What furtive spectacle did I expect to find here, inside the Washington, DC, Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints? This Cinderella Castle on the Beltway loomed large in my childhood memory of weekend shopping expeditions; I’d crane my neck to catch a glimpse of the hovering mass from the backseat of my parents’ car. Never did I imagine venturing inside.
Since its consecration in 1974, the temple complex has been closed to all but adherents, and only those with up-to-date records of tithing and participation. Much-needed repairs—some to address damage from a 2011 earthquake—led, in 2018, to the site’s temporary deconsecration. Before reconsecration this past August, the church briefly held open-house tours of the building, giving non-Mormons in the area their best chance to see the interior in their lifetimes.
It was the first week in May, and I was home visiting my mother. She thought a tour of the temple would appeal to my recreational interest in LDS culture. For a long time, I’d been curious about Mormonism, particularly its syncretic sourcing of religious ideas, from eldritch Masonic rites to the communalism of early Christians. My college best friend grew up in the church, though then as now, resides firmly outside it. My teenage love of the Killers, with its Mormon front man, Brandon Flowers, is largely unwavering. I was always curious about this most earnest collection of American lifeways that, like the DC temple itself, keenly evokes a place (Utah but also the metropolitan area, democracy’s cradle) and habitus (car-centric).
Over the years, I had seen a few images from temple interiors on the r/exmormon subreddit, smuggled out from sleeved-and-smuggled cell phones. They were bland, far from the fantasia the building projects outward, which has caused local ne’er-do-wells to paint and repaint a Beltway overpass with the message, “Surrender Dorothy.” With its six gold-covered spires, the temple does indeed bear an uncanny similarity to the Emerald City from The Wizard of Oz. The impression is reinforced by its cinematic remove from the bending freeway, behind an insulating glade of trees. The angel Moroni, with impeccable posture, gestures from atop the central spire, arm outstretched and face pressed to a trumpet.
To our surprise, our tickets had not secured us individual entry to the temple, but rather to a parking space. In a sense, this subtle prioritization was fitting. The basic unit of Mormon belief is the nuclear family, all traveling and entering together, just as the basic subject of American city planning is the car. New Mormon architecture adapts to this reality, always imagining itself from the vantage of the driver. The DC temple pitches out by the capital’s busiest roadway, while the Manhattan temple, built in 2003 across from Lincoln Center, pleads for Broadway’s embrace.
A tidy group of girls passed us in their rush toward the temple. We idled for a minute in the visitors’ center—normally as far as non-Mormons are allowed to go—before pressing on. As the great white-and-gold edifice came into view, we paused on the sidewalk to take it all in. The temple is clad all over in white marble, like a vertically preoccupied Lord & Taylor. In this land of milk and honey, the people have straight white teeth and smell like dairy, and the buildings have thin proud towers, like in a fairy tale.
A MISSION-DRIVEN SMILE glided toward us. “Do you want your picture taken? There’s a good view over the pool.” I handed over my phone to the attendant, who returned it after snapping a few photos. As we waited to pass through the security check, I glanced around and noticed groups of families who all looked the same. Blond boys with strong milk-fed teeth were wearing ties, young women with shoulders covered. Evidently, the great majority of visitors were Mormons from elsewhere, come to see this first temple in the east.
The entry structure looked something like a Hilton hotel, with its white carport, staid lobby furniture, and check-in desk. During normal operation, Temple Recommends—documents attesting to membership in good standing based on interviews with the priesthood—are checked here; those who have committed sins such as masturbation or tardy tithing are turned away. Our group was directed down the stairs and below the pedestrian bridge that serves as the normal route. In front of the basement door, two rows of giggling children (shouldn’t they have been at school?) sat waiting for us. They knelt and labored to put disposable blue booties over our shoes as we awkwardly dangled our feet in their faces. Someone tried to do it herself, but a child protested: “That’s our job!”
As we ascended the temple, the spaces got whiter as well. The beige of the carpet distilled toward cream, the wall paneling slid into an off-white, and the fluorescence of light fixtures began channeling the mood of an office or department store. This last simile is more apt, as one level of the building is entirely devoted to dressing rooms.
