In my youth, the closest I ever came to anything that had to do with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was a cursory glance at the Book of Mormon in the nightstand of a Marriott hotel room. Religions in general had always intrigued me, but I associated Mormonism with square-looking boy missionaries riding bicycles while wearing helmets, short-sleeve button-up shirts, and name tags.
Adolescence did little to change my initial impression, as I picked up the bits of cliched information about Latter-Day Saints that most Gentiles know and filed them away: Mitt Romney, coffee prohibition, Tabernacle Choir Christmas music.
But then I went to college and majored in religious studies. In my final year, I found a striking passage in a 1976 essay by a French scholar whom I idolized, Henry Corbin. Corbin was famous for his expertise on visionary and mystical currents in Islamic spirituality, and also for his exploration of the “imaginal world” — a “world of images and archetypal forms,” a realm of “‘subtle bodies” that provided the “link between the pure spirit and the material body.” Near the end of the essay, he took a surprising turn away from the medieval Persians who were his usual guides to celestial abodes, divine lights, angelic hierarchies and hidden revelations, and led his reader all the way from the Middle East to Western America. He called it a “favoured land whose secret remains unsuspected and supports what we have just attempted to draw out from our ‘oriental’ philosophers.”
“Oriental” was not in quotes because the term was considered impolite, but because Corbin wanted to make clear that the weird, wild religious stuff he’d spent his lifetime studying can and does happen all over. He invited the reader to consider “the cosmology of a heroically destined community that designates itself as the Church of Jesus Christ of the Saints of the Final Days (sic) or simply as the Mormons.”
Their doctrine includes…the concept of a primordial God, who as the God of Gods is not at all the creator but the generator of other Gods. All have the stature of man, since man was created in the image of God. The essential function of these Gods is to produce souls for bodies that have been created in this and other worlds. Each world has its own God. In the case of our planet, the God is Adam as described in the Book of Genesis and who has gradually reached his present predominant status. He is the God with whom we have to deal. All the Gods are in a gradual process of development. Saints gain entry into this series of Gods via death. At first, they are much lower in rank, but they progress until each one even surpasses the Adam-God in splendour and might. This is the meaning of the pithy statement: “What you are, God has been. What God is, you shall be.”
Suddenly, I was a long way from that Marriott hotel and those cyclists in formal dress. Corbin had planted a seed of sympathetic interest for me by presenting a tiny bit of something at the core of this religion’s prophetic vision: a beautiful and beautifully scandalous intimacy between creation and spirit, the human and the divine. The essay didn’t change the course of my life, but it led me to pay attention to the various mystical and esoteric parts of LDS tradition that I encountered. Once my image of this church could hold “What you are, God has been. What God is, you shall be” alongside Joseph Smith’s seer stones, the recovery of an Adamic language, and the Masonic symbolism formative in the church’s early years, I also found it more interesting to learn about its more mundane aspects. A roadside marker in Utah taught me about the historic Mormon communes. And the still-ongoing encouragement of Saints to grow their own family gardens and to store food now seemed the fruit of a uniquely American frontier Gnosticism.
*****
Through July 11, The Latter-Day Saints’ Temple in La Jolla, a San Diego landmark familiar to any local, opened its doors for public tours. This hadn’t happened since it was first constructed 33 years ago. Back then, it had not yet been dedicated; now, it has not yet been rededicated after renovations. For a few more days, anyone can enter it, not just church members seeking to take part in the ordinances that give the Temple its centrality to the faithful. The temple is not the regular LDS Sunday church location; rather, it’s the site of “endowments,” “sealings” of couples and families and vicarious baptisms, among other rites.
Last month, I attended a press tour of the temple. Before starting, I asked to use the bathroom. I was shown past the Temple entrance and past the media tent to the most sparkling, pleasantly perfumed mobile bathroom I’d ever entered. I wondered if that meant there were no bathrooms inside the Temple, if these latter-day wanderers in the desert had revived ancient Semitic sensibilities and instituted purity laws for their ritual spaces. Alas, it turned out those were just the nearest bathrooms at the moment. But we did have to observe at least one ritual requirement as we entered, placing our feet up on long, low benches as cheerful volunteers placed white fabric booties over our shoes. Post-dedication, actual visitors to the temple would wear their own temple shoes.
“This isn’t a modern-day invention,” began Elder Craig Christensen. “We’ve been building temples to God over the eons of time. This, for us, is the house of the Lord. If you saw as you entered in, ‘The House of the Lord — Holiness to the Lord’ — we believe this. As it’s dedicated, it becomes his house, and we’re invited to come in. In the temple, we worship and we perform ordinances or ceremonies or religious ceremonies here, just like they did in ancient times.”
As we continued on our way, our booties rustling over freshly laid pale carpeting, it occurred to me that this was the cleanest building I’d ever been in. I said as much to one of the organizers of the tour, who told me that it wasn’t because of the renovation. It’s always like this.
We stopped when we reached the baptistery. Temple baptisteries like this one are used primarily for the practice of vicarious baptism, in which a living person stands in for someone who has died but who can, in LDS theology, still benefit from baptism and so make spiritual progress. A circular pool rested on the backs of 12 sculpted oxen. There was a small desk, a mannequin wearing an example of white temple garments, and two wooden shelves bearing stacks of radiantly white folded towels. Nearby was the changing area, where temple garments could be borrowed by visitors who did not have their own.
We also stopped in a room for wedding parties to gather and one for bridal preparation, before arriving at an endowment room — one of six, where instructional material can be projected on screens. Screens? Let me pause here for a moment. The screens arrived in the 1950s. Before that, Temple Workers would serve as live actors in a ritual drama that wove its way through the Temple, “with initiates moving from room to room to represent their progress toward the presence of God.” They would make their way from the telestial room, to the terrestrial room, to the veil, to the celestial room.
I wondered what else had changed. A lot, actually, over a long period of time. In no particular order: two actors used to portray the cooperation of an emblematic Protestant minister with Lucifer. An oath of vengeance (the product of early persecution) that offered a prayer for God “to avenge the blood of the prophets” was taken out of Temple rites in 1927. Recitation of a phrase in the Adamic language (“Pay Lay Ale”) ceased in 1990, as did a ceremonial embrace of the initiate with a temple worker through a veil, touching five points on the body, concluding with a word whispered in the initiate’s ear. There was more. Suffice it to say that the ritual drama seems to have declined.
Back to the tour. From the endowment room we moved to the Celestial Room, described by our guide as “the most sacred place” in the Temple, in which even now we would be asked to maintain silence. The room, he said, is meant to provide “a feeling of being in the presence of God.” We ended the tour in one of the sealing rooms, forming ourselves into a ring around the amethyst-colored bench upon which couples or families kneel during the ordinance that connects them forever. There, we heard some reflections and stories from the church members present. Elder Neil Andersen, one of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles since 2009, who had been with us throughout, had this to say:
“Everything in the building speaks to us about Christ, who he was, why he is so important, and that because of him, is why we can live forever after this life. Not just us, but all people everywhere on the earth, not just those who belong to our church. It teaches us about the purpose of life.”
- Where: San Diego, California, Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, 7474 Charmant Drive, San Diego
- When: Through July 11, 2026, 9 am-8 pm
- Ages: All ages
- Cost: Free, but reservations recommended
