The Two Towers: Temple

The road that led out of the desert ran north through gray and ocher rock, mining country, stark and forbidding beneath a lowering sky that promised rain. In Judeo-Christian mythology, deserts are places of confusion and danger—the Jews wandered for forty years in the desert searching for Canaan; Satan tried Jesus for forty days in the rocky waste between Jerusalem and Jericho—but in the Southwest we had gladly fled from the tawdry tumult of Las Vegas into the craggy embrace of the Great Basin desert. The Great Basin had given way to the Escalante, and now the Escalante gave way to a span of desolate beauty on Highway 6.

The desert lay behind us; ahead Salt Lake City waited. Colorless hills, fronted by low, scrubby tumbleweed, stretched into the distance on either side of the road. After the russet splendor of Arches and Canyonlands National Parks, where every gradation of red and orange revealed itself in time to the vigilant eye, the earth seemed suddenly bereft of vibrancy. Perhaps this was due to the unfamiliar cloud cover—the sky hadn’t surrendered a single wisp until the morning of our fifth day in the desert. We passed mining installations, railroad tracks, and sulfurous piles of stones and minerals, but few settlements of any size. Gradually the landscape greened, and the hills took height; snow appeared high up in the crowns of the Wasatch Mountains. Provo presaged Salt Lake City: the town ran up into the foothills, and a large lake in the west reflected the light of a fugitive sun. We stopped for gas. The station’s clientele was improbably diverse—I saw black, white, Latino, and Native American customers. Salt Lake City, the omphalos of the Mormon universe, was 45 miles away.

When Brigham Young first caught site of the Salt Lake Valley, he was reported to have said, “This is the place,” recognizing an accord between personal spiritual vision and reality. The valley is paradisiacal—it is green and vast and beautiful. Snow-capped mountains encircle the city and kick out crumpled spurs into peripheral streets like legs stretched before a fire. From a distance, the valley is a convincing vision of heaven come to earth. Once it was arid and barren; the Mormons, by dint of will, transformed it into something vibrant and growing. My brother-in-law, a professor of history, calls Mormonism the only true indigenous American religion, born on American soil, incorporating the history of the continent into its mythology. Throughout my time in Salt Lake City, I fought the impulse to think of the Mormons as a separate race of beings, some alien people; such is always the danger where spin-off is concerned. So like us, but not us, the thinking goes.

The evening of our arrival in the city, we paid a visit to Temple Square. At its center is the Salt Lake Temple, the sanctum sanctorum of Mormonism, the center of the center of the center. The Temple, the construction of which began in 1853 and finished in 1893 (forty years—coincidence?), is of an architectural style that I thought of as Futuristic-Gothic. It resembles a fortress, spired to the hilt, finials on every spire, jagged but perfectly symmetrical. The spires are lit from below with white fluorescence that evokes a gleaming purity, and because of the rigidness of the building’s lines, it resembles a baroque candelabrum. It is a vision of cold magnificence, as conceived by the uneducated, neophyte prophet of an embattled religion, determined to impress upon a hostile nation the capability and the potential of his faith (it is a fight that the Mormons continue to wage, with increasing success, to this day).

The spires, glowing as if from within, imbue the temple with a fantastic quality; striding around Temple Square in its shadow, one has the unmistakable sensation of being an extra in a science fiction film. Seen from a distance, the spires are magnetic. They project sanctimony like the biblical city on a hill—if that city were the Emerald City. However, this tower of the American Dream, unlike the glittering totems of Las Vegas, attempts to conceal its kitschiness—in this case behind a façade of impregnable authority. The Temple possesses the gravity and solemnity of proscription; it, like Mormon temples generally, is closed to all but members of the Mormon Church in good standing. One cannot observe the rituals of the church, experience its liturgy, hymn with its congregation. For a religion so desirous of converts, the secrecy is puzzling. One must wonder what, precisely, goes on within the Temple’s walls, what harm the Church imagines would follow upon the opening of its doors to outsiders. It invites scrutiny and the sort of flickering curiosity that attaches itself to secret societies.

The Mormon Church’s means of sidestepping this issue—Americans demand transparency in all categories of experience, sacred to profane—is the Visitor Center. Temple Square has two. Mormon Visitor Centers are some cross between museum and exposition hall. The Salt Lake Temple’s Visitor Centers were open at 8:30 on a Saturday night, and when we entered, clad in black hoodies, jeans, and sneakers, we found the place swarming with churchgoing families dressed in the formal, dowdy manner of the stolid American pious—the men in modest suits and ties, the women in monochrome dresses rising no higher than mid-calf. There were children everywhere, boys running with tucked-in shirts, girls congregating around a display, giggling. Some families perched on couches, their attention taken by a program running on a large television before them. On the screen, a series of young children answered questions about God and religion. “I believe a prophet is anyone who does God’s work,” a young boy, no older than five, intoned. I shuddered a bit.

I felt unmoored, panicky even. I couldn’t say why, exactly; somehow the unreality of the Temple had coupled with the unreality of this wholesome, beprimmed mob to rattle me. I could at least peer into the collective psyche of the Las Vegas Strip, even if I couldn’t fully apprehend it; but here, despite being a regular churchgoer throughout my childhood and adolescence, I met something opaque and impenetrable. We wandered dazed among the exhibits, scenes from the Book of Mormon reconstructed and explicated, precepts of the faith illustrated in painting or video. All the while, despite our conspicuous difference, we moved among the people as if unseen. I felt invisible, like Ebenezer Scrooge visiting the stations of his life with the Ghosts of Christmases Past, Present, and Future.

Finally, we were buttonholed by a pair of docents—young Mormon women whose mission brought them to Temple Square for two years to answer the questions of the faithful and unfaithful alike with patient good humor. One was American, the other, according to her lapel pin, Korean. They were both smartly made up, unfailingly bubbly, well-informed. We chatted uneasily for several minutes. There was no proselytizing. I waited for the ask, the pitch, the personal expression of faith, the gentle condescension masquerading as affirmation, all of the things that I had come to associate with Christian evangelism. They never came. They were nice girls; they offered us a dinner recommendation. We made our way to the Lion House, which originally quartered several of Brigham Young’s wives. The food was served cafeteria style, and it was impossibly bland and nourishing: Mashed potatoes, corn-on-the-cub, mixed vegetables without salt, dinner rolls—an all-American cuisine.