The Salt Lake Temple will open to the public from April 5 through October 1, 2027, before it is rededicated and again restricted to Latter-day Saints with temple recommends.[2] Reservations opened on September 1, 2026, and one million tour spaces were claimed in less than 24 hours.[1] The Church describes the event as only the second public open house in the temple’s 134-year history.[2]
The building visitors will enter is both old and substantially new.[12][13] Construction began in 1853 and ended with the temple’s dedication in April 1893, but the interior has been altered repeatedly since then.[3][20] The current renovation adds about 100,000 square feet of underground space, two baptistries instead of one, five instruction rooms, and 22 sealing rooms instead of 13.[12] The temple now rests on 98 base isolators about 20 feet below the structure, part of a seismic system designed to allow substantial horizontal movement during a major earthquake.[14][24]
The changes are easier to understand once the work performed inside the building is understood.[12] A Latter-day Saint temple is not primarily a weekly meetinghouse. It is a place for ordinances that the Church teaches are connected with salvation, exaltation, and eternal family relationships.[7] Some are performed for living members, while the same ordinances are also performed by proxy for deceased people who did not receive them during life.[39]
The Salt Lake Temple was designed around these rites, especially the endowment.[4][20] Its baptistry, initiatory rooms, instruction rooms, veil, celestial room, sealing rooms, and other spaces were not simply decorative interiors. They existed because particular religious acts were performed in them.[4][20] The 2027 open house is therefore an opportunity to see both an important historic building and the physical setting for a distinctive system of Latter-day Saint ritual.[2][7]
For living members, the principal temple ordinances are the initiatory, the endowment, sealing a husband and wife, and sealing children to parents.[7] Baptism, confirmation, and priesthood ordination are normally received by living members before they receive their own endowment, but those ordinances are also performed inside temples by proxy for deceased people.[39] The Church’s handbook lists the normal proxy sequence as baptism, confirmation, Melchizedek Priesthood ordination for men, initiatory, endowment, and sealings.[39] Current policy also requires the living proxy to be the same birth sex as the deceased person represented.[39]
Temple worship is restricted after dedication.[7] Members generally need a current temple recommend, which is issued after interviews concerning belief, conduct, and commitment to Church standards.[7] Inside, patrons change from ordinary clothing into white clothing before participating in ordinances, a practice the Church says symbolizes purity and equality before God.[7]
The ordinances are connected to one another in a larger theology sometimes described as the covenant path.[7] Baptism and confirmation bring a person into the Church, priesthood ordination gives men priesthood office, the initiatory symbolically prepares the participant, the endowment teaches a ritualized account of humanity’s relationship with God and requires additional covenants, and sealing extends covenant relationships into eternity.[7][39][48]
Proxy baptism is one of the oldest distinctive temple practices in Mormonism.[36] Joseph Smith first publicly taught baptism for the dead at the funeral of Seymour Brunson in August 1840, citing 1 Corinthians 15:29.[36] Latter-day Saints soon began being baptized in the Mississippi River and nearby streams on behalf of deceased relatives and friends.[36] In 1841, Joseph taught that the ordinance should thereafter be performed in a temple, and a temporary wooden font was installed in the unfinished Nauvoo Temple.[36]
The ordinance itself is brief.[38] A living person dressed in white stands in a baptismal font as a proxy while another person pronounces the baptismal prayer using the deceased person’s name and immerses the proxy in water.[38] Confirmation follows as a separate proxy ordinance: priesthood holders lay their hands on the proxy’s head and bestow the gift of the Holy Ghost on behalf of the deceased person.[56] The font rests on twelve oxen, a design the Church connects with the twelve tribes of Israel and the brazen sea described in the Old Testament.[36]
The renovated Salt Lake Temple has two baptistries, doubling the number that existed before the current project.[12] One uses the restored original cast-iron oxen from the historic temple.[12] The increase reflects the scale of proxy work in modern temples, where groups of members, including teenagers with limited-use recommends, may perform baptisms and confirmations for deceased people.[39]
The Salt Lake Temple baptismal font as published in James E. Talmage’s 1912 The House of the Lord.[4]
Proxy baptism has produced public disputes that extend beyond any one religious community.[37][38][52][53] The questions fall into several categories: whether the New Testament authorizes the practice, whether a rite performed after death can respect the identity and wishes of the deceased, and who has the right to submit another person’s name.[39][52][53]
