Making Sense of the Temple

One of the modern articles of faith of Mormonism is that temple work for the dead is vitally important to their salvation. This was reinforced in 1981, when Spencer W. Kimball declared it to be one of the three core missions of the church. Our duty to perform temple ordinances for the deceased has been preached in nearly every General Conference since.

Briefly, the theology works like this:

1. You can’t go to heaven without Mormon baptism and temple ordinances: the endowment and sealing. While the Bible records that Jesus told one of the criminals that was crucified with him, “Today you will be with me in paradise,” Joseph Smith taught that He was misquoted. Only those who have received their temple ordinances can enter paradise. (While the Book of Mormon records Jesus teaching that “Whoso shall declare more or less than [repentance and baptism], the same cometh of evil,” He was apparently misquoted there too.)
2. You need a body to perform temple ordinances.
3. The vast majority of humanity haven’t received these ordinances before dying. (Until Joseph Smith restored them, no one since Adam had the authority to perform them.)
4. Therefore, Mormons need to perform baptism and temple ordinances vicariously for everyone who died without them, for their own good.
5. Not only that, but Mormons need to do this urgently, because our ancestors and everyone else are stuck in Spirit Prison until we do.

Here’s what doesn’t add up

It’s difficult to square the urgency of performing these ordinances on the one hand, with the demographics of the dead on the other.

Many of the deceased waiting for their work to be done have already been waiting for either 6,000 or 50,000 years, depending on how literally you take the Church’s scriptures on young earth creationism. If the Second Coming and Millennium are just around the corner (during which supernatural help will be available to finish this work), it’s hard to see a few years one way or the other making much difference.

On the other hand, if the Millennium is still centuries away, it hardly seems fair that only a relative handful of souls can be saved in the meantime, primarily those who died in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. (Farther back, and we don’t even know the names; farther forwards, and the rate of death is vastly outpacing Mormon ability to keep up, resulting in a backlog that gets longer with time, not shorter.) Most of the 108 billion people who need temple ordinances will be waiting a long, long time.

One might reasonably suggest that even with the impossibility of the task it is incumbent on us to do the best we can to make a dent in this backlog, however small. But the opportunity cost is high: over two hours for those who live next door to a temple, to about six hours where I live in Austin Texas, to more depending on your location.

We could be spending that time in the service of our fellow man. Building houses, like Habitat for Humanity. Helping less fortunate members of society recover from drug or alcohol habits, like the Salvation Army. Jesus taught the value of this kind of service to the living in both the Bible and the Book of Mormon, while also teaching what our priorities should be: “Let the dead bury the dead.”

In 2009, Thomas S. Monson announced that caring for the poor would officially become the fourth core mission of the Church, but I’m not aware of any new initiatives resulting from this after the press releases went out.

The issue of cost

For those of us in first-world countries, attending the temple is virtually free and imposes only opportunity cost, but for the poorest citizens of the world the costs are very real and very high.

The first temple ordinances were performed in ordinary houses and other venues. Once the the Nauvoo and Utah temples were built, the ordinances moved there.

But an important exception was made. After Wilford Woodruff bowed to government pressure and publicly renounced polygamy, Church leaders continued to quietly allow new plural marriages. (An official overview is provided by the Church; much more detail is available from historian D. Michael Quinn.) Since the temples were carefully watched by a suspicious government, these ordinances were again performed in ordinary houses and meeting places.

In modern times, Spencer W. Kimball taught, “If you understood the ordinances of the House of the Lord, you would crawl on your hands and feet for thousands of miles in order to receive them!” And many poor Saints have metaphorically done just that, sacrificing their family car or college tuition to travel thousands of miles to a temple.

It seems odd to me that God is fine with performing ordinances outside His temples when that’s what it takes to perform clandestine polygamous marriages, but poor families in Brazil or Tonga or the Philippines need to sacrifice their financial safety and their childrens’ future to attend the temple officially so that Americans can talk about it like it’s faith porn.

What if we haven’t asked the right questions yet?

Mormons like to say that God reveals His will line upon line, precept upon precept, often in response to mortal questioning. The temple ordinances have been no exception. Perhaps we are still in need of further light and knowledge.