, you know, trustworthy, loyal, helpful. There’s these wonderful virtues, and it’s based in this idea of respect for God, doing my duty to God, but it’s not religious in that you would have to be a Christian to be a Boy Scout. How do you feel about the comparison between Masonry as an adult, more developed version of Boy Scouts?

Lon Tibbitts:
I can agree with that. There are some who would say that that doesn’t make us serious enough, if you will, but I don’t agree with that. There have been connections to Masonry and to the Boy Scouts over the decades. We have a scouter award, actually, that we give to those who’ve been part of scouting and it’s a Masonic scouter award. So I think it’s an apt comparison, if you ask me.

Scott Woodward:
For me that just takes away the mystery ,of like, what kind of an organization is this? Because there’s so much familiarity in the church with Boy Scouts that all the mystery sort of drains away for me and I think, okay, it’s about helping men become good and have, like you said, fraternity and belonging and to do the kind of good you can do as an organization that maybe we can’t do as effectively as an individual.

Lon Tibbitts:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
And I want to chime in and say, there’s a lot of complicated feelings about Boy Scouts in the church, but I love Boy Scouts. Like, I thought it was the best. Well, Lon, let’s shift gears a little bit, because this is a church history podcast and Masons are entwined with the history of the church, and so we want to explore a little bit about the connection between the early Latter-day Saints and Masons. So start us down that road and where some of those connections come from.

Lon Tibbitts:
So I don’t know that the connections are always overt, but we do know that, for example, Heber C. Kimball, and there are others among the leading brethren in the early stages of the church, who were Masons when they came into the church. We also know, if you take a look at W. W. Phelps, who had been an editor of a paper that was an anti-Masonic paper, he was never reconciled to the fraternity and railed against it on a regular basis, so there were both the Heber C. Kimballs and there were the W. W. Phelpses in the early days of the church, and so you saw both of them. There was some tension there, especially when Brother Phelps would get up and spend some time talking about what was wrong with them. It could be offensive to others, and I’m sure that there were some things Heber C. Kimball said that probably were the same. There were those who were Freemasons: Hyrum, Joseph’s brother. There are those of us who believe but cannot prove, and so I say it that way exactly—there are some of us who believe that Alvin was also a member of that lodge in Palmyra that Hyrum was a member of. There are some who would like to believe that Joseph Smith, Sr. was a member of a lodge in Canandigua. We can only believe that because we can’t prove it, and no one’s been able to definitively show that either one of those fit that. Some have posited that there would—had been a fire in Palmyra that had destroyed the records, and therefore they could never get around to proving it, but they were quite sure. Well, like I say, there’s some of us who would like to believe that, but there were people on both sides of that divide, and the country had gone through the Morgan Affair, which I’m not going to go into that because that is a rabbit’s hole all by itself, but the country had just gone through the Morgan Affair. It had had a tremendous impact on Masonry and its membership. For a period of time around the time that Joseph joined the fraternity, it was on a rebound from the Morgan Affair. So was Masonry a topic? Was it something that would have been front and center for many members of the early church, whether they belonged to the fraternity or not? Yes, it would have been. And they would have been very, very familiar with the Morgan Affair. When the members of the church really got interested in it, of course, happened in Nauvoo, and a lot of that had to do with Joseph Smith’s joining the fraternity at that point, and he was what we call “raised on site” by a Grand Master. What that means is he didn’t have to go through a petitioning process. He didn’t have to go through an investigative process where the Lodge investigated him to make sure he was okay, and then he didn’t have to stand for an election where white balls or black balls were used to decide whether he entered or didn’t enter. The Grand Master said, “This guy is going to be a Mason, and I’m going to make him one.” He did have to go through the degrees, but he didn’t have to do what we call “returning a catechism.” So Masons, after the entered apprentice degree, they go through a memorization process, and then they return that catechism to their lodge, and after that then they are able to go to the fellow craft degree, and they do the same thing there before they go to the master mason degree, and when they have returned their catechism as a master mason, they become a full member of that lodge with a single vote, like everybody else in there, and with the rights and responsibilities that come along with it. So when Joseph went through his process, because the Grand Master of Illinois, Abraham Jonas, actually came down to Nauvoo, did this piece, which is called making a Mason on site, told him, “You’re a Mason,” on Saturday morning following that, he took his entered apprentice degree. Saturday afternoon he took his fellow craft—excuse me, Friday morning and afternoon, and then Saturday morning he took his master mason degree.

