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Don’t worry, this is a “safe” link! Very interesting article on temples from a non-member. No, it’s not an anti-Mormon article, but the author does express a few opinions.
Latter-Day Fortresses – The spooky charisma of Mormon temples.
Quote:
Why would Mormons, who are so well-known for their polite but persistent evangelism, create buildings that are not just opaque but often intimidating? Wouldn’t it make more sense to let potential converts peer at the glories within? On the other hand, this opacity fosters a sense of suspense and allure, of perks reserved for insiders. After all, if you can wander into a house of worship at will, you don’t have much incentive to make a permanent commitment.The forbidding look of the temples has some historical roots, too. The church’s earliest buildings were frequent targets of anti-Mormon sentiment; a temple in Nauvoo, Ill., that the Mormons abandoned as they moved west, was burned nearly to the ground in 1848. (It is now being rebuilt.) “With the painful experience of Nauvoo still fresh in their minds,” the LDS Web site reports, “Church leaders determined that the Salt Lake Temple would be almost fortress-like in its design and construction.” That quality has been passed along from temple to temple over the years.
The temples play on the subconscious and dredge up no small number of associations, from the religious to the pop-cultural. When I was a kid, I lived near the Mormon temple in the Oakland hills. The building has a spooky charisma at night, with a lighting scheme that’s the architectural equivalent of holding a flashlight under your chin. Every once in while