The biblical debate begins with 1 Corinthians 15:29, the only New Testament passage that explicitly refers to people being baptized for the dead.[52][55] Many scholars agree that some form of vicarious baptism is the most natural reading of the Greek, but that does not settle whether Paul approved of the practice or simply used it as part of an argument for resurrection.[52][55] Christianity Today summarized the latter reading:
Although Paul does not explicitly condemn the practice, neither does he endorse it.[52]
FAIR argues that the absence of a Pauline condemnation, combined with the wording of the verse and evidence of later proxy rites, points in the other direction.[55]
What 1 Corinthians 15:29 can tell us without a doubt is that the practice is ancient.[55]
Other Christian traditions object on theological as well as interpretive grounds.[52][53] In 2008, the Vatican instructed Catholic dioceses not to make parish registers available for Latter-day Saint genealogical work when those records could facilitate proxy baptism.[53] The directive told bishops:
not to cooperate with the erroneous practices of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.[53]
That dispute was not based on a belief that an LDS ordinance could change a deceased Catholic’s status in the Catholic Church.[53] It concerned whether another church should perform a religious ordinance in that person’s name at all.[53]
The Jewish controversy remains one of the clearest examples of the identity question.[37][38] Jewish organizations and Holocaust survivors objected after learning that names of Holocaust victims had been submitted for temple ordinances.[37][38] Roman Kent, a Holocaust survivor, described the issue in personal terms:
Six million my brothers and my friends and my family were killed because they were Jews. So I wanted them to be Jews.[37]
The same consent question can arise with atheists, former Latter-day Saints, members of other Christian churches, adherents of other religions, and public figures who never chose Latter-day Saint ordinances during life.[36][39] Church historical materials acknowledge that earlier large-scale extraction projects sometimes included celebrities and people connected with historical events such as the Holocaust.[36] Current policy is much narrower: members are told to submit only relatives, famous people and Holocaust victims are specifically prohibited, and ordinances for a person born less than 110 years ago generally require submission or permission from a close relative.[39]
One especially difficult case involves people who explicitly resigned from the Church or had their membership withdrawn while alive.[39] The current handbook allows a deceased person in that situation to be readmitted by proxy baptism and confirmation after First Presidency approval, normally requested by family after at least one year has passed.[39] This preserves the Church’s belief that choices can continue after death, but it also means a person who formally rejected Church membership during life may later have the ordinance performed in his or her name.[39]
The Church’s theological answer rests on agency in the spirit world.[38][39] Proxy ordinances, in its teaching, make an option available; they do not compel acceptance, alter civil identity, or automatically place the deceased on Church membership rolls.[38][39] Church leaders have also tightened submission rules and threatened loss of access or other discipline for deliberate violations.[39][54] A 2012 Church statement described the intended purpose this way:
something that should be understood to be an offering based on love and respect becomes a source of contention.[54]
The disagreement is therefore not simply over what Latter-day Saints think happens after the baptism.[37][38][39] It is over whether consent must exist before a religious rite is performed, or whether postmortem agency is sufficient because the ordinance can still be rejected.[37][38][39]
The proxy sequence includes another ordinance that is less visible in public discussions: Melchizedek Priesthood ordination for deceased men.[39] In current Church practice, a deceased man is ordained by proxy before proxy initiatory and endowment ordinances are completed for him.[39] There is no corresponding priesthood ordination for deceased women because the Church ordains only men to priesthood offices.[48]
That distinction exposes an important feature of current Latter-day Saint teaching about gender and priesthood.[48] Men receive priesthood through conferral and ordination to offices such as elder, while women do not receive those offices.[48] At the same time, the Church now emphasizes that priesthood power can bless both women and men and that women can exercise delegated priesthood authority when assigned or set apart to Church responsibilities.[48] Women who serve as temple ordinance workers are specifically described as exercising delegated priesthood authority.[48]