Scott Woodward:
And that’s unusually fast, correct?

Lon Tibbitts:
Unusually fast, and went along with that principle of raising a Mason on site. So one of the writers of books on Masonic jurisprudence starts off by saying that the first power of a Grand Master is the right to raise a Mason on site. But not all Grand Lodges allow that at this point in time anymore. That’s when it really took off.

Scott Woodward:
Once Joseph becomes a Mason then Latter-day Saints pile on.

Lon Tibbitts:
Latter-day Saints pile on. And there were about—I’ve seen a number as big as 2,400, but there were about 2,000 men who joined the fraternity or were already members of the fraternity and joined those lodges in Nauvoo that were predominantly members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. That created other issues, by the way. There was a lodge in Quincy, Illinois, that was not happy, very annoyed, the fact that the Grand Master of Illinois would have done this. It quickly became a political issue for them as well. There were only about 1,500 Masons in all of Illinois before that happened, and so you add about 2,000 Masons that are now all members of the church, and you can begin to see that it started to worry and scare and bother.

Scott Woodward:
Because they would have voting rights within Masonry to be able to influence.

Lon Tibbitts:
To sway and influence, yeah. So in that it became a little bit of an issue. It had something to do with the trouble that happened and the eventual expulsion of the members of the church from Illinois.

Scott Woodward:
Wow. And the appeal, ironically, for Joseph Smith and other Latter-day Saints to join Masonry seemed, at least in part, to get friends that were not members of the church, right?

Lon Tibbitts:
Right.

Scott Woodward:
We’d just experienced Missouri. We’d just come off that persecution. We were seen as too insular. We were seen as too groupish. And we wanted to get friends outside of our own circles, to be more well connected.

Lon Tibbitts:
Right.

Scott Woodward:
And that seems to backfire a little bit because so many of us become Masons, that actually stokes the jealousies of other Masons.

Lon Tibbitts:
Oh, yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Dang.

Casey Griffiths:
For most of our listeners, the primary connection that they still see as having resonance is in the development of the temple ordinances, in the development of the temple endowment. So, Lon, you are an endowed member of the Church, and you’re an active Freemason. Having seen both ceremonies, what do you see as the connection between them, or lack of connection?

Lon Tibbitts:
So the whole, wide world of Mormons and Masons may not agree with me, just so that you know, but for me, when I take a look at this, I believe that the symbolism in teaching is one of the great things that both systems have in common. I think the interactive way that we participate in both the degrees and the ceremonies in the temple are another one of those, and I think that we have some symbols in common. I don’t believe that the meanings of those symbols line up. And I would say that we’re talking about differences in morality behind Masonic symbols, but we’re looking at principles and elements of salvation and exaltation when we talk about them in the temple. But those are really the ones that I find to be the same, if you will. I always hate to go down the rabbit hole of talking about penalties, because they evoke some tremendous visceral reactions from people. I believe that if we wanted to talk about things as being literal or symbolic, when we get to penalties, we get to symbolism, and while the obligation that we take or the oath that we take is not symbolic, the penalty that is there or used to be there in our temples is still in Masonic circles. Not everywhere, by the way. The Grand Lodge of England decades ago rolled back and removed all the penalties from their ritual.

Scott Woodward:
And these are penalties that would be incurred for violating the secrecy?

Lon Tibbitts:
Yes. Yes.

Scott Woodward:
Okay.

Lon Tibbitts:
Most since the—about the same period of time, the 1980s, added wording to make sure that everybody understood that the penalties were just symbolic in nature. I think serious Masons, if I can say it that way, understood them to be symbolic to begin with. I will add just a personal thing, and that is I always used to struggle with what was symbolic and what was literal when I went through the endowment. If there’s been a personal benefit for me, it has been this, and that is that I now approach most of the temple endowment and other rituals in the temple as symbolic, and it has opened up a world of understanding for me that I don’t think I had previously. In that way, I would have to thank Freemasonry for helping me to have a better understanding of those things. But that’s very personal with me, and I’m not sure that every endowed member of the church who was a member of the fraternity would say the same things.