Properly attired, we were led into a solemn room, at the end of which was a giant marble font. It rested on a sculptural base of twelve heaving oxen, symbols of the tribes of Israel. Mormons practice the ritual of vicariously baptizing the dead, giving them a chance to accept a gospel they never heard during their lifetime. Genealogical services like Ancestry.com are used to find deceased candidates for this procedure. I peered into the bowl, its water as blue as a swimming pool, and then focused my attention back on the room. Decorative landscape scenes formed a soothing backdrop, but for the wood-veneer doors cutting through swamp, river, and brook. Around the basin, white fence with elven filigree, suitable for a Las Vegas wedding chapel.
The American Dream, moribund in most of the country, lives on here in a religious guise. Moral conduct in this life leads to perfectibility, the attainment of a godlike state in the next. “We are highly focused on perfecting ourselves emotionally, financially, and physically,” says Heather Gay, of Real Housewives of Salt Lake City. “How beautiful your home is and how beautiful and well-behaved your children are and physically beautiful you are is a reflection of your moral state.” One wonders whether architecture is similarly perfectible. And if it is, why does the Mormon—and by extension white-bread American—aesthetic imagination find perfection in this panoply of default commercial finishes?
CLIMBING STAIRCASES illuminated by slits of light filtered through abstract expressionist stained glass, we traipsed through all the levels of the temple (about eight in total). If we had taken the footbridge back at the entry pavilion, we would have entered on the second floor, one with a beige-carpeted oval lounge at its heart. Behind the seating area, an informal chapel, and to the side, offices. The decor is a cross between a dentist’s office and a funeral home, with wood and cream-colored wall panels, periodically placed upholstered armchairs, credenzas topped with oak-and-silk lamps, and more paintings in the Mormon style: a mix of Thomas Kinkade and natural history museum diorama. Interestingly, a tableau that I assumed was added during the renovation shows a Black priesthood holder with his hand to a child’s forehead, both of them dressed in ceremonial white clothing. Bold for an organization that banned Black members from the priesthood until 1978 and still equates lightness of appearance with goodness in scripture, though this teaching has been quietly de-emphasized in recent years.
Such shifts in outlook are about survival. Membership among the church’s traditional constituency of white Americans has stagnated. What growth there is comes through increased missionary activity among Indigenous communities in Latin American and among Pacific Islanders. Despite, or perhaps because of, unremarkable membership numbers, the church has gone on something of a construction binge. At last month’s annual conference, plans for eighteen new temples were announced, with many of them in Mexico and Brazil. At the very least, these building projects augur a rosier financial picture.
What is motivating these new constituencies in deciding to convert? One explanation may be flattery: LDS doctrine holds that Native Americans are descended from the lost tribes of Israel and were ministered to by Christ after his crucifixion and resurrection (hence the label “Latter-Day Saints”). Another motivator may be the aspiration to assimilate more easily into Americanness, particularly of the white variety. Not too long ago, sermonizers promised converts that through prayer their children would be born with lighter skin.
As we ascended the temple, the spaces got whiter as well. The beige of the carpet distilled toward cream, the wall paneling slid into an off-white, and the fluorescence of light fixtures began channeling the mood of an office or department store. This last simile is more apt, as one level of the building is entirely devoted to dressing rooms. Before engaging in prayer, the faithful must change from their Sunday best into an all-white raiment, varying in detail by degrees of spiritual attainment. A docent explained that the wardrobe change was intended to strip worshipers of markers of wealth or difference—save for markers of their place in church hierarchy, of course. At this point, I realized that the docents and the ushers, distributed every twenty feet along the tour’s prescribed path, were actually lay members: volunteers, not employees. I inquired about the dressing rooms; my questions exceeded the volunteer’s script, and I was gestured on, kindly, but with a sentence ending in a period.
SINCE ITS INCEPTION, the church has maintained its distance from other, more mainstream American Christianities. This is both by choice—the LDS church possesses the one true doctrine, according to its followers—and due to at times intensive and deadly persecution of Mormons that forced them into the deserts of Utah in the first place. The distinctiveness of the Mormon faith is wielded symbolically in the architecture of its wards and temples, presented in stark white, with hints of pre-Columbian pyramid and ball court articulation. Now, in taking drastic steps to lock out the threat of an internet-based secularism that undermines doctrine and custom, the church leaves itself open to being absorbed into the mainstream of evangelical conservatism, which once sought to murder it.