The distinction does not remove the institutional asymmetry.[48] Men can hold priesthood offices and keys that women cannot hold.[48] The Church’s answer is that priesthood office is only one form in which divine authority operates and that both women and men receive priesthood power through covenants and authorized service.[48] The temple is one of the clearest places where those two claims exist together.[48]
The Initiatory: Washing, Anointing, and Clothing
Before receiving the main portion of the endowment, a member receives preliminary ordinances commonly called the initiatory.[7] The Church’s handbook describes the initiatory as symbolic washing and anointing accompanied by blessings related to the person’s divine potential, followed by instruction concerning the temple garment.[7] The Church connects the washing, anointing, and clothing pattern to Exodus 29, where priests were washed, anointed, and clothed for sacred service.[7]
The initiatory has changed considerably in physical form over Mormon history.[18] Nineteenth-century accounts describe washing and anointing as more literal bodily rituals, while the modern ordinance is explicitly described by the Church as symbolic.[18][7] The garment has also changed in style and construction over time, although the Church continues to teach that endowed members should wear it as a reminder of temple covenants.[47]
The garment itself is white religious underclothing worn beneath ordinary clothing after a person receives the endowment.[47] The Church currently describes it as a symbol of Jesus Christ and a reminder of covenant commitment, and it teaches members to wear it day and night throughout life except when activities reasonably require its removal.[47] Styles and fabrics have been adjusted repeatedly under Church direction.[47]
Changes to initiatory wording have also affected how women experience the ordinance.[43] In 2019, writer and believing Latter-day Saint Margaret Blair Young described revisions that removed wording she understood as placing a wife’s relationship with God more directly through her husband.[43] She wrote that earlier language had been painful for women close to her.[43]
I was profoundly grateful for the new words. The gratitude remained as I noted changes throughout the endowment and later in the sealings.[43]
For some members and former members, changes of this kind raise a question about what it means to call an ordinance revealed if significant wording and physical actions can later be altered.[18][43] The Church’s historical answer has been to distinguish the ordinance’s underlying covenants and blessings from the method used to administer or present them.[9] That distinction appears repeatedly across modern temple history, from initiatory changes to film presentation of the endowment and the current Salt Lake redesign.[9][11]
The endowment is the ordinance around which much of the historic Salt Lake Temple interior was organized.[4][20] The Church describes the word endowment as meaning a gift and teaches that the ordinance gives participants greater knowledge of God’s purposes, divine direction, and promised spiritual power.[7] It is received in two parts, beginning with the initiatory and continuing with instruction and covenant making.[7]
The second part presents the plan of salvation through the Creation, the Fall of Adam and Eve, the Atonement of Jesus Christ, and instruction about returning to God’s presence.[7] Participants are invited to covenant to live the laws of obedience, sacrifice, the gospel of Jesus Christ, chastity, and consecration.[7] The ceremony uses ritual actions, symbolic clothing, gestures, and other teaching devices in addition to spoken instruction.[8][18]
Brigham Young described the endowment in 1853 as ordinances intended to prepare a person for what follows death:
... after you have departed this life, to enable you to walk back to the presence of the Father, passing the angels who stand as sentinels[17]
Joseph Smith first administered the Nauvoo endowment on May 4, 1842, in the upper room of his Red Brick Store to a small group of men.[19][32] The Joseph Smith Papers describes that ceremony as communicating knowledge intended to prepare participants to enter the presence of God.[19] Joseph later instructed Brigham Young to organize and systematize the ceremony, and Church leaders continued revising its administration after Joseph’s death.[9][18]
Freemasonry is central to any serious discussion of the endowment’s development.[8][18] Joseph Smith became a Mason in Nauvoo shortly before introducing the endowment, and all nine men in the first endowment group were Masons.[8] The Church acknowledges similarities involving handgrips, key words, special clothing, staged instruction, and symbolic gestures.[8] Heber C. Kimball, one of the earliest participants, wrote that “there is a similarity of priesthood in masonry.”[8]
The historical disagreement is over what those similarities mean.[8][18][51] One interpretation treats the parallels as evidence that Joseph borrowed substantial ritual material and reframed it as revelation.[18] Latter-day Saint defenses answer that similar ritual forms do not establish identical theological content.[8][51] David Buerger’s historical analysis lands between the strongest versions of those two positions:
The temple ceremony cannot be explained as wholesale borrowing from Masonry; neither can it be explained as completely unrelated to Masonry.[18]
Buerger points specifically to Masonic influence on ritual mechanics while noting that major endowment themes such as Creation, Fall, covenant, washing, anointing, and exaltation do not come from Masonry.[18] The Church’s current historical explanation uses explicitly revelatory language:
the endowment did not simply imitate the rituals of Freemasonry. Rather, Joseph’s encounter with Masonry evidently served as a catalyst for revelation.[8]
FAIR makes a similar distinction between the doctrines and covenants taught in the endowment and the ritual form used to present them.[51]
The endowment also changed after Nauvoo.[9][18] It was standardized in writing in the late nineteenth century, shortened over time, and eventually presented through film beginning with the Swiss Temple in 1955.[9][18] Film allowed the ordinance to be administered in one room and in multiple languages without requiring a live cast moving from room to room.[9][18] Harold B. Lee summarized the institutional approach in 1959:
the truths are the same regardless of how they are presented.[9]
That principle is directly relevant to the Salt Lake renovation.[9][11] The Church continues to treat the covenants and doctrinal purpose of the endowment as stable while allowing the mode of presentation to change.[9] The renovated Salt Lake Temple extends that approach to architecture by ending the old progressive movement through multiple instruction rooms.[11][12]
Temple sealing is the ordinance through which a man and woman are joined as husband and wife for eternity if they remain faithful to their covenants.[40] The General Handbook describes sealing ordinances as uniting families for eternity as members honor the covenants they make.[40] The renovated Salt Lake Temple will have 22 sealing rooms, compared with 13 before the renovation.[12]
The Sealing Room for the Living as published in James E. Talmage’s 1912 The House of the Lord.[4]
Eternal marriage developed in the same Nauvoo period as plural marriage.[41] Doctrine and Covenants 132 links eternal marriage, exaltation, and the introduction of plural marriage, and the Church acknowledges that Joseph Smith was sealed to multiple women.[41] Some were already legally married to other men, and some sealings appear to have been understood as applying only to eternity.[41] The Church’s current historical essay presents several possible explanations for those relationships while acknowledging that the surviving record does not resolve every question.[41]
The nineteenth-century history remains relevant because modern sealing policy is not completely symmetrical for men and women.[40][41] A widower who has been sealed to a wife may later be sealed to another woman without canceling the first sealing.[40] A living widow who was sealed to a husband generally cannot be sealed to another man unless the first sealing is canceled.[40] After death, proxy policies permit a deceased woman eventually to be sealed to all legal husbands under specified conditions, while deceased men may also be sealed to multiple legal wives.[40]
Some Latter-day Saint women have described these policies as a surviving form of theological polygamy, particularly because a living man can anticipate more than one eternal sealing while a living woman cannot.[49] Jana Riess stated the imbalance directly:
living men get to be sealed to all of their wives forever if that’s their choice. Living women can only be sealed to one man.[49]
The Church does not provide a detailed description of how multiple sealings will function in the afterlife.[41] Its Gospel Topics essay instead says that the precise nature of those relationships is unknown and encourages members to trust that God will resolve family relationships justly.[41] FAIR approaches sealing by emphasizing its conditional rather than automatic character:
By this ordinance, a husband and wife are joined ... in a union that will last beyond death, forever, if they keep the promises they make.[50]
That response explains why believers do not necessarily read multiple recorded sealings as a literal map of a future household, although it does not remove the different rules applied to living men and women.[40][50]
Current Church policy defines marriage for eternal purposes as a union of a man and a woman.[40] Same-sex couples therefore cannot receive a temple marriage sealing.[40] For readers outside the Church, that exclusion can appear especially significant because sealing is connected with eternal family relationships and exaltation.[40] The Church frames the restriction as a doctrinal claim about marriage rather than an administrative limitation.[40]