Scott Woodward:
Let me ask you a two-part question about this, because connection between the endowment and Freemasonry is obviously a point of criticism for those who are critical of the church, and it’s also a point that sometimes gets avoided by those who are faithful in the church who just don’t want to talk about it or see it, and so here’s my two-part question for you: Lon, in what ways do you think the LDS temple-Freemasonry connection has been overdramatized by critics? Okay, that’s part one. And in what ways do you think this connection has been underappreciated by LDS membership?

Lon Tibbitts:
So let me take on the first part of it. I’ve had an opportunity over the last seventeen years to think pretty deeply about these things and to read and to study, and let me begin by saying that Freemasonry has never in any way caused me to doubt anything about what it is that we do in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It has been another one of those little, teeny building blocks that has strengthened my testimony as opposed to create a doubt for me. But I’ll start with this: What has been overblown? So the stolen, “Joseph stole all this stuff and turned it into a religious ritual” is way overblown. Are there similarities? Yes, there are. But Freemasonry itself, when you get to some of its serious writers, when you get to serious writers about our history, when you get to men who understand Freemasonry well, you hear them say things like that we have stolen from every initiatic, symbolic ritual out there: that if the Egyptians had some, we’ve stolen some of that. If the Greeks had something, we’ve stolen some of that. If the Zoroastrians had something, we’ve stolen some of that, and we’ve built it into what we have today.

Scott Woodward:
So stolen is such a charged word, right?

Lon Tibbitts:
It is, right? So they talk about it in those terms, and when we hear somebody say, yeah, but Joseph stole it, my answer to that is, well, didn’t we appropriate it from others as well? Isn’t that part of the history, and isn’t that part of what we talk about and what it is that we do? So if I think of anything as overblown, it’s that. There are similarities.

Scott Woodward:
You use the word appropriated instead of stolen, and I think that’s a more gentle word. Are you okay with that, this adopting and adapting and recontextualizing of Masonic symbols? That doesn’t bother you at all, is that correct, what I’m hearing?

Lon Tibbitts:
No. It doesn’t bother me at all. And the other part of that, I think that the part that I think the members of the church don’t get is to think that Joseph was not influenced by everything around him in what he did is just silly. That’s probably a word that’s charged as well. I probably just offended somebody with what I just said.

Scott Woodward:
But it’s an important historical point to make, right? That we need to read these people seriously in the context in which they lived.

Lon Tibbitts:
Right.

Scott Woodward:
And Joseph is such a sponge. He’s pulling from everything. One of his mantras is that Mormonism believes all truth: that if it’s true, we believe it, that to be a true Latter-day Saint, you need to take truth from wherever you can find it.

Lon Tibbitts:
Right.

Scott Woodward:
And, I mean, this is his modus operandi. This is Joseph Smith to a T. He’s a sponge.

Lon Tibbitts:
Oh, yeah. I can’t tell you how often I am reading in my Book of Mormon, a book that I love and know to be true, but I can’t tell you how often I will read something that I have read fifty, sixty, seventy times before and suddenly see a word in there that triggers something for me that all of a sudden becomes a sermon in my life. So one word turns into a sermon about something that I need to do or something that I need to learn or know at that point in time, and I’ve never seen it before. So the fact that Joseph—we call it a sponge, but the fact that he would see things that would trigger for him an open sermon, a new ritual, a new way of thinking about the gospel, I just think that that is the Lord using things around us to tell us what it is that we need to know. I’ve come to believe that the Book of Mormon, for example, is a Urim and Thummim for each of us, or could be a Urim and Thummim for each of us. And who’s to say that the experiences that Joseph went through as a Mason, or—let’s be honest: Joseph probably had heard enough about what was done inside a Masonic temple at that point in his life that he was very familiar with them. By that I’m not saying that Hyrum told him any of the secrets. What I’m saying is he would have been familiar with those things to begin with because it was right there in his home. And because of that, the fact that that might trigger things that needed to be done, things that needed to be added, lessons that he needed to learn in order to incorporate them into the things that were going forward. And like I say, I’ll come back. I will use that nasty word, silly. It’s silly to think that he wasn’t influenced by the world around him and the things that he saw and did.

