Scott Woodward:
Hi, this is Scott from Church History Matters. As we wrap up this series, we want to hear from you. Next week we will be pleased to have as our special guest Dr. Richard Bennett to help us respond to your questions about the development of LDS temple practices. Dr. Bennett has literally written the book on this topic, and so he’s more than ready to respond. So please send your thoughtful questions in anytime before May 9, 2024 to podcasts@scripturecentral.org. As always, let us know your name, where you’re from, and try to keep each question as concise as possible when you email them in. That helps out a lot. Okay, now on to the episode. 1904 marked the beginning of what would become a grueling, four-year-long Senate hearing of U. S. Senator and Apostle Reed Smoot. It is intriguing and important to learn how this crucible of intensive government examination into every aspect of the Church led Church leaders to a posture of much greater openness about the temple to outsiders. In fact, those hearings, followed by a backfired blackmail attempt by a man who threatened to release illicit pictures he had taken of the interior of the Salt Lake Temple, led church leaders, really for the first time, to go on the offensive and proactively tell our own story about LDS temple beliefs and practices. In today’s episode of Church History Matters, we’ll talk about the Smoot hearings and the blackmail attempt, as well as dig into the origin of temple garments, their symbolism, and changes made to their design over the years. We’ll also discuss major innovations in how the temple endowment was presented, which included some help from Walt Disney Studios; a cool, floating temple boat idea that never happened; as well as how President Gordon B. Hinckley’s temple innovations and prolific temple-building ministry became an inflection point which set the church on a trajectory to build thousands of temples in the years to come. I’m Scott Woodward, and my co-host is Casey Griffiths, and today, Casey and I dive into our eighth episode in this series about the development of Latter-day Saint temple worship. Now, let’s get into it. Well, Casey, we made it to our penultimate episode on temple worship.

Casey Griffiths:
Yes.

Scott Woodward:
Next week we have our guest expert coming—

Casey Griffiths:
Yes.

Scott Woodward:
—to field some questions, but as far as you and I go, this is it today.

Casey Griffiths:
This is as far as we go, but, man, this has been a good one.

Scott Woodward:
This has been a fun ride. Yes.

Casey Griffiths:
I think we outlined five episodes, and we’re on—I don’t know. What are we at now? Eight?

Scott Woodward:
This is eight, plus our bonus episode with Lon Tibbitts.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Our Masonic friend. And so this is, I guess, our ninth, and we’ll end next week with our tenth. How about that?

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah. And I’m still sitting here thinking there’s more we could put in, but that’s okay. That’s okay.

Scott Woodward:
Got to leave them wanting more, you know?

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
So.

Casey Griffiths:
You’re leaving me wanting more. Like, I’ve really, really, really enjoyed this one, and so it’s been good.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. So let’s recap where we’ve been. I’ll dive into that.

Casey Griffiths:
Okay. Fire away.

Scott Woodward:
Okay, so in our previous episodes we’ve been tracing the development of temple work and temple worship. We talked about the earliest really coming out of the Book of Mormon prophecies about the New Jerusalem, and we traced that, Oliver Cowdery’s mission to the Lamanites, as well as to raise up a pillar unto the Lord for where the future temple will be, and that’s October of 1830, our very first reference to a temple. Following that, we talked about how the saints wanted to build a temple in Missouri. That’s the first one pointed out by the finger of the Lord, but that was not able to happen due to persecution there that forced them to leave. The first temple we actually build is the second one commanded: Kirtland. And Kirtland, we talked about, was primarily something of a preparatory temple to get those temple keys essential to building the kind of temples that we start building in Nauvoo, where we have the keys of gathering, the keys of Elias with the temple marriage, and the keys of Elijah, to seal the family of God together, and it’s only shortly after the temple keys are restored in the Kirtland Temple that persecution rears its ugly head. We have the Kirtland apostasy. Lives are threatened. Joseph flees, heads out to Far West, Missouri, where there was already a group of saints there. We had two temples that were proposed and sites even dedicated for them in northern Missouri, but, again, because of persecution, those do not happen: the Far West temple and the temple at Adam-ondi-Ahman. But once we get to Nauvoo and we get our own little place for a little while, our own space to now let the prophets settle in and use those keys from Kirtland to begin to go to, maybe we could call it “Temple phase two” with the kind of temples that the Nauvoo temple represents, and this is where we’re going to start getting the temple practices of baptisms for the dead, which initially was authorized outside the temple, but then becomes part of the temple ritual. Washing and anointings, we talked about the development of that. That was something that had a Kirtland corollary, but it was built upon and recontextualized in Nauvoo, made part one of a two-part endowment, and then the part two of that endowment, we really spent some time talking about the development of that and its various influences from the revelations and translations of Joseph Smith, as well as the Masonic order that Joseph had recently joined in early 1842. We’ve been talking about how the keys that Joseph received did not come with an instruction manual. We started out with the metaphor of puzzle pieces, and then I wasn’t quite subtle with that, so we went with the analogy of LEGOs, which basically was meant to imply that the prophet has more leeway than sometimes we want to think. He’s not just given blueprints or, like, the picture on the front of a puzzle box that says “build that thing, and you’ll know when you’re done.”

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
But instead the sealing keys particularly seem to have a lot more leeway. It’s more like a pile of LEGO blocks that said the end result is to seal the family of God together, to help everyone qualify for the celestial kingdom, be part of the Church of the Firstborn, and so with the prophet Joseph this is built line upon line. We’re going to get the pieces coming together bit by bit in Nauvoo. The sealing power is used in some interesting ways, we discussed. There’s an ordinance that was introduced in Nauvoo called the second anointing, where the keys of Elijah were used to seal couples up unto eternal life.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
There’s also this law of adoption we talked about, where the sealing keys are used to connect individuals and families sort of horizontally. This is adults being adopted into the family of usually church leaders, usually apostles, as sons and daughters. And this was, in their understanding, a way to create an eternal network of heavenly connection, which would endure through the eternities. And so we see some innovative ways the prophets are using the keys of the sealing power to try to create that end product of the sealed family of God, but in 1894 President Wilford Woodruff receives this really important revelation wherein the Lord says, don’t you have a father? And he says, yes. And he says, well, then, why not be sealed to your father rather than horizontally to somebody like a church leader, right? And at that point, Wilford Woodruff says, yes, that’s right. And he starts teaching the Latter-day Saints, we’re going to do this vertically, back through your ancestry, rather than horizontally to church leaders that you admire and want to be part of their sort of sub-kingdom of the kingdom of God. And so that’s when things kind of start looking a little bit more like we do it today. That seemed—Wilford Woodruff said in his discourse that seems more in alignment with the revelations given to Joseph Smith, actually, about Elijah and turning the hearts of the children to their fathers and back through their fathers rather than turning the hearts of the children to church leaders that were really wonderful and admirable, but ultimately this seems to have meant to have always gone vertically rather than that horizontal way.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
But whoever’s got the keys of the kingdom has some leeway, and that’s what we’ve been trying to emphasize, is that there’s some flexibility with these keys, and there’s innovations that have come, some have gone, some have stayed, some have been tweaked and changed, and, in fact, we want to talk a lot more about that today: innovations in temple worship.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Anyway, that’s kind of a—my little zigzag through where we’ve been in the last eight or so episodes. Anything you’d add? What did I leave out?

Casey Griffiths:
That was an admirable summary of eight episodes of material.

Scott Woodward:
Oftentimes I’m looking at my notes when I do that. This time I didn’t even look at my notes. I was just looking at you. I think I covered it, but . . .

Casey Griffiths:
You covered it like a scholar and also like a hyperactive five-year-old trying to explain something that they’re really excited about, so well done on both counts. At any rate we kind of carried us up to what I would say is the third important historic temple to know. Kirtland, of course, Nauvoo, and St. George, which was just rededicated, and they went out of their way to return it to its pioneer appearance as well. St. George is where the whole LEGO structure comes together, and we get all the ordinances that we’re familiar with: baptisms, initiatories, endowments, and sealings. And St. George is the first place where we do them all for the dead.

