Power of Place: Reflections on the Continuing Story of the Kirtland Temple

For tens of thousands of contemporary Latter-day Saint pilgrims, the Kirtland Temple near Cleveland, Ohio, provides an opportunity to visit a place where they believe Jesus appeared and restored long-lost priesthood powers. The Kirtland Temple, however, is not owned by the LDS church. Instead, the shrine is owned by a related denomination that has doctrinally aligned itself with mainline Protestant Christianity—the Community of Christ (formerly known as the RLDS church). Members of both churches include Kirtland on pilgrimage itineraries yet have understood the site's significance in radically different ways between themselves and within their denominations over time. The Kirtland Temple provides an opportune case study for changing contestation and cooperation by multiple groups at an American pilgrimage shrine—a phenomena that I term pilgrimage. Two orienting metaphors help focus my moving picture of parallel pilgrimage: proximity (how the site “moves” in relation to changing pilgrimage routes, new shrines, and new interest groups) and performance (plays re-enacting the history of the temple and tour scripts, along with the reception of these performances). My study works out these two themes across the last forty years of change at the Kirtland Temple. Ultimately, I draw three main conclusions in my study. First, parallel pilgrimage at Kirtland Temple reveals sacred places, not simply pilgrimage routes, as itineraries in motion, constantly contested and constantly changing. Second, acts of cooperation and contestation at Kirtland Temple have formed a dialectical relationship that allows the site to function. Acts of contestation helped the site retain its heightened importance while acts of cooperation allowed members from various denominations to minimize potentially disruptive conflict. Finally, in a wider context, parallel pilgrimage at Kirtland Temple, with its moving alliances and contested narratives, may be seen as suggestive of

This chapter examines the use of staged performances at pilgrimage sites to establish links between the past and the pilgrim. Since the late 1970s, the Kirtland Temple and its surrounding interpretative sites have served as venues for dramatic performances in which the shrine's past is resurrected and performed on stage. Plays about the Kirtland Temple have allowed audience members and actors to relate Kirtland's past to their present personal and institutional dilemmas and experiences, elevated the temple's status as sacred space, and shaped the way that individual groups socially construct the temple. Moreover, dramas provide an alternative space where the temple is interpreted and incorporated into a “useful past” that shapes the lives of pilgrims. They also further illustrate the process of parallel pilgrimage at the Kirtland Temple, as Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints members have constructed dramas drawing on common stories, with very different applications for those narratives.

Book Review| January 01 2015 Kirtland Temple: The Biography of a Shared Mormon Sacred Space David J. Howlett. Kirtland Temple: The Biography of a Shared Mormon Sacred Space. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014. Jeanne Halgren Kilde Jeanne Halgren Kilde Jeanne Halgren Kilde is the director of the religious studies program at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of When Church Became Theater: The Transformation of Evangelical Architecture and Worship in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford, 2002) and of Sacred Power, Sacred Space: An Introduction to Christian Architecture and Worship (Oxford, 2008). Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Mormon Studies Review (2015) 2: 117–121. https://doi.org/10.5406/mormstudrevi.2.2015.0117 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Jeanne Halgren Kilde; Kirtland Temple: The Biography of a Shared Mormon Sacred Space. Mormon Studies Review 1 January 2015; 2 117–121. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/mormstudrevi.2.2015.0117 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressMormon Studies Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2015 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2015 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

This chapter focuses on religious diversity. Whatever their political or social outlook, religious groups in late twentieth-century America positioned themselves as arbiters of social morality related to race, gender, and sexuality. Perhaps unsurprisingly, some temple visitors look at the Kirtland temple as a place of encounter where social questions can be explored, questioned, and argued. This is not totally without precedent. Before 1965, the social morality discussed at the temple dealt almost exclusively with nineteenth-century Mormon polygamy. By 2012, the issues were still about sexuality, but they had changed. The primary social issues that drew visitors' attention were the Community of Christ's position on same-sex relationships and gender roles. Ultimately, the Kirtland Temple was and is a platform for reinforcing the identities of various religious groups as well as a place where they can momentarily transcend their differences.

This chapter argues that the evolution of tour guiding at the Kirtland Temple reflects select and crucial changes within the Community of Christ/Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints denomination over the course of the late twentieth century. Specifically, tour performances offer a window into the historical memories that the church deemed important, show how it desired itself to be known by the wider world, and reflect how the denomination interacted with its competitors and changing allies. The Kirtland Temple tours tell as much about the Community of Christ's general leftward turn in the late twentieth century as they reveal about changing academic knowledge of the Kirtland Temple's past. Indeed, guides constantly were correcting or changing tour content to reflect new understandings of the history and the meaning of the temple.