Scott Woodward:
There’s a theory of Joseph’s translation of the book of Abraham we call the catalyst theory, right? That he came across these papyrus scrolls, believed sincerely they were about Abraham, and so he asked the Lord about the story—asked for revelation, and he actually got the book of Abraham. Whether or not that’s what was on the scrolls or not, you know, we don’t know, but it almost seems like an analogy could be drawn there with, with Masonry, that there’s something here. There’s something good. There’s something true. There’s something beautiful in Masonry that acted as potentially a catalyst for what then becomes the framework of the endowment, right? I’m totally okay with that.

Casey Griffiths:
See, the example I was thinking of was the Word of Wisdom.

Lon Tibbitts:
Yeah, so am I.

Casey Griffiths:
When they started to find out that there were movements, temperance movements, movements to get people to eat and drink more healthily, and that may have influenced Joseph Smith, some people were like, oh no, the Word of Wisdom was completely out of the blue. No. I mean, they were part of the conversation that was happening when Joseph Smith inquired of the Lord and received the revelations. I’d say the temple sometimes occupies a different space than us, but it comes from the same environment, too. It doesn’t take place in a vacuum. And so, yeah, it’s a wonderful insight to say Joseph Smith was influenced by the things around him. It opens the doors for a lot of greater understanding.

Scott Woodward:
The Relief Society. I mean, there’s benevolent societies all around the U. S. at the time, and we wanted a women’s society in Nauvoo connected with the temple to help prepare for that, and so they—there is a thing already out there called a benevolent society, and they’re going to adopt it and adapt it and make it our own thing. And so we see that happening all the time. And that’s totally okay.

Casey Griffiths:
In fact, Lon, isn’t relief one of the major principles of masonry? Because looking at the timeline, we notice Joseph Smith is inducted into the Masonic fraternity, and then it’s, like, the next day that he sets up the Relief Society. Tell us that word and where it exists in there.

Lon Tibbitts:
Actually, I’ll expand on that. So I think that the very next day, Sunday, following his Saturday being raised as a Master Mason, he reorganizes, I think at that point. It had been organized before with a president earlier, and then he expounds on some things.

Scott Woodward:
You’re talking about the Masonic Fraternity or the Relief Society?

Lon Tibbitts:
The Relief Society.

Scott Woodward:
Okay.

Lon Tibbitts:
So he expounds on some of those things that he’d learned the day before. There are some Masons who read the speech as recorded in the history of the church, read that speech that he gave the next day, and say he’s making female Masons. There are just some elements of that that make them say that. But there are many of those things where he is laying out the Masonic principle, if you will, of relief, which is that you’re willing to go out of your way to help a fellow Mason with whatever it is that they need. And a lot of times that, as I’ve said before here, even, a lot of times that comes back to just being the sounding board that they need and just being there when they need that. We need to have good male friends that we can talk to about things that men experience and maybe experience different than what women do and maybe approach it differently than what women do. It’s good to be able to have those kinds of relationships, and I will say that some of the greatest relationships, male relationships, that I have in the world are in the fraternity, and that I don’t always get that from the brethren of the elders quorum, just to say it that way. That doesn’t mean that there’s anything lacking in my elders quorum. It may be lacking in me, by the way.

Scott Woodward:
Well, we can do better. We can do better for sure.

Lon Tibbitts:
We can.

Scott Woodward:
Wow. Amen to the need for male connection.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Can we go back to the Relief Society for just a second?

Lon Tibbitts:
Yes. Yes.

Scott Woodward:
This gets talked about as a point of major contention in Joseph Smith’s time, that there was this angst that Joseph was sharing the Masonic secrets with women, which would be a major no-no in a fraternity, right?

Lon Tibbitts:
Right.

Scott Woodward:
Could you talk about how—I mean, how much do you know about that, of the broader world of Masonry at the time and their angst against that? Talk about that. I mean, how egregious would that be for him to be sharing that with women? You know, kind of paint a picture for us of the complexity of what Joseph’s doing with women in the Relief Society, with the temple, and then the fact that he is a Mason.