Scott Woodward:
Mm-hmm.

Casey Griffiths:
In addition, St. George is where they sort of codify and systematize and write down the endowment ceremony for the first time. You and I were chatting before we started recording, and you said, “Whoa, they didn’t write it down before St. George?”

Scott Woodward:
’Cause, yeah, we talked about in our last episode, too—forgot to mention this. We talked about how they did the endowment for—what was his name? Brother Pratt? What’s his first name? Addison.

Casey Griffiths:
For Addison Pratt, yeah.

Scott Woodward:
They had done Addison Pratt’s endowment on Ensign Peak, and then for years they did the endowment in the Council House.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Then they actually built a house called the Endowment House where they did the endowments there. But it wasn’t until St. George that Brigham Young and Wilford Woodruff really sit down to work to codify the endowment tightly. So, yeah, my question was why in the 30-year period between Nauvoo and the St. George Temple had they not already codified and written this down when people were being endowed all throughout that time period?

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah, and the general consensus from the scholars we’ve been following in this series, which are Richard Bennett, who’s going to be with us next week, and Devery Anderson, was that the endowment was transmitted orally prior to the St. George Temple—that they saw it as so sacred that it wasn’t written down, and it was transmitted that way, which also—I’ll emphasize, too, that we have sources that indicate that the endowment wasn’t as precise as it is today: that there were some things, like a lecture that happened at the veil that has been greatly shortened, simplified when the endowment was codified and written down, too.

Scott Woodward:
From my understanding, the endowment used to be hours and hours longer than it is today.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah. Yeah, one source says that in Nauvoo it was eight hours long.

Scott Woodward:
Whoo!

Casey Griffiths:
But I even found one source that—as late as the 1920s George F. Richards, who was president of the Salt Lake Temple, was talking about the sheets the endowment was written on and how they were kept in special folders, and I don’t know if that’s the original or what was going on there, but it seems like they felt a great desire to preserve the fidelity of the text, but they also had this push and pull to keep it sacred as well. And when something’s written down there is a tendency for copies to get made, and the more copies made, the more widely distributed it tends to be. So they were cautious with that during the first several decades of performing the endowment. One of the big themes, I think, of this entire series has been that the temple ceremonies are dynamic and changing.

Scott Woodward:
Right.

Casey Griffiths:
I mean, there’s been changes even recently to the ceremony of baptisms for the dead—

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
—which we take as pretty static, but the endowment is the longest by a wide margin and the most complex ordinance that we perform would expect to undergo a number of changes, and I believe those changes came by inspiration. So for me the Lord, through his prophets, continues to refine the endowment, adapt the endowment. The covenants have stayed the same, but there’s a lot about the wording that has changed.

Scott Woodward:
Right. So today we want to actually trace more of those changes during the 20th and 21st centuries, and so how do you want to start talking about that, Casey?

Casey Griffiths:
Well, I mean, this is going to be a sprint compared to the other things we’ve done. We’re going to try and go from basically where we ended last time, which was around 1890, up ’til the present, so fasten your seatbelts.

Scott Woodward:
Buckle up.

Casey Griffiths:
Let’s start with a simple thing: 1890 is the Manifesto. That ends plural marriage. That starts what one of my favorite historians, a guy named Thomas G. Alexander, calls the transitional era of Latter-day Saints. So from 1890 to about 1930, Tom Alexander writes this book that I love called Mormonism in Transition where he notes all these changes that happen, and if the manifesto is kind of the first one, what really kicks the changes into high gear actually is something that’s external to the church, not internal. It’s the Reed Smoot hearing.

Scott Woodward:
Ah, yes.

Casey Griffiths:
Reed was a very, very well-off businessman. He was also a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. He was also a monogamist. He never practiced plural marriage. So he was considered part of this new generation of church leadership, and, to make a long story short, Reed Smoot is elected to the U. S. Senate in the early 20th century.

Scott Woodward:
How was that received by the nation broadly?

Casey Griffiths:
Not very well, to put it simply. We’d already had one person elected to the House of Representatives: that was B. H. Roberts. And B. H. Roberts was kind of a cantankerous soul, and he decided to just, like, fight it and go it alone, and he was also a polygamist. He just felt like, hey, now that we’re not performing new plural marriages, it’s fine. And he was voted out by the other Congress-people from serving. So Smoot is elected to the U. S. Senate, and this is a different ball game because Smoot is endorsed by the church. B. H. Roberts wasn’t. He decided to do it on his own. That kind of creates a rift with the church. That’s another story for another day.

Scott Woodward:
Another episode.

Casey Griffiths:
Smoot does it with full church support and is, like, you know, squeaky clean, but there’s the simple fact that he’s a Latter-day Saint, and you can add in that he’s a member of the Quorum of the Twelve as well, causes kind of an uproar. And when we say an uproar, we’re saying there is today a 3,500-page record of all the witnesses, over 100 witnesses, called during the Reed Smoot hearings. I mean, If the manifesto started us down the path to moving more towards the American mainstream, this kicks us into high gear. The problem is the Reed Smoot hearings, which went on for years—

Scott Woodward:
Wasn’t it, like, four years or something?

Casey Griffiths:
Oh man, it was back and forth and so intense. Reed Smoot’s a Republican, by the way, and he gets the support of Teddy Roosevelt as he’s doing this, but this is really sort of a colonoscopy for the church.

Scott Woodward:
Okay, let’s pause and think about that metaphor for a second. Actually, let’s not.

Casey Griffiths:
Maybe don’t want to call it a colonoscopy—

Scott Woodward:
Yeah, maybe not.

Casey Griffiths:
—but it was, like, an intensive examination.

Scott Woodward:
Okay. He had to use the word examination. Okay.

Casey Griffiths:
It was intense.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. Yeah. So paint the picture of the Reed Smoot hearings. So we’re talking about, like, intensive, over four years long.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Like, testimonies, people being called to the stand. We’re talking hundreds of witnesses, right?

Casey Griffiths:
Hundreds of witnesses from all different walks of life, including several apostles and the president of the church, which was Joseph F. Smith. And the Reed Smoot trials just have huge reverberations because one of the things that the Senate is really interested in is, hey, is this guy actually a monogamist or is he just pretending to be a monogamist? And is the church still advocating for practicing plural marriage? Like . . .

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
Oh, there’s—could I read this one exchange?

Scott Woodward:
Yes.

Casey Griffiths:
Joseph F. Smith is on trial, and Massachusetts Senator Joseph Hoar is asking President Joseph F. Smith about the scriptural basis for plural marriage.

Scott Woodward:
So this is at the Reed Smoot hearings.

Casey Griffiths:
This is during the hearings.

Scott Woodward:
Okay.

Casey Griffiths:
So the Senator says, “Now I will illustrate what I mean by the injunction of our scripture, what we call the New Testament. Mr. Smith:” this is Joseph F. Smith, “Which is our scripture also. The Senator: Which is your Scripture also? Mr. Smith: Yes, sir. The Senator: The apostle says a bishop must be sober and be the husband of one wife. Mr. Smith: At least.” So . . .

Scott Woodward:
At least one wife.

Casey Griffiths:
So this is, like, front page news and in a lot of ways sort of blows up the short era of relative calm that exists after the manifesto. By the way, another great exchange from the trial: Fred Dubois of Idaho was this really vicious critic of Reed Smoot. Said he shouldn’t be seated. Another senator, Boies Penrose from Pennsylvania, who was on Reed Smoot’s side, started talking about polygamy and then pointed out that several members of the Senate he knew were unfaithful to their wives, and then this is the classic quote from the Reed Smoot trials: Senator Boies Penrose says, “As for me, I would rather have seated beside me in this chamber a polygamist who doesn’t polyg than a monogamist who doesn’t monog.” And so . . .