The only temple completed by Mormonism's founder, Joseph Smith Jr., the Kirtland Temple in Kirtland, Ohio, receives 30,000 Mormon pilgrims every year. Though the site is sacred to all Mormons, the temple's religious significance and the space itself are contested by rival Mormon denominations: its owner, the relatively liberal Community of Christ, and the larger Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This biography of Kirtland Temple is set against the backdrop of religious rivalry. The two sides have long contested the temple's ownership, purpose, and significance in both the courts and Mormon literature. Yet members of each denomination have occasionally cooperated to establish periods of co-worship, host joint tours, and create friendships. The book uses the temple to build a model for understanding what he calls parallel pilgrimage—the set of dynamics of disagreement and alliance by religious rivals at a shared sacred site. At the same time, it illuminates social and intellectual changes in the two main branches of Mormonism since the 1830s, providing a much-needed history of the lesser-known Community of Christ.

This chapter examines the transformation of the Kirtland Temple as a site of interest into a site of contagion, only then to be blessed along with the surrounding land as a place of promise. While the Kirtland Temple still remained an ambiguous site for many Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints pilgrims, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints agents on the ground in Cleveland worked out a story that could explain Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints' possession of the temple while still embracing it as a holy site. This resanctification of sacred space offers several insights into the study of sacred space that may be “useful to think with.” First, this case study illustrates the power of middling agents in creating and sustaining sacred spaces. Second, it illustrates that the creation and maintenance of sacred space may be one strategy that religious groups use to answer theodical questions, or questions about the presence of evil.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of “parallel pilgrimage”—the dynamics of cooperation and contestation by rival religious groups at a common pilgrimage site. Contestation, whether covert or overt, often charges the shared sacred site with a heightened importance since the shrine is seen as a scarce resource, in danger of appropriation by a religious other. In this way, a contested sacred site may become a supra-sacred site. The Kirtland Temple, a site owned by a minority—a moderately liberal faith community—and patronized mainly by a much larger, conservative religious community, serves as an opportune case study for parallel pilgrimage and its attendant rituals of cooperation and contestation. Beyond the relatively liberal Community of Christ and the more conservative Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, at least a half dozen smaller Mormon groups also currently patronize the sacred shrine.

Kirtland Temple: The Biography of a Shared Mormon Sacred Space

This chapter begins in the mid-nineteenth century, just as competing Mormon denominations coalesced. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City) and the smaller Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints emerged as the most important denominations for Kirtland's future. These two churches were rivals and actively competed with each other for converts, especially in the first decades of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints' organization. More than simply competing for converts, though, the two churches developed different visions for the purpose and permeability of temple spaces, and much of these differences centered on their understanding of the legacy of the Kirtland Temple. In short, the Kirtland Temple was a living testament to different lineages of temple teachings present within Joseph Smith's many churches.

Journal Article Kirtland Temple: The Biography of a Shared Mormon Sacred Space Get access David J. Howlett. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014. xiv, 263 pp. Cloth, $90.00. Paper, $25.00.) Journal of American History, Volume 102, Issue 2, September 2015, Page 515, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jav370 Published: 01 September 2015

This chapter explores the 1980s Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints' schism by the ways individuals mapped the Kirtland Temple within their sacred universes. Such mapping involved revelations about temples, conferences at or near the building, the construction of worship spaces near the temple, the creation of eschatological maps about the temple and its role in the end of history, and the creation of collective memories through commemorative rituals. In this, Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints members followed practices that had helped establish their church's collective identity in previous decades. What was different, of course, was the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints' schism that allowed for an opening to extreme, even violent, mappings of the Kirtland Temple. The chapter then recounts the history of Jeffrey Lundgren, his apocalyptic group, and his violent mapping and actions.

This chapter discusses how sacred sites are also built through cooperation. At sites of parallel pilgrimage, people may negotiate with others and form alliances that allow them access to otherwise denied resources. In addition, people who form alliances benefit from a multiplier effect—meaning the resources of a group are greater than the sum of its parts. Group membership carries with it a form of power, or social capital that can only be established and maintained by “reacknowledgement of proximity”—that is, “relations of proximity in physical (geographical) space or even in economic and social space.” The chapter then looks at the changing proximal relationships in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints around the Kirtland Temple.

Busting the Silos of “Global” Scholarship

This chapter looks at the Mormons' earliest choirs, first by considering passages in the Book of Mormon that mentioned heavenly “choirs”—all of which would have made sense to a young religious American in the 1820s named Joseph Smith. For almost a decade Smith had visits from spirits awash in heavenly light. One of those spirits, an angel named Moroni, had led him repeatedly to a local hillside where a stone box of gold plates lay buried. The result was the Book of Mormon; one of its passages makes reference to the prophet Mormon's promise of heavenly choir membership as a reward to the faithful. This chapter discusses the founding and organization of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the first choirs it assembled, including the one at Kirtland Temple in Ohio and another at Nauvoo Temple in Illinois. It also examines the anti-choir, anti-music-literacy strand of American Protestantism during the nineteenth century and how conflicting visions of musical literacy lived on in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.