Temple marriage has also created a more practical problem for families when close relatives are not eligible to enter the temple.[7][42] Until 2019, couples in some countries who chose a civil wedding before a temple sealing could face a required waiting period.[42] The Church removed that waiting period and now explicitly allows a civil ceremony followed by an immediate sealing when a temple wedding would cause parents or immediate family members to feel excluded.[42] The change preserved the doctrine of sealing while reducing one of the social costs associated with restricted temple access.[42]
The second major form of sealing joins children to parents.[40] Children born after their parents are sealed are considered “born in the covenant” and do not need a separate sealing ordinance.[40] Children born before a parental sealing, adopted children, and some other family situations may involve a specific sealing of children to parents.[40] The same ordinance is performed by proxy for deceased families.[39][40]
This part of temple theology helps explain why genealogy became so closely connected with Latter-day Saint temple work.[36][40] Salvation is not presented only as an individual relationship with God. Sealings construct a network of relationships that the Church believes can continue beyond death.[40]
Real family histories make that system administratively complicated.[40] Divorce, remarriage, adoption, stepfamilies, deceased spouses, and canceled sealings can create questions about which relationships should be represented through temple ordinances.[40] The handbook contains detailed policies governing such cases and repeatedly states that faithful individuals will not lose promised blessings because of another person’s choices.[40]
For believers, that flexibility protects the principle that God will ultimately organize eternal relationships justly.[40] For others, the complexity can make the simple phrase “families can be together forever” sound more settled than the actual sealing system is.[40] The temple promises continuity, but Church policy also acknowledges that many specific family configurations remain unresolved in mortality.[40][41]
There is another temple ordinance that does not appear in the Church’s standard public list of ordinances for living members.[44][45] Historical records show that Joseph and Emma Smith were “anointed & ordained to the highest and holiest order of the priesthood” on September 28, 1843.[44] Wilford Woodruff later referred to the rite as a “Second Anointing.”[44]
The ordinance became associated with receiving what nineteenth-century Latter-day Saints called the fulness of the priesthood and with promises connected to exaltation.[45] Buerger’s research documents thousands of second anointings for living and deceased people in the late nineteenth century, although the practice later became much less visible.[45] Unlike ordinary temple ordinances, modern public Church materials provide almost no procedural explanation of how recipients are selected.[45][46]
That limited access has generated questions about hierarchy and secrecy because ordinary members cannot simply prepare for the ordinance and request it in the same way they can seek an endowment or sealing.[45] Buerger summarized the unusual gap between its historical importance and its public visibility:
most Mormons, even faithful temple-goers, know little of the capstone of the endowment.[45]
FAIR acknowledges that the second anointing exists and is performed in temples but argues that receiving it during mortality is not required for exaltation.[46] Its explanation states:
It is not regarded as an essential ordinance which one must receive in this life for exaltation; but will be necessary in the next life.[46]
FAIR declines to discuss the ritual details, treating them as sacred.[46] The result is an ordinance that can be established historically and acknowledged apologetically while remaining largely absent from ordinary public Church instruction.[44][45][46]
The historical existence of the ordinance complicates the phrase “everything that happens in the temple” because the Church now explains most ordinary temple ordinances publicly while leaving this one largely outside official public teaching.[7][44][46] Its history is well documented enough to establish that it exists, but current practice is far less transparent.[44][45][46]
The Salt Lake Temple’s progressive endowment rooms were not part of a completely fixed plan from 1853.[20] Early designs followed the Kirtland and Nauvoo pattern of large assembly spaces.[20] By the 1880s, after Logan and Manti had developed staged ordinance rooms, Church architects revised the unfinished Salt Lake interior so much of the building would serve the endowment.[20] Capacity was already part of that redesign, with the revised arrangement allowing larger groups to pass through the ceremony.[20]
Joseph Don Carlos Young refined the layout as construction neared completion.[27][29] The Garden Room, World Room, Terrestrial Room, veil, and Celestial Room formed an ascending ritual sequence.[4][27] Patrons did not simply hear a story about Eden, mortality, and return to God. They physically moved through rooms that represented those stages.[4][27]
James E. Talmage described the Garden Room as an immersive representation of Eden, with painted landscapes, plants, animals, and water.[4]
it is the Garden of Eden depicted in miniature.