Scott Woodward:
That’s so booyah.

Casey Griffiths:
It brings up a lot of intensive feelings. A lot of intensive feelings. But after plural marriage, probably the biggest controversy brought out in the Reed Smoot hearings was the temple.

Scott Woodward:
Because on the face of it, this looks like a non-U.S.-type trial, right? Like, how can you try to unseat a man simply because of his religious beliefs, right? There’s no religious test for office.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
And this seems like a religious test for office.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
But there’s more going on underneath this, right? It’s not just about polygamy. So what’s the other thing going on here?

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah. The fundamental question that the Reed Smoot hearings were asking was, can an active Latter-day Saint serve in the U. S. government? Because the church and the government had been in opposition to each other for so long and, you know, the Republican party, which Smoot was elected by, was basically founded to end plural marriage, and so there were a lot of people that just thought, hey, the church is not ending plural marriage, and the church is some kind of secret combination intended to destroy the U. S. government, and when the word secret comes up, a lot of times people with Latter-day Saints go directly to the temple and these secret ceremonies that are carried out in Latter-day Saint temples.

Scott Woodward:
So that seems to be at the heart of this, right?

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Some of his accusers start to say that Latter-day Saints who enter into temple covenants are automatically guilty of sedition against the U. S. government, right?

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah, and I mean the assumption at the time was just simply that to be a Latter-day Saint meant you were seditious to the government. Like, in 1905 the New York Post listed eight senators who they thought should be removed. And some of the senators have, like, their picture. Underneath is the word “indicted.” Another one, it says, “accused of fraud.” Another one, it says “expulsion asked for.” Another one was financially embarrassed through trying to elect notorious addicts to the Senate. Underneath Reed Smoot, the little heading says “Mormon.” Like, that was enough. Like . . .

Scott Woodward:
Guilty.

Casey Griffiths:
This guy’s a Mormon, so obviously he’s not fit to be in the Senate. And that is, like, bigotry, just plain and simple, right?

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
So part of making these charges try to stick against Reed Smoot is to say, well, don’t Latter-day Saints enter into these ceremonies where they enter into secret covenants, and isn’t the covenant something that, you know, is against the country? And so, I mean, during the Reed Smoot hearings—no joke, I did research on this a couple years ago—Reed Smoot kept newspaper clippings of everywhere his name appeared, and there are just binders and binders of this stuff. One newspaper just flat out had someone wearing the temple clothing, and this is on their front page. And so they showed the clothing, they explained the ceremonies at length, and they even had witnesses in the Reed Smoot hearings that quoted the endowment in the middle of the hearings. Like, you could still go to the Senate hearings and look up the wording of the endowment if you wish to.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah, and one article charges, “It is generally admitted in Utah that the priesthood,” meaning the men, “and all the leading spirits of the Mormon Church are members of a secret oath-bound fraternity whose chief meeting place is in the temple at Salt Lake City. This massive stone edifice, sacred in the eyes of the followers of the ‘Prophet’ Joseph Smith, and it is the one building in Utah within which no Gentile may enter.” They call it a “secret oath-bound fraternity,” people who go to the temple. So there’s all kinds of suspicion about Latter-day Saints, especially endowed Latter-day Saints, similar to kind of the anti-Masonry movement in America, which I’m seeing some connections here.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah, major similarities, right?

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
It’s easy to take the temple ceremonies and sensationalize them, especially given that not a lot of people in the United States were very familiar with what Latter-day Saints actually believed, and there had been fifty years of conflict prior to this with the U. S. government. So, for instance, a New York newspaper, one of the headlines was, “Death Penalties in Mormon Oath,” and “Dead Married to Living.” But it doesn’t explain—I mean, if I came up to you and said, “Dead married to living,” and didn’t offer anything, I may have accurately explained one of our beliefs, but you can see how it sounds really strange. Like, if I say we baptize on behalf of the dead, you could get the wrong idea there.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
Like, several people on my mission did. One guy thought we actually—

Scott Woodward:
Dug up bodies and . . .

Casey Griffiths:
—Baptized the dead, like, literally.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. Yeah. Without context it’s easy to smear, villainize, sensationalize the temple ordinances.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
It’s especially low-hanging fruit because we often try to keep it secret or sacred. We don’t want to talk about it. And that only causes people to want to bring it up more and sensationalize it. Like, you mentioned that New York newspapers headline “Death Penalties in Mormon Oath.” Like, there used to be in the temple endowment penalties articulated for the breaking of the oaths that you made there, and as we talked to Lon Tibbitts, he was really good talking about how, you know, the Latter-day Saint temple endowment and Masonry have that in common—

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
—where there were penalties associated with divulging or breaking the oaths that you’d made. And he was really clear to say those were intended to be understood symbolically. Those were hyperbole, right? Those were intended to simply underscore the seriousness of the promise you’re making.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
There was language of penalty if you broke the oath, and that’s the kind of thing that is really easy to sensationalize, and I can understand why later on church leaders took that out.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah, and they have several witnesses come to the stand who are sort of lapsed members of the church or people that have left the church that are willing to explain the ordinances. One of them quotes it directly. But the big issue they’re bringing up here is does this oath make you automatically seditious to the government of the United States? For instance, here’s a couple excerpts: Reed Smoot is asked directly, so “Senator Overman: You believe, then, if God should make a revelation to Joseph F. Smith, and that was submitted to the church in conference and accepted by the church, it would be the law of the church. Senator Smoot: It would be the rule and law of the church. Senator Overman: You think the laws of God are superior to the laws of man? Senator Smoot: I think the laws of God upon the conscience of men are superior. I do, Mr. Senator. Senator Overman: You think the laws of God as revealed to Joseph F. Smith and accepted by the church would be binding upon the members of the church superior to the laws of the land? Senator Smoot: I think it would be binding upon Joseph F. Smith.” When Senator Overman pushed him, he said, “I think if the revelation were given to me, and I knew it was from God, and that the law of God would be more binding upon me possibly than the law of the land, I would have to do what God told me if I were a Christian. Senator Overman said, “I speak of a law, Senator Smoot, but I want to say this, Mr. Senator: I would want to know, and to know positively, it was a revelation from God.” Senator Smoot said, “And I would further state this: if it conflicted with the law of my country in which I live, I would go to some other country where it would not conflict.” So Reed Smoot is a champ. Like, honestly, he stands up for what he believes and doesn’t back down, and basically says, I don’t think that there’s any conflict between the oath of the temple, but if there was a conflict between the laws of my religion, I’d go with my religion, but I’d also go to a country where the laws didn’t conflict.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. And one of those lapsed members you spoke of was Walter W. Wolfe, right?

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
He was a former teacher at Brigham Young College.

Casey Griffiths:
That’s correct. Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
He leaves the church in 1906. He’s called to the stand, and he’s actually complimentary of the endowment. He says it’s a very impressive ceremony, but then he also said that he felt that in the covenant of the endowment, “the seed of treason is planted,” he said.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
It’s like, okay. Like, where? Like, where is the seed of treason planted?

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
But the only thing that people can seem to really point out is there used to be an oath talking about avenging the blood of the prophets, right? Speaking of Joseph and Hyrum Smith, who were murdered.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
But what they make it sound like is that Latter-day Saints were making an oath to avenge the blood of Joseph and Hyrum. But actually, from the hearing, we have the exact language of the oath. Here it is: do you want to hear it?

Casey Griffiths:
Yep, let’s hear it.

Scott Woodward:
So this, again, comes from the U. S. Senate document of the hearing, and it says this: “You, and each of you, do covenant and promise that you will pray and never cease to pray to Almighty God to avenge the blood of the prophets upon this nation, and that you will teach the same to your children and to your children’s children unto the third and fourth generation.” So notice this is an oath to pray for God to avenge the murders of Joseph and Hyrum, not an oath for church members themselves to seek vengeance.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Right? So that’s, again, twisting it to make it sound like members of the church go into the temple and make an oath to go out and avenge the prophet.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
They didn’t do that. This was asking God to avenge the blood of the fallen prophets. Now, that language was taken out of the temple endowment. Obviously that language didn’t originally exist in the temple endowment. Clearly, in Joseph Smith’s lifetime, that language wouldn’t be there, because he wasn’t dead. That was later introduced, right?