Lon Tibbitts:
So the Lodge in Quincy, Illinois had heard about the speech that Joseph gave to the women when he reorganized the Relief Society. They immediately jumped to the conclusion that he was making female Masons. That was their belief at that point. It’s solely because he shared some framework, if you will, with those sisters in the room. So things like, if you go back and look at that, it talks about them needing to petition, needing to make an application, if you will, right, that they needed to be investigated, right? There’s another one of those pieces. Then they needed to be accepted and be a part of that process. The organization itself had some of the hallmarks of a lodge, if you will. The Masons in that lodge in Quincy jumped on this immediately and immediately reached out to the Grand Master of Illinois to say, “You blew it. You did this all wrong. What were you thinking of?” So, again, taking a look at the overreaction by the lodge in Quincy, from my point of view, my opinion, and maybe the underreaction by the members of the church, again, to think that he hadn’t been influenced by the experiences of the two days prior to this experience is just untenable in my mind. To think that he was making female Masons at that point, also untenable in my mind. So could be very much overblown or underblown, whichever you like, by whatever it is that someone wanted to prove, I think at that point. The Masons in Quincy, Illinois didn’t want to see Joseph and the Mormons in the fraternity. It’s fair to say that. And they spent a lot of time over the next period of time before the martyrdom of the prophet drumming up issues and problems. You know, one of—the other one was apparently the Lodge in Nauvoo had more than one potential mason at the altar taking his obligation at the same time. This is a no-no in at least U. S. Freemasonry, where every man goes through an entire degree by himself, entire pieces of the degree, at least, by himself, and so this was one of those complaints that was made about him at that point. I don’t know whether that was true or not, honestly. I will say in a couple of years and in a short period of time, actually it was closer to a year, putting 2,000 men through the degrees in three lodges, that’s pretty amazing work. That’s a lot of work. So I can see where some of that comes from.

Scott Woodward:
Okay, so it’s clear that there were non-LDS Masons at the time that were not pleased with Joseph Smith for valid or rumored reasons. But what do you want to say about the claim that some Masons were actually in on the conspiracy to kill Joseph Smith? Like, weren’t there Masons in the mob at Carthage Jail?

Lon Tibbitts:
So were there Masons in the mob? Yeah, there were. When one in every five men at the time in the United States was a member of the fraternity, it’s a little hard to not have them in the mob. But one of the points I’d like to make is there was no lodge that met as a lodge and got together and said, “Let’s go kill Joseph Smith.” There was no Masonic connection, if you want to put it that way. Were there individual members of the fraternity? Yeah. So I draw that line pretty boldly to say it was not a Masonic conspiracy, but yes, there were Masons in the presence, in the mob that took part in that piece. One of the scandals, if you will, afterwards was that the leader and rabble rouser who put the mob together to begin with fled to the lodge in Quincy to hide. They accepted him as a Mason, and then that led to their losing their charter as a Masonic lodge, at least for a period of time, and until they had expelled that man. So there—are there connections? Yeah, there are connections. Was it a Masonic conspiracy? No. It was not.

Casey Griffiths:
And Lon, I’m going to ask you something, because I’m pretty sure our listeners are going to be curious, but Joseph Smith’s last words, some members of the church said that that may have been a plea to the Masons in the force attacking the jail. What’s your opinion about that?

Scott Woodward:
When he said, “Oh Lord, my God”?

Casey Griffiths:
“Oh, Lord, my God.” Yeah.

Lon Tibbitts:
Yeah. I would agree that he may have been appealing.

Scott Woodward:
So walk us through what that means. Like, if you were a Mason outside or you were in a position to help Joseph Smith when he made that cry, what’s the obligation of a Mason at that point?

Lon Tibbitts:
He’s to do everything he can, really, short of giving his life at that point, to help that man, yeah.

Scott Woodward:
So from that perspective, the Latter-day Saint Masons back in Nauvoo felt completely let down by their brothers who would have been in that mob or been in the vicinity to help.

Lon Tibbitts:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
So the church’s association with Freemasonry doesn’t end in Nauvoo. One of our conversations, you mentioned that there’s a photograph of Brigham Young in his advanced age, and he’s wearing a little Masonic pin. What’s the story after they leave Nauvoo? Are they still considered Masons? Are there Masons in Utah? And how does that play out?

Lon Tibbitts:
So when they leave Nauvoo, their lodges have lost their charter. The Grand Master of Masons in Illinois has taken their charter, which is the power by which a lodge operates. A lodge has to have a charter from a Grand Master in order to operate.

Scott Woodward:
What were the grounds for taking that charter away?