The route toward the World Room included art glass showing Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden.[4] The World Room then replaced the peaceful imagery with broken rocks, predators, thorns, blasted trees, storms, and death.[4]
From Eden man has been driven out.[4]
Participants then moved through the Terrestrial Room and veil into the Celestial Room.[4] The changing elevation and visual environment made physical movement part of the religious instruction.[4][27] In the renovated temple, the endowment will instead use single-room presentations like those found in many other modern temples.[12]
The Celestial Room as published in James E. Talmage’s 1912 The House of the Lord.[4]
The murals were a large institutional project.[5][21] John Hafen and Lorus Pratt proposed that the Church support professional art study in Paris in exchange for their work on the Salt Lake Temple.[21] John B. Fairbanks and other artists joined the effort, studied at the Académie Julian, and received plans and dimensions from Utah for the work awaiting them.[5][21]
The mural program continued evolving even after the 1893 dedication.[21][27] Historical studies indicate that some rooms were still comparatively plain at dedication and received later mural work, including twentieth-century additions.[27] The interior remembered as “historic” was therefore already layered rather than frozen at a single moment.[27]
The Church itself describes hand-painted temple murals as part of a “beautiful and sacred setting” for worship.[5] That is why their removal produced objections from some believing Latter-day Saints as well as preservationists.[31][34] Chad Nielsen, writing from a Latter-day Saint perspective after the 2021 announcement, expressed the concern this way:
“For the few that we have preserved, it feels like we keep changing and erasing much of what makes those buildings beautiful and unique inside.”[34]
The objection was not simply that nothing old should ever be altered.[34] It was that art created specifically to participate in the ordinance was being removed while other nineteenth-century visual elements were being carefully reconstructed.[12][34]
When the renovation was announced in 2019, Church officials emphasized seismic safety, infrastructure, accessibility, and preservation of historic character.[10] Church History curator Emily Utt said the project would “highlight and honor the work of past craftsmen” while making the temple usable for future generations.[10]
By 2021, the plan had expanded.[11] The First Presidency announced additional instruction rooms, a second baptistry, more sealing rooms, and a move away from the live progressive endowment presentation.[11] The Church said murals painted directly on lath and plaster had suffered water damage and repeated repairs and could not be reliably moved with the walls.[11] They were photographed and documented before removal, with portions preserved in Church archives.[11]
The seismic work was extraordinary in scale.[14][24] Engineering News-Record reported that engineers considered approaches that would have removed more of the original foundation before developing a system intended to preserve more historic material.[24] The completed system places the temple on 98 base isolators and a network of structural elements designed to protect the heavy masonry building during a major earthquake.[14][24]
The renovation also reflects a practical priority expressed repeatedly by Church project leaders: the building exists to perform ordinances.[12][25] Andy Kirby, the Church’s director of historic temple renovations, summarized that priority by saying that architecture is important but “what’s most important ... is the ordinances.”[12] More instruction rooms allow more frequent endowment sessions, two baptistries increase proxy capacity, and 22 sealing rooms allow more living and proxy family ordinances.[12]
The preservation question is therefore not whether the Church preserved anything.[12][13] It preserved substantial historic fabric, including the celestial room, most of the terrestrial room, spiral staircases, Tiffany glass, historic furnishings, artwork, and other architectural details.[12][13] It also reconstructed Victorian colors, carpets, millwork, draperies, and fixtures in newly built spaces.[12][24] The more difficult question is what kind of history was prioritized: surviving material, historic appearance, or historic ritual use.[12][20][31]
The Manti Utah Temple provides a useful comparison because Church leaders initially announced a similar plan to remove its progressive presentation and murals.[11] President Russell M. Nelson later announced a new temple in nearby Ephraim and a revised plan that preserved Manti’s murals.[15] The Church subsequently highlighted the conservation work as a significant part of the renovation.[15]
Church conservator Emiline Twitchell described the murals as:
a symbolic entry point into new understandings of our temple worship, theology and relationship with the divine.[15]