Casey Griffiths:
Yep.

Scott Woodward:
And then, in the course of an examination that began really in 1919, which is shortly after President Heber J. Grant becomes president of the church, he appointed a committee to review the content of all the ordinances performed in our temples, and that committee completed their work in 1927, and as part of their recommendations to President Grant, they recommended that that oath be taken out, and so it was, actually. They did some other things to smooth out any language of vengeance or asking God for retribution. The song, “Praise to the Man,” instead of saying . . .

Casey Griffiths:
“Long shall the blood which was shed by assassins stain Illinois.”

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. “Stain Illinois while the earth lauds his fame.” And it was in the 1927 hymnal that that was changed to, “Plead unto heaven while the earth lauds his fame,” and so . . .

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
No, no—no pointing fingers, no accusation, especially by 1927, none of the people who were in on the conspiracy or who murdered Joseph and Hyrum were still around, and so . . .

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Whether it was ever appropriate to put it in the first place, let God judge that, but by 1927, Heber J. Grant says, yep, I agree with that recommendation. Let’s take it out. So there did used to be an oath where Latter-day Saints would promise to pray for God to avenge the blood of Joseph and Hyrum. But—

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
—that’s neither here nor there in terms of sedition. That’s not something against the government of the United States. I don’t know. What do you think?

Casey Griffiths:
Well, it’s clear that the early saints didn’t like the U. S. government, and that might have been seditious in the early 20th century, but now it’s fairly standard. In my mind, it’s like we were country before country was cool, you know? So we love the ideals of America, but like most Americans, I think we felt like the execution of the ideals has sometimes fallen short.

Scott Woodward:
We admired the cool kid, but then the cool kid became the bully who kept beating us up over and over and over again.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
And so we understandably wanted a little distance from him for a little while.

Casey Griffiths:
At best, the cool kid didn’t protect us from the other ruffians on the playground at very least.

Scott Woodward:
Yes, well said.

Casey Griffiths:
But the point is, I mean, within one generation, around thirty years, we go from the temple ceremonies are so secret they shouldn’t be written down to they’re openly proclaimed in a Senate hearing, and that was pretty jarring for the saints, but the Reed Smoot hearings sort of opened up a lot of doors for us. Smoot was appointed to the Senate. He serves in the Senate. End of the 1930s he’s still one of the most distinguished senators in the history of the country.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
Right after the Reed Smoot trials ended, this guy tries to blackmail the church.

Scott Woodward:
Okay.

Casey Griffiths:
This is a weird digression that I’m going to do really fast, but a guy named Gilbert Bossard, who was a recent convert to the church, who grew disenchanted with the leadership of the church, actually snuck into the Salt Lake Temple while it was being renovated, and he took pictures of the temple, and then he, along with this other guy who’s not a church member, Max Florence, sent a note to the First Presidency, blackmailing them, essentially, saying, hey, if you guys don’t pay us $100,000, we’re going to publish these photos of the temple. President Joseph F. Smith said, “I will make no bargain with thieves or traffickers in stolen goods. I prefer to let the law deal with them.” Then, this is their novel solution to it, they actually hire their own photographer. They send a guy into the temple. He takes pictures of the temple, and then they ask James E. Talmage to write The House of the Lord, which is still a classic in temple literature. House of the Lord is published with forty-six photos from different temples, thirty-one from Salt Lake. So actually, if you bought The House of the Lord, You got more than just the Salt Lake Temple. St. George, Manti, Logan were all included in there as well. In fact, you can find pretty easily a PDF of House of the Lord. There’s a photo of the Holy of Holies from the Salt Lake Temple in The House of the Lord, which is really cool, too.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
So this thing with Reed Smoot, this kerfuffle, ultimately turns into a blessing for the church where we get examined really closely, but it leads to greater openness. For the first time, we try to explain the temple to outsiders. We try and figure out ways that we can make sure people know that the temple is sacred to us, but that temple covenants of consecration, of living the law of the gospel, are designed to make us better neighbors and Christians. So a lot of stuff happening there.

Scott Woodward:
And that’s pretty standard procedure today, right? For the church to release photos of the interiors of temples, and . . .

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah. It’s actually turned into a whole new thing where the church maintains a website, the Church News does, where you have, like, high-res photos of every temple. It’s where I always get my photos from when I give lessons on temples. And now each one also features interior photos of the temples as well. So that starts with The House of the Lord, and now all you have to do is go to the Church News and look up whatever temple you want, and you can see pretty much what the interior looks like. We’re not super worried about that.

Scott Woodward:
And the church has even released a video showing the temple robes and talking about that and talking about that in context with other world religions and some of the sacred clothing they wear. And so we’re just a lot more open now.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
So thanks to Gilbert Bossard for his little underhanded blackmail scheme, which led to a season of great openness. So . . .

Casey Griffiths:
“Bless his heart,” is what we would say.

Scott Woodward:
Bless his heart. Yeah. Bless your heart, Gilbert.

Casey Griffiths:
That leads us to the next thing that we want to talk about, which is, we haven’t talked about this a lot, but temple clothing.

Scott Woodward:
Ooh, so are we talking about temple garments, temple robes?

Casey Griffiths:
Primarily about temple garments, but you mentioned that a couple of years ago the church published—and now there’s actually several videos on the church’s website and in Gospel Library that show the temple clothing that’s worn inside the temple, and also the temple garments that are worn by church members outside the temple. This is something that goes all the way back to Nauvoo. The idea of wearing ceremonial clothing like these videos emphasize is something that’s found in a lot of religions. It’s just that Latter-day Saints wear them under their clothes instead of outside their clothes.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
In fact, you put this scripture in here, Exodus 40: “Thou shalt bring Aaron and his sons to the door of the tabernacle of the congregation and wash them with water, and put upon Aaron the holy garments, and anoint him and sanctify him, that he may minister unto me in the priest’s office.”

Scott Woodward:
That’s the pattern, right, that we’ve been following ever since the beginning. It’s washing, anointing, and clothing in a holy garment.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah. And last general conference there was probably more discussion about temple garments openly than we’ve seen in almost any conference, and the conference I’m talking about is the April 2024 conference, which had just barely happened at the time of this recording. Two major talks mentioned temple garments, one by a female leader of the church, that’s J. Annette Dennis, and one by a male leader of the church, that’s Dallin H. Oaks. Sister Dennis gave a talk where she explained in a lot of detail about the temple garments that women and men wear. She taught, “The garment of the holy priesthood is deeply symbolic and also points to the Savior. When Adam and Eve partook of the fruit and had to leave the Garden of Eden, they were given coats of skins as a covering for them. It is likely that an animal was sacrificed to make those coats of skins, symbolic of the Savior’s own sacrifice for us. Kaphar is the basic Hebrew word for atonement, and one of its meanings is to cover. Our temple garments remind us that the Savior and the blessings of His atonement cover us throughout our lives. As we put on the garments of the holy priesthood each day, that beautiful symbol becomes part of us.” Again, that was J. Annette Dennis.

Scott Woodward:
So she’s being really clear that the temple garment represents the Savior’s atonement covering us.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah. And Dallin H. Oaks said, “Persons who have been endowed in a temple are responsible to wear a temple garment, an article of clothing not visible because it is worn beneath outer clothing. It reminds endowed members of the sacred covenants they have made and the blessings they have been promised in the Holy Temple. To achieve those holy purposes we are instructed to wear the garments continuously, with the only exception being those obviously necessary. Because covenants do not take a day off, to remove one’s garments can be understood as a disclaimer of the covenant responsibilities and blessings to which they relate. In contrast, persons who wear their garments faithfully and keep their temple covenants continually affirm their role as disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ.”