Lon Tibbitts:
Well, the irregularities that would have been pointed out by the lodge in Quincy and other Masons were really what led to it, and the Grand Master of Masons in Illinois at that point kind of lost some of his political power to begin with there. Most of us believe that he was using his position as Grand Master of Masons in Illinois to springboard a run for governor of the state of Illinois, and that never happened. That became an issue on the side. But when they left, their official position would have been they were masons without a lodge. So the lodges are now gone. They don’t—they no longer have a charter to operate, and they are now traveling out to Utah. There are Masons in those parties. I’ve been working for years on a research project, and I’m not quite there, but I’m close to being able to prove that—from Masonic records, I’m close to being able to prove that every member of the first wagon train that came into the valley on 1847 was a Mason, except those who were women that were there with them as well. I’m still missing the B—I can’t prove two of them, but that’s kind of where that piece is at. So they come, and they’ve got no lodge, and what I’m about to tell you, I don’t know it exists anywhere in the history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but it does exist in the history, they started to write that history in 1872 when the Grand Lodge of Utah was formed, but it does exist there, and that is that there was a belief among the worshipful masters of Wasatch Lodge and Mount Moriah Lodge here in the state of Utah in 1872—they had been organized in 1866 and were operating, one was operating with a charter from Montana and the other with a charter from the Grand Lodge of Kansas. And there were these two lodges. They added a third one, Argenta Lodge, and they had a charter from the Grand Lodge of Nevada at that point. So these three lodges were there, and the story that they had was that Heber C. Kimball, specifically, had asked Brigham Young for permission—now, how they knew these things, I don’t know, but this is what the story says. And so, whether or not this story is true doesn’t matter: The fact that they had this belief at the time was the impetus for taking these three lodges and forming the Grand Lodge of Utah. And in that history, one of the things that’s said is that Heber C. Kimball was headed to England because he’d been unsuccessful at getting a U. S. Grand Lodge to give them charters for five lodges that he had asked for permission, according to this story, to go to England and get a charter from the Grand Lodge of England for a Grand Lodge and five lodges and that then he was going to then return so that their masons would have a place to meet. Again, let me just emphasize, I don’t know if this is true. I just know that this is what those men in those three lodges thought at the time, and their fear was that if the Mormons get Masonry in Utah, we’ll never be admitted to their lodges, and we won’t be able to practice Masonry. That was their belief and their fear. That was what was driving them. And the fact is a geographic area can only have one regular Grand Lodge within it and be recognized by other regular Grand Lodges around the world. And so they had this very real fear. Many of these men had come into the territory as Masons to begin with and now had formed these little lodges and were meeting in these lodges. So, they then, the three lodges got together. It takes three lodges to form a Grand Lodge. They got together and formed the Grand Lodge of Utah in 1872. And then they enacted their own law, which was—and I believe it comes from their belief that had Heber C. Kimball gone and done that and then come back and formed a Grand Lodge in Utah that they would not have allowed their lodges to join their Grand Lodge, so they then said that members of the church could not join their lodges. And as I mentioned earlier, that started in 1872. It was fairly much unofficial at that point. It lasted until 1984. Lodges did continue thereafter to drop black cubes against those who were members of the church. Now that said, there were some exceptions before 1984. There was at least one very famous one where it would have been almost death to the Grand Lodge of Utah in order—if they had refused a California Mason membership in the fraternity here. They reasoned at the time that it was all right, because he was inactive. He later on returned to activity and actually ended up serving in the Salt Lake Temple. They had kept that going for quite a long time based off of this story. And it’s an origin story that may or may not be true, right? That’s the thing we’ve got to understand is sometimes origin stories are stories, and they cause action, but I have no doubt that the men who told that story believed it, and that they thereby acted.

Scott Woodward:
So the animosity between Latter-day Saints and Utah Masons wasn’t so much about what happened back in Carthage or what happened in Nauvoo as it was a fear-based story that the Mormons were going to beat the non-Mormons to creating a lodge in Utah and excluding all others. And so they hurried and formed their own grand lodge from those three lodges and then turned the tables and excluded the Latter-day Saints.

Lon Tibbitts:
Yes. Yes.

Scott Woodward:
Wow. Based on a story that may or may not be true.

Lon Tibbitts:
Right. Right.

Scott Woodward:
Interesting. Interesting.

Casey Griffiths:
Today there are Latter-day Saints that are Freemasons, such as yourself. I’ve asked you a couple times what you think the percentages are in Utah. Can you give us an overview of that?