Manti is not a simple engineering equivalent to Salt Lake.[14][15] Salt Lake required a much more invasive seismic isolation project, so Manti does not prove that every Salt Lake mural could have remained untouched.[14][24] It does show, however, that the Church has at times treated historic mural environments as religiously meaningful enough to preserve even while modernizing temple operations.[15][26]
Manti’s own murals are also layered history.[26] Minerva Teichert’s World Room paintings date from the twentieth century and replaced earlier deteriorated work.[26] Preserving them meant preserving a later reinterpretation of the progressive-room tradition rather than returning the building to one pristine original state.[26]
The Salt Lake Temple has always occupied an unusual position between public visibility and restricted interior access.[23] Temple Square became one of Utah’s most prominent public spaces while the dedicated temple itself remained available only to recommend-holding Latter-day Saints.[23][30]
The boundary has occasionally been challenged.[22] In 1911, Gisbert Bossard secretly photographed the temple interior and became involved with an effort to sell and exhibit the images.[22] James E. Talmage responded by proposing an authorized book showing and explaining the building, and the First Presidency approved what became The House of the Lord in 1912.[22][4]
The Church today publishes far more about temple ordinances, clothing, covenants, and rooms than it once did.[7][47] During CNN’s 2026 preview of the renovated Salt Lake Temple, Andy Kirby used the familiar description:
Sacred, not secret.[16]
That formulation has also been questioned within Mormon scholarship.[35] Armand Mauss argued that temple worship is both sacred and intentionally restricted, and that calling it merely “not secret” can obscure the real boundary around participation and ritual knowledge.[35]
the ceremonies are obviously both.[35]
Mauss did not argue that every ritual element should simply be published.[35] He argued for enough openness that members and outsiders could understand temple worship without confusing reverence with complete silence.[35] The modern Church has moved significantly in that direction while continuing to reserve participation and some ritual information for endowed members.[7][35][50]
A visitor in 2027 will move through a building containing several periods of Mormon history at once.[12][20] The granite shell belongs to the nineteenth century, parts of the interior reflect the 1893 temple, some features reflect later renovations, and large sections are new construction deliberately finished in a historic visual language.[12][13][24]
The physical layout also reveals what the Church now prioritizes in temple worship.[12] Two baptistries support proxy baptism and confirmation.[12][39] Initiatory spaces prepare patrons for the endowment.[7] Five instruction rooms allow the endowment to be presented repeatedly without requiring each group to progress through the historic rooms.[12] Twenty-two sealing rooms support marriages and family sealings for the living and the dead.[12][39][40]
The old progressive path through Eden, the fallen world, the terrestrial state, the veil, and the celestial room will no longer organize the endowment.[11][12] The doctrine and covenants remain, according to the Church, while the architectural presentation has changed.[9][11] That is consistent with a much longer pattern in which temple ordinances have been standardized, shortened, translated, filmed, reworded, and adapted to new buildings while Church leaders have continued to describe their religious purpose as continuous.[9][18]
The Salt Lake Temple is therefore not simply an old building restored to 1893, nor is it a wholly new temple behind a historic granite exterior.[12][20] It is the latest form of a building that has repeatedly changed as Latter-day Saint temple worship itself has developed.[9][20] The 2027 open house will give the public an unusually broad view of that history before the temple is rededicated and the normal recommend requirement returns.[2][7]
[6] The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. “Temple Endowment.” Church History Topics.
[8] The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. “Masonry.” Church History Topics.
[16] CNN. “Inside the Renovated Salt Lake Temple.” CNN Newsroom transcript, August 30, 2026.
[26] Doris R. Dant. “Minerva Teichert’s Manti Temple Murals.” BYU Studies 38, no. 3 (1999).
[32] The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. “Red Brick Store.” Historic Nauvoo.
[36] The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. “Baptism for the Dead.” Church History Topics.
[43] Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. “Patience, Faith, and the Temple in 2019.”
[46] FAIR. “What Is the Second Anointing?”
[50] FAIR. “Eternal Marriage/Sealing.”
[51] FAIR. “Why Would Joseph Smith Incorporate Masonic Elements into the Temple Ritual?”
[52] Christianity Today. “Did Paul Baptize for the Dead?” August 10, 1998.
[53] Associated Press. “Vatican keeps parish records from LDS.” KSL.com, May 4, 2008.
[55] FAIR. “Baptism for the Dead in Early Christianity.”
[56] The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. “Temple Baptism for the Dead.”
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