Scott Woodward:
So he’s adding to Sister Dennis in saying that the garment reminds us of our covenants that we’ve made in the temple.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
And it’s a symbol of us affirming our role as disciples of Christ. It’s a symbol of Jesus’s atonement covering us. It’s a symbol of the covenants we’ve made. It’s a symbol of our discipleship.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah. But a lot like the temple ceremonies, the design and nature of the garments that a person wears outside the temple have also undergone change.

Scott Woodward:
Significant changes, really.

Casey Griffiths:
The most significant changes that have happened have come in the 20th century. Here’s a quick rundown on changes in the temple garment.

Scott Woodward:
Okay.

Casey Griffiths:
So temple garments are there from the beginning. There’s a note in John Nuttall’s diary where he says, “Brigham Young recalled that in Joseph’s office,” so this would have been when those first endowments were performed in the spring of 1842.

Scott Woodward:
May 4th, 1842, yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah. “We were washed and anointed and had our garments placed upon us.” And initially what would happen is that you would bring your own underclothing to the temple, and then the temple officiator would put the symbols into the garment, and you would return home and make those permanent.

Scott Woodward:
They would, like, cut them, right? They would cut the symbols.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
And then you’d go home and, like, sew those cuts as, like, permanent signs. That’s super interesting.

Casey Griffiths:
Very home industry.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
The first garments that were worn were “union suits”? I had to look this up.

Scott Woodward:
Okay, go Google “union suits.”

Casey Griffiths:
Go Google “union suits,” but basically imagine, like, long johns is what we would have called them growing up.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
They went all the way down to the wrist and all the way down to the ankle and were fastened as you go up.

Scott Woodward:
I just Googled “union suits” by the way, and I’m starting to regret that I just told our listeners to Google “union suits.”

Casey Griffiths:
So maybe don’t Google “union suits,” but like old-timey long johns, I guess is what we would imagine them to look like.

Scott Woodward:
Long johns. There you go.

Casey Griffiths:
So they had to be made of white cotton, flax, or wool, and they were one piece, and you put them on by, you know, stepping into the neck and pulling them up over your body. And so that, I don’t think, is that far from the norm as to what 19th century people would wear as undergarments anyway, but as time goes on clothing styles change, and beginning in the 1920s, which was around the time we’ve noted several of these changes to temple worship happen, they start to innovate with the garments. So there was a collar flap that was removed. There were tie strings that were replaced with buttons. They also allowed women to wear modified garments with sleeves that only went to the elbows and then extended to the knees.

Scott Woodward:
Sounds reasonable. Wait—what about men?

Casey Griffiths:
Oh, good question. I don’t know.

Scott Woodward:
So women got it modified, but men continued to wear them down to the ankles and the wrists?

Casey Griffiths:
That’s the—

Scott Woodward:
That’s interesting.

Casey Griffiths:
That’s the source that I had, but remember that this was for outside the temple.

Scott Woodward:
That’s true.

Casey Griffiths:
When you went to the temple you continued to use . . .

Scott Woodward:
The long-john style?

Casey Griffiths:
Old-style garments. Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
And this actually continued until 1975, when the First Presidency basically said, if you’re coming to the temple, you can use the old style or you can use the new style. And then a huge change in 1979, they introduced two-piece garments with a top and a bottom. And I’ve got to say, shout out to my dad. I remember when I was a kid my dad saying to me, “You know how I know President Kimball’s a prophet?”

Scott Woodward:
Oh, boy.

Casey Griffiths:
And I was like, “How, dad?” And he said, “Two-piece garments, son. Two-piece garments.” And so there has been a gradual kind of evolution of style there. Today garments are available in a ton of different styles.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
Church leaders have gone out of their way to make garments more comfortable, to make them so that, you know, if you live in a hot climate you could wear fabric that was a little bit more breathable. There’s military-style garments that are, you know, military colors and things like that, which they’ve done to try and accommodate people in the services as well.

Scott Woodward:
And I think that’s good. I think that’s beautiful, right? That the temple garment was never intended itself to be a temporal thing to cover your body in a way that was intended for warmth or physical protection or anything like that, right? It’s about reminding us of the Savior. It’s about reminding us of our covenants. It’s about reminding us of our role as disciples of Christ.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
And prophets have taught that it’s to be a protection against temptation as well, particularly temptations of chastity, right?

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
As long as we remember that those are the purposes of the garment, then modifications in the style, those make all the sense in the world.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah. Those church videos that show the garments do such a beautiful job of kind of explaining, you know, nobody would freak out if they saw a priest wearing a clerical collar or if they saw a Buddhist monk wearing a saffron robe. Everybody that goes to the temple, men and women, are inducted into the priesthood, and so they wear the garment of the holy priesthood.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
It was kind of cool in the last conference to hear Sister Dennis, the female leader of the church, describing the garment of the holy priesthood and saying that both men and women are clothed in it. So it’s like our clergy clothing, but since you could be a teacher, an accountant, a physical therapist, do you wear it under your clothing instead of over it?

Scott Woodward:
It reminds me a lot of a religion that I admire a lot. It’s Sikhism. And members of the Khalsa in Sikhism will wear sacred undergarments as well, called Kachera, and it has a similar function for them, to remind them to be chaste. To remember the promises that they’ve made to God. And so when you look more broadly and you step out, like, this idea of sacred clothing, you look at the world around us, and you’re going to see people that are totally on board with this who are not Latter-day Saints, right? You can see that in the headdresses of Muslims, Hindus. You can see it in the Kachera of Sikhs. You can see it in the robes of Buddhists.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Rather than being the stuff of deriding and making jokes and trying to belittle, like, this is the stuff that we ought to, and I think we’re doing better at as a society, respect.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Like, when women are seen today wearing the hijab, I think people more and more are starting to respect that. It used to be seen as, like, some sort of a symbol of oppression, but as we’ve understood it from Muslim perspective, that’s not the case at all. It’s about preserving her dignity, modesty, that kind of thing.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
And so I think we’re getting better as a society about looking at each other, people who are different than us, and trying to understand one another and trying to respect each other a little better, and certainly we have room to improve, but I am encouraged by the progress that we’ve made.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah. Very good. So bottom line here, just like the temple ceremonies have undergone changes, the temple clothing, and this is both the clothing you wear in the temple and outside the temple, have undergone modifications, mostly for practical reasons, but that kind of keep at the core the central thing that they were intended for it.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
Let’s talk about how the endowment was presented, which has also undergone radical changes. So one of the biggest changes is that at first endowments were presented live, and I think a lot of members of the church are familiar with this.

Scott Woodward:
When you say live, what do you mean?

Casey Griffiths:
Well, I was endowed in the Manti Temple. The Manti Temple and Salt Lake Temple were the last two temples to perform the endowment live, and they did so until October 2021. That’s when Manti shut down to be renovated and video equipment was put in. But essentially, like we talked about earlier, the endowment presents the creation, the fall, and the atonement in a kind of divine play, and so temple workers would play the roles of Adam and Eve, of other figures in the endowment. And again, if you haven’t been to the temple, they weren’t in costume, I guess we’d say. They were just wearing the clothing that temple workers wear.

Scott Woodward:
But they were actually acting out a play with memorized lines and those kinds of things.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
But that required a huge, huge number of temple workers for us to fill all these roles.

Scott Woodward:
And so much memorization. I’ve been so impressed.

Casey Griffiths:
So much memorization. Bless their hearts. Some of the workers in the Manti Temple when I went would forget their lines, and it seems like one of the other temple workers would shout at them as fast as they could.

Scott Woodward:
That’s funny.

Casey Griffiths:
It was also—and I’ve got to share personally, like, these were some people from my own town who were carrying out the ceremonies. One of the people in the ceremony was my sixth grade teacher, which was actually really cool. But it also meant that their accents and things—like, one of my friends used to joke that Manti’s the only temple where God created the “harse” and stuff like that.