We passed Bridal Rooms, where brides-to-be prepare for their sealing, or wedding, ceremony. Then past Instruction Rooms, gray-upholstered movie theaters where members are instructed in the arcana of deep LDS doctrine, which spans the planets and the personhood of the divine to North American history. On the upper floors, a central Celestial Room offers more hotel lobby seating arrangements, framed by withdrawn palm trees; overhead, a postmodern-gothic ceiling is washed in blinding white light. Meant for private or family contemplation, the room resembles heaven as imagined in a Hollywood film, perhaps 2003’s Bruce Almighty.
The Mormon built environment tends toward order and progressive infrastructure. Salt Lake City stands out among American metropolises by its ready adoption of classic symbols of European urbanism—traffic circles, light-rail, and allees of plane trees. Aspects of Euro-style social democracy also find their way into the life of the church, whose institutions still function. In church buildings, for example, members of the all-female Relief Society maintain grounds, plant flowers, and undertake improvements for the good of the collective. But Mormon identity is slowly undergoing a shift. In Salt Lake, one is just as likely to encounter wraparound Oakleys, thin blue line flags, and Fox News as ties, smiles, and Eagle Scouts. And while Mitt Romney may stand for a nonfascist conservatism, Utah itself seems more than willing to vote for the likes of Trump. Meanwhile, factual challenges to LDS scripture (there were no horses in pre-Columbian America!) and measures to exclude those nonconformant to Mormon social mores have contributed to a hemorrhaging in membership among political moderates and liberals, and among millennials and zoomers of all kinds.
The opening of the DC temple to the general public is surely a response to a vulnerable situation. The church defends against the erosion of belief on the one hand and against subsumption into a conservatism characterized by blinding rage and an annihilating individualism on the other. And yet, the DC temple is still able to mobilize battalions of believers in the Beltway suburbs to man the open house and keep its medians and walkways planted with flowers. The renovation, its big PR push, reveals a nice-enough building with a dated interior palette that no amount of refreshening could alleviate. Made of mass-produced materials and clinging to its 1950s vision of perfection, the temple will not stand the test of centuries like cathedrals have. It’s nice to know that a community as large as this one—in 2020, the church claimed a membership of over sixteen million—has managed to preserve its well-developed and prosperous valley from the dangers outside, at least for a time. But the church is clearly struggling to reinvent itself for the present, much less the future, and has only to fall back on the filmic dictum “If you build it they will come.”
WE BEGAN MOVING independently of the group as each wave of visitors blended into the next, becoming a smooth stream. We stood next to a folksy family from Ohio as we entered the Sealing Room, where LDS weddings take place. The Ohioan father took it upon himself to explain things to those he identified as non-Mormon visitors, including me. (I was wearing a sweatshirt.) “Look at these mirrors. Aren’t they cool!” he said, gesturing to the panes set on either side of the kneeling altar so as to reflect each other. “They show the sealing continues for eternity!” He turned to the next visitor, a Black man, and explained how he had driven down from Ohio just for the tour. “That’s great, man” was the response. He seemed satisfied with that. It is hard to blame LDS culture for holding on so tightly to the aesthetics of American hegemony—supermarkets and shopping malls filled with variety, Donny Osmond on TV, tight nuclear families reading Hardy Boys mysteries by the fireside—in a world beset by man-made disasters, wanton murder, and climate destruction. But Mormonism responds by retreating into orderly Utah valleys and suburban temple and ward parking lots. Custom and policy keep out what late Quorum of Twelve leader, and great-grandfather of at least 120, Boyd K. Packer defined as the greatest threats to religion: “feminists, homosexuals, and intellectuals.” The tragedy of this defensive reaction, aside from the individual lives harmed and even ended by the forcible estrangement from loved ones either within or locked out of the church—antisuicide billboards line Salt Lake City highways—is the erosion of Mormon culture writ large.
The tour was winding down; we weren’t admitted to the top floor, marked in old section drawings as the Solemn Assembly Room. We flowed down the stairs, down from off-white, to cream, and then beige, out through the Hilton lobby bridge. Outside in the carport, another row of (homeschooled?) children removed our overshoe booties. One visitor rebelled against the performed humility and removed her own. Out in the parking lot, we exited between a row of cheerful lot attendants. They appeared to be new church members from the Pacific, excited to be part of the event.