Lon Tibbitts:
Yes, I can. So—and just for the record here, there were Masons in other places, other countries, other states, from 1872 on. There were Masons who were members of the Church. So, it’s not like it was banned everywhere or as seen as a bad thing everywhere, but here in Utah, yes. Today, since the ban was dropped, and since we started admitting Masons into the lodges in Utah, I would estimate—we don’t ask men what their religion is, so it’s sometimes difficult to figure those things out. Based on a rough number of the men that I know are members of the church, I would have to say that we are 10 to 15 percent of the fraternity here in Utah. So there are men who I know who are completely inactive or who would not admit to their membership in the church, but I know that they grew up that way. That number probably goes up a little higher, maybe as much as 20 or 25 percent.

Scott Woodward:
Wow. Lon, this has been fantastic. I’ve learned a ton, and I’m sure our listeners have picked up a thing or two, and we just want to thank you so much for your time here with us today, and I just want to end with this final question for you: Lon, could you share with us what makes you a believer in the truth claims of the Restoration? We’d love to hear that.

Lon Tibbitts:
Well, you know, like most active, longtime members of the church, there was a defining moment before I served a mission that allowed me to know that these things are true about Joseph Smith, about the Book of Mormon, about ongoing revelation, about the transfer of power from Joseph to Brigham, about the church as it stands today. I’d actually put in my papers to serve a mission, and I think at that point I thought, you know, I’ve never really asked. I’ve just gone along. I’ve been a good seminary student. I had read the scriptures all the way through, but I realized at some point in there that I hadn’t asked. And I went off and had my own little experience. And in comparison to Joseph’s experience, it was a little experience, but it brought me back to my home on that Sabbath day. Absolutely sure that serving a mission was the right thing for me to do. I’ve had my ups and downs, but it’s always been my north star, and I’ve had some great experiences since then, so I’m not building at this point upon one little, teeny thing that happened. It wasn’t teeny. It was big to me. It was huge to me. But I’m, I’ve been—it’s been building all of my life, and I know that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is Jesus Christ’s church on earth. I know that because of the accumulation of spiritual experiences that I’ve had in my life. Do I occasionally have doubts? Do I have to deal with those doubts? Do I have concerns? Do I wonder sometimes? Surely, I do. But I read and read and reread and read over and read and try to read every day, actually, no matter what else we’re studying, I try to read from the Book of Mormon. I can tell you this. I know without a shadow of a doubt that that book is true and that the principles that are there do lead me to become a better man, a better member of the church, a better Christian, and to do the things that I ought to do. So that’s my answer. That’s how I know. That’s why I’m here. That’s why the church means more to me than any other earthly organization.

Scott Woodward:
Wow. Thank you so much. Lon, so wonderful to have you with us, and we appreciate your time.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah, thanks very much.

Lon Tibbitts:
You’re welcome.

Scott Woodward:
Thank you for listening to this bonus episode of Church History Matters with Lon Tibbitts. And by the way, Lon wanted us to note that although he is currently Grand Secretary of the Grand Lodge in Utah, he was not speaking in any official capacity for the Grand Lodge during this interview. All of his comments were made only from his own personal perspective as a member of the fraternity. In our next episode Casey and I discuss the development of marriage sealings in Nauvoo and the corresponding rich theological developments that undergird and make sense of this crowning ritual in the church. If you’re enjoying Church History Matters, we’d appreciate it if you could take a moment to subscribe, rate, review, and comment on the podcast. That makes us easier to find. Also, we’d love to hear your suggestions for future series on this podcast. If there’s a church history topic you think would be worth exploring for multiple episodes, send us your idea to podcasts@scripturecentral.org. We promise to consider all suggestions. Today’s episode was produced by Scott Woodward and edited by Nick Galieti and Scott Woodward, with show notes and transcript by Gabe Davis. Church History Matters is a podcast of Scripture Central, a nonprofit which exists to help build enduring faith in Jesus Christ by making Latter-day Saint scripture and church history accessible, comprehensible, and defensible to people everywhere. For more resources to enhance your gospel study, go to scripturecentral.org, where everything is available for free because of the generous donations of people like you. And while we try very hard to be historically and doctrinally accurate in what we say on this podcast, please remember that all views expressed in this and every episode are our views alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of Scripture Central or The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Thank you so much for being a part of this with us.