Scott Woodward:
The “harse.”

Casey Griffiths:
But this is one of those things that they have to deal with. As in the 20th century, they decide instead of having people convert and then immigrate to the Intermountain West, let’s take the temple to them. So one of the first instances of this is the Laie Hawaii temple, which if you’re keeping track of your historic temples here, Kirtland, Nauvoo, St. George, next one I’d add to the list is Laie. Laie is the first temple to the people rather than people coming to the temple.

Scott Woodward:
And that’s a major shift that maybe, I don’t know, maybe we need to talk about it more elsewhere, but just in brief, like, the idea of gathering was about gathering to the temple.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Like, the purpose of gathering was you come to the temple. The reason saints from England were coming to Nauvoo is because Nauvoo had the temple. The reason that converts would come to Salt Lake is because that’s where the temple was.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
But now, in this new era, it’s about taking the temples to the people starting at the turn of the century: was that 1915 the Laie Temple is announced?

Casey Griffiths:
That’s when they announce the Laie Temple. We’ve got a nice little video on Scripture Central that actually talks about Iosepa, which is this colony of Hawaiian Latter-day Saints that they built in the Skull Valley of Utah. They were there so that they could be close to the Salt Lake Temple and attend the temple. When Joseph F. Smith announces the temple that he’s going to build in Laie, Iosepa becomes a ghost town. You know, within three years, I think almost all the residents were gone because Hawaii is objectively better than Utah.

Scott Woodward:
Let me ask you a question, Casey: if you were living in a place called Skull Valley, and you knew you could move to a place in Hawaii, what would you do?

Casey Griffiths:
It wouldn’t take me long.

Scott Woodward:
Not a lot of coaxing required, yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah, especially if I was native Hawaiian, I would be out of there. But that makes Laie, Hawaii and Cardston, Canada both important temples, because this is the first effort to take the temples to the people. By the 1950s we’re kind of in round two, so a temple’s announced in New Zealand, even though New Zealand doesn’t really have a stake yet. They’re really small. There’s about 3,000 members. David O. McKay said he believed New Zealand was the safest country outside of Europe to put a temple in. Remember, this is post-war, and that even if there were only 3,000 saints in New Zealand, there were hundreds of thousands of Saints in Tonga, in Samoa, in Tahiti, throughout the Pacific, that would come. And we’ve all heard some touching, touching stories in General Conference about Latter-day Saints that made sacrifices to go to that temple.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
However, our fifth historic temple on your list here is Bern, Switzerland. And here’s the reason why: so they announce a temple in Europe, first temple in Europe, in 1952. They’re going to build it in Switzerland, because Switzerland hasn’t gone to war with anybody for a really long time, so it’s generally a safe place to build a temple.

Scott Woodward:
Because they’re Switzerland.

Casey Griffiths:
They’re Switzerland. But this is going to mean that they’re going to need to figure out how to present the endowment in at least eight languages. So what are you going to do when you have a French family show up at the temple, and then an Italian family, and then a German family, and then a Czech family, and so on, and so on, and so on? If you’re going to act out everything, like, that’s going to require a German shift and a French shift of temple workers and an Italian group of temple workers, and that was a lot. This was a small, small temple, one of the smallest ones we’d built to that point, and to house and to care for that many workers and to just have them on staff would have been a major, major pain. So David O. McKay approaches a young man working for the church media department named Gordon B. Hinckley. Gordon B. Hinckley is tasked with finding the way to present the endowment in all future languages, and President Hinckley’s idea was to film the endowment. Let’s make a movie, and we can dub it into different languages. So they actually—the first movies are made in the Salt Lake Temple. They take the fifth floor of the Salt Lake Temple, and they stage the endowment with actors all holding temple recommends, and then they’re able to dub it into all these different languages, and when the temple opens, instead of having to have all these different shifts of temple workers speaking different languages, you can just play the movie and dub it into French or play the movie and dub it into Spanish or whatever you need to do.

Scott Woodward:
Doesn’t that seem, like, to us so obvious?

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
We’re like, yeah, that’s exactly what you should do, but it’s cool to see the moment where it actually happened in the mind of Gordon B. Hinckley. He’s like, bingo.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah. Like, where did you get your endowments?

Scott Woodward:
Jordan River Temple in West Jordan, Utah, yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
So you watched a film, correct?

Scott Woodward:
I did, yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
I went to Manti and got to see my sixth grade teacher, but I will say even though, you know, the temple workers at Manti are wonderful and they did an amazing job, I picked up on a lot more from the film. I did go back to Manti several times before 2021 and watched it and did a live session in the Salt Lake Temple and enjoyed those very much, but it’s a lot less labor-intensive to use the film and probably a lot more precise, and it allows them to update the endowment with greater ease from time to time.

Scott Woodward:
So that’s interesting, to note that 2021 marks the end of the era of the presentation of the endowment as it was done from Nauvoo up to Gordon B. Hinckley’s innovation here.

Casey Griffiths:
Yep.

Scott Woodward:
That’s amazing.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah. And a little note that I wanted to add in here, too: in making the endowment video, they actually wanted something that showed the creation in kind of a cool way. And so . . .

Scott Woodward:
Visualize the creation.

Casey Griffiths:
To visualize the creation. And so they reached out to Walt Disney Studios.

Scott Woodward:
Yes.

Casey Griffiths:
And asked if they could use a clip from Fantasia. So I went and watched this yesterday while I was prepping this outline. It’s the longest segment of Fantasia, which, by the way, Fantasia is pretty trippy just to begin with, and it’s called The Rite of Spring. It has dinosaurs and all kinds of stuff. The dinosaurs weren’t in the temple part. They only used a three-minute clip that kind of shows the galaxy and then the earth being created, and then dinosaurs show up. And it’s objectively awesome. Like, still, today, Fantasia rules, but they were granted permission to use the film for five years, and after five years were up, church leaders wrote to Disney. This is what they wrote. They said, “The public is never invited to these classes.” That’s interesting. They called the temple ceremony “classes.”

Scott Woodward:
They called the temple a class. Okay.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah. Then they said, “This most excellent footage has become inseparably part of the temple program in establishing the mood of reverence and awe for the Creator’s work.” So credit and shout out to the Disney company. They allowed them to use Fantasia in the endowment until 1989, when new endowment films were produced. It’s pretty cool to think that we did, and go and watch that clip if you have Disney+.

Scott Woodward:
See, and this kind of speaks to something we’ve talked about in previous episodes, of prophets reaching out to elements in their own environment to teach the word of the Lord, the revelations, the way that they understand them best, and so that’s super cool. They’re reaching out to Disney and saying, you guys have presented this in a cool way. We would like to adopt and adapt, please.

Casey Griffiths:
So compiling the sources for the endowment, we’ve got the Book of Mormon, the Bible, the Doctrine and Covenants, the Masons, and now let’s add in Disney.

Scott Woodward:
Disney.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah. Which is pretty cool.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah, and super fun side note, just two days ago my sister-in-law was in Disneyland. Okay? Follow me on this.

Casey Griffiths:
Okay, I’m with you.

Scott Woodward:
She sent this text to our family group text. It says, “I’m in Disneyland, and I just saw Camille Johnson, General Relief Society President, Elder Uchtdorf, Elder Stevenson, the Presiding Bishop, Elder Cook, and a lot of others here in the park.” She said, “We chatted with them, and they are here to get ideas for the Temple Square renovation to make it more interactive.

Casey Griffiths:
Whoa. Okay.

Scott Woodward:
We’re still getting ideas from Disney of how to present our message in a more interesting way. Like, up to this day, Casey.

Casey Griffiths:
That’s really awesome.

Scott Woodward:
It’s really awesome.

Casey Griffiths:
I hope when Temple Square reopens, they have, like, giant Hyrum Smiths walking around that your kids can take pictures with and stuff like that.

Scott Woodward:
Spinny cups.

Casey Griffiths:
And hopefully they don’t charge you, like, $40 for a pretzel in the temple cafeteria and stuff like that.

Scott Woodward:
See, my biggest beef against Disney is that they charge so much money.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah, seriously.

Scott Woodward:
One of my favorite things about church visitor centers is they charge you no money.

Casey Griffiths:
Right.

Scott Woodward:
So a visitor’s center at Temple Square is going to be like Disney—

Casey Griffiths:
But free.

Scott Woodward:
—but free.

Casey Griffiths:
Okay. So that’s changes to the endowment. Now let’s move on to maybe a little follow-up for a series we did. We did a series on race and the priesthood, and one of the things that we emphasized was that the priesthood ban was not just a priesthood ban: it was a priesthood and temple ban. And so in the 20th century another thing that they reckoned with was how this policy was applied, which generally was any member of African ancestry was not allowed to go to the temple. However, this is even more complex than it initially appears. So, for instance, changes begin to happen a full decade before the revelation’s received in 1978. In August 1966, in a letter to local church leaders, the First Presidency explained that “after the expiration of one year from the date of death, temple ordinances may be performed for all deceased persons, except those of known Negro blood, without considerations of worthiness or any other qualifications.” So 1966, you can’t even do work on behalf of a deceased person who’s of African ancestry, but the same year President McKay gave permission to a couple that had adopted several black children to be sealed to them. So President McKay’s journal said he could see no objection to the sealing of a couple to black children that they adopted. However, seven months later, a letter to bishops instructing was to discourage a couple that was doing that from a similar adoption. So one step forward, one step back.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
However, we found out that it was actually 1968, not 1978, that black members were able to go to the temple to do baptisms for the dead.

Scott Woodward:
Ten years before the big revelation.

Casey Griffiths:
Ten years before, yeah. There’s a note in David O. McKay’s diary from December 5th, 1968, where he says, “Attention was called to a letter from President Reuel E. Christensen, of the Manti Temple, reporting that a bishop and stake president in one of the BYU stakes had inquired if they could send colored people who are members of the church in good standing to do baptismal work for the dead in the temple. I ruled that the worthy Negro baptized members of the church should be permitted to do baptismal work for the dead if they desired to do so.” And so it seems like they were allowed to go to the temple a full decade and do baptisms before they were allowed to go to the temple and participate in all the ceremonies. So that’s more complex than sometimes it comes across.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
In addition to the temple plays a huge role in President Kimball receiving the motivation: specifically, this is another one on your list of historic temples, the Sao Paulo temple. Brazil has a huge population of people of African ancestry, ton of racially mixed marriages, and President Kimball was very open in saying that his visits to Brazil and the plans to build the temple there played a huge role in him seeking the Lord in revelation and receiving the revelation that ends the priesthood policy. So temples influential in that realm of church history as well.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. So we should talk about the small temples from the era of Gordon B. Hinckley.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah, let’s talk about the small temples.

Scott Woodward:
He doesn’t stop having an influence, ever since he was that young kid that David O. McKay tasked with getting the temple in multiple language, like he never stopped from that point on all the way to his death. He was incredible in temple innovation.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah. And we should say that small temples were not a totally new idea. The Hawaii Temple and the Cardston Temple were both relatively small, by the standards the church was used to at that time. Leaders of the church were always searching for ways to bring the temples to the people after they decided to change that policy in the 20th century. For instance, one thing that gets brought up a lot is the temple ship. Have you heard of this before?

Scott Woodward:
Yes, it’s so cool. I wish we would have done it, personally, but . . .

Casey Griffiths:
I think this would be awesome, but I understand why they didn’t do it.

Scott Woodward:
Here’s an idea that was floated by the leadership of the church, but it did not actually come to fruition.

Casey Griffiths:
So Mark Garff, who was the chairman of the church building committee in 1968, proposed—it never got past the proposal stage—that there should be a temple ship.

Scott Woodward:
Like a boat.

Casey Griffiths:
Like a boat that the church could sail into a port and then allow members to be endowed and sealed, and then move on, which, honestly, I think is kind of a crazy good idea.

Scott Woodward:
That’s a cool idea. Talk about bringing the temple to the people.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah. Yeah. And, I mean, if you go to the Pacific, there’s all these places where there’s a small island with a lot of members of the church, but not enough of a population to justify building a temple. Now, that’s changing. I went to Kiribati a couple years ago, thought they’d never get a temple, and now their temple’s on the way. It’s under construction.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
But at the time this idea was shot down by Alvin R. Dyer, who was a counselor in the First Presidency, but that little episode just goes to illustrate that we’re trying to think of new and innovative ways to do this.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
So next major innovation, Gordon B. Hinckley is president of the church. There were forty-seven temples when he became president of the church. He was part of a huge expansion of temple buildings where, you know, in the 1980s, when the decade opens, we have seventeen temples, then we double the number of functioning temples. President Hinckley, when he became president of the church, had already dedicated twenty-two of the current temples, but he actually went to David Burton, who was the presiding bishop at the time. And this is—Bishop Burton said this in General Conference: he said, “President Hinckley responded to an observation concerning the number of temple dedications or rededications in which he had participated during his tenure as a General Authority. He indicated it was his desire to continue to be involved in dedicating temples at least until we have 100 temples.” So we’ve got forty-six when President Hinckley becomes president of the Church. He says, I want there to be 100 temples, and he’s 85 when he becomes president of the Church. So Bishop Burton actually said, “As I heard this statement, I couldn’t help doing a little simple math and realized the sum of the number representing the current operating temples and the number representing temple projects, this in design or construction, was far less than 100, and I remember vividly saying to the prophet, ‘President, I pray the Lord bless you with great longevity.’” So President Hinckley does live to be 98, I believe.

Scott Woodward:
And he lives, actually, to see his dream fulfilled of 100 temples.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah. It was 100 temples by the year 2000, by the end of the year 2000.

Scott Woodward:
Oh, that’s right.

Casey Griffiths:
And we hit it. So he announces—well, we’ve got to back up the story a little bit here. So President Hinckley is trying to think of how do we get 100 temples, and he goes to visit Colonia Juarez, which is in northern Mexico, which is sort of an interesting thing. There’s about 5,000 members there. They’re colonists going back to the 19th century that moved to Mexico to practice plural marriage, but there’s these little towns in northern Mexico that seem like Utah towns: like, everybody’s a member of the church. There’s a church school, but there weren’t quite enough people to justify building a large temple there. So President Hinckley is—he goes to the colonies when he’s there. He actually gives a speech. In the speech he says, there aren’t enough of you to justify a temple. Now, if you’d multiply the membership here and get about 20,000 members, there’s 5,000 at the time, or 30,000, we’ll build a beautiful temple. That’s a challenge for you, but you might decide it’s easier to keep going to Mesa. They had to go all the way to Mesa, Arizona to go to the temple. But then, on his way back, so he’s riding back to the airport on the other side of the border in El Paso, Texas, he said he started to reflect on it. This is what he says later. He said, “They’ve been so very faithful over the years. They’ve kept the faith. They’ve gone on missions in large numbers. These stakes have produced very many mission presidents who serve faithfully and well. They’ve been the epitome of faithfulness, and I thought of these things, about what could be done.” He said, “As I pondered over the question, the concept of smaller temples came to mind. We don’t need the laundry. We don’t need to rent temple clothing. We don’t need eating facilities. These have been added for the convenience of the people, but they’re not necessary.” And then while he was boarding the flight home, he actually sketches out the plan for the small temple. You can see this, if you go on the church website and just type in “small temple sketch.” President Hinckley drew this small temple, which is how he gets to 100. So he announces that they’re going to experiment with small temples, and then they build the first one in Monticello, Utah, which I’ve been and visited this temple. It is small.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
And then they actually announce that the original three small temples, one of which was in Juarez, Mexico, would be an experiment, and then President Hinckley, April 1998, he announced a program to construct thirty temples, still a record for one general conference.

Scott Woodward:
I remember this. Like, he was on the move.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah. I mean, just to put things in perspective, there were decades of the 20th century where we did not dedicate a temple at all.

Scott Woodward:
Zero temples announced in general conference for decades.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah. In the 1960s, for instance, we dedicated the Oakland Temple. That’s it. President Hinckley gets up and announces thirty temples. This was in 1998, so two years before he gets up, and he says, “This will make a total of forty-seven new temples in addition to the fifty-one now in operation. I think we better add two more and make it an even 100 by the end of this century.” And here’s the crazy thing: like, they did it.

Scott Woodward:
He did it.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
He carries it out.

Scott Woodward:
He did it.

Casey Griffiths:
And so all of a sudden, there’s a ton more temples. By the time President Hinckley passed away he dedicated or rededicated ninety of the 124 temples in operation throughout the church, and the only person to surpass President Hinckley when it comes to announcing temples so far is Russell M. Nelson.

Scott Woodward:
Yes. Picking up where President Hinckley left off and just going for it. I mean, President Monson did this, too, but man.

Casey Griffiths:
All prolific temple-builders.

Scott Woodward:
Let’s call President Hinckley’s administration an inflection point in temple building, right? Because from that time on, it has just skyrocketed, and President Nelson continues that legacy. Incredible.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
We’re excited for our next week’s episode, where we’re going to have Q&R with Richard Bennett.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
But how do you want to land the plane today, Casey? You’ve been doing a good job in the driver’s seat today kind of walking us through this important history. Like, how would you want to land all of this today?

Casey Griffiths:
Let me use a statement by the First Presidency. So in July 2020 there were changes made to the endowment. Again, some of these changes are updating to better reflect the times we live in. Some of the changes were made during the pandemic just to make the endowment more safe. Most temple workers are older people, and during the pandemic we needed to take steps to keep them safe. First Presidency wrote a letter released on July 20th, 2020, where they said this: they said, “The sacred teachings, promises, and ceremonies of the temple are of ancient origin and point God’s children to Him as they make further covenants and learn more about his plan, including the role of the Savior Jesus Christ. Through inspiration, the methods of instruction in the temple experience changed many times, even in recent history, to help members better understand and live what they learn in the temple. Part of the temple experience includes the making of sacred covenants or promises to God. Most people are familiar with symbolic actions that accompany the making of religious covenants, such as prayer, immersion of an individual at baptism, or holding hands during a marriage ceremony. Similar simple, symbolic actions accompany the making of temple covenants. With a concern for all, and a desire to enhance the temple learning experience, recent changes have been authorized in the temple endowment ceremony.” So this is all pretty transparent stuff, where they acknowledge we make changes for a number of reasons. Sometimes it’s to streamline. Sometimes it’s to simplify. Sometimes it’s for safety. But it’s standard. And if we were to, you know, take a crystal ball and say, what changes come in the future? I don’t know.

Scott Woodward:
Not a very good crystal ball.

Casey Griffiths:
It’s not a very good crystal ball, but we’ve seen in the last, say, twenty or thirty years, a number of innovations, and right now, by the way, as of this recording, 350 temples under construction or announced.

Scott Woodward:
That’s incredible.

Casey Griffiths:
Sometimes temples take a long time to build, though. Just to give you an example, the Kiev Ukraine temple, which was announced in 1998, was not dedicated until 2013. So fifteen years from announcement to completion. So a lot of these temples could be a long time coming.

Scott Woodward:
But still, 350 temples. That’s amazing.

Casey Griffiths:
That’s amazing, right? That’s incredible. Especially in such a short time. Scott, when I left on my mission they handed us an Ensign, and they were like, “The 50th temple was just dedicated.” It was the St. Louis temple. And we were like, “Holy cow. 50 temples.” I mean, by the time I got home from my mission and it was a year after, 100 temples. Now, 350 temples a quarter of a century later.

Scott Woodward:
As we’ve been talking about throughout the series, like, what the Lord revealed through Joseph Smith was we could call it the prototype and what his successors have been doing is scaling that prototype throughout the world. And we’re witnessing that happening more prolifically than it’s ever happened, I think it’s safe to say, not just in the history of the church, but in the history of earth.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah. And we’ve mentioned some innovations, but there will probably be more to come. The Hong Kong Temple was a major, major innovation where it was a multi-purpose structure. There was a girl that I taught seminary to, and she actually in one class said, “Hey, I’ve slept inside the Hong Kong Temple.” And I was like, “What?”

Scott Woodward:
Oh, a lot of people fall asleep during parts of the temple.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah. I was like, “I’ve slept in the temple, too, but I didn’t mean to.” She was like, “No, my grandma and grandpa’s apartment was in there.” Her grandpa was in the temple presidency. So she said, “I slept in the temple, and I watched The Little Mermaid in the temple.

Scott Woodward:
Nice.

Casey Griffiths:
When President Nelson announced a temple in Shanghai, for instance, he mentioned that it might only be part of the temple, that it would be a multipurpose facility that would probably have a few rooms devoted to temple ordinances. So that’s a change that we’ll see. We already saw that with Hong Kong. Hong Kong has a meeting house, mission offices, apartments, and part of a temple that are all part of the same building. The only thing we know for sure is that we’re going to continue to build temples.

Scott Woodward:
You know what I’ve thought of for years that could be really cool? And I’m nobody, so this doesn’t matter worth diddly squat.

Casey Griffiths:
You’re not nobody to me, Scott, but go on.

Scott Woodward:
Thank you, Casey. Thank you very much. But with that kind of idea, with, like, Shanghai and Hong Kong, where there’s one building and parts of it are dedicated for temple work and other parts are, like, meetinghouse chapel, and other parts are, like, offices for the mission, etc.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
In some future day I could see some modification coming where we could do that kind of hybrid thing more at scale throughout the world. I don’t know if that would look like stake centers being modified or that going forward, the buildings that are built kind of have multiple functions built in like that, but I think the Hong Kong and Shanghai Temple are teasing at some really cool possibilities of what the future of temple work could look like and how broadly we could take that to the whole world.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah, and the Manhattan Temple, too. The Manhattan Temple is like Hong Kong, where it’s a multi-purpose structure. I mean, again, we don’t have a crystal ball, and we don’t know.

Scott Woodward:
No crystal ball here, just spitballing.

Casey Griffiths:
That’s right. The only thing that we know for sure is that there’s more temples on the way. In fact, this is the classic quote you hear all the time. I want to end with this. Brigham Young prophesied of the time in which we’re now living, and here’s what he said—and this was when they were struggling to get one temple built. He said, “To accomplish this work, there will have to be not only one temple but thousands of them, and thousands and tens of thousands of men and women who will go into those temples and officiate for people who have lived as far back as the Lord shall reveal.” So maybe by the end of our lives 350 temples won’t seem like a big deal because we’ll be counting temples in the thousands. That’s a great hope, but the way that we practice the temple and the clothing, the ceremonies, the way the temples are constructed, will all continue to change and grow because we’re a living church. We can get more revelation and go off in new and unexpected and exciting directions.

Scott Woodward:
We’re on our way to the fulfillment of that prophecy.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Well, thank you, Casey.

Casey Griffiths:
Thank you, Scott. It’s been a pleasure.

Scott Woodward:
’til next time. Thank you for listening to this episode of Church History Matters. Next week Casey and I will be joined by Dr. Richard Bennett, who will help respond to your questions. If there is anything you’d like to dig deeper into about the history or doctrine of LDS temple practice, we seriously want to hear from you. So please send in your questions to podcasts@scripturecentral.org before May 9th, 2024. Let us know your name, where you’re from, and try to keep each question as concise as possible when you email them in. Can’t wait to hear from you. 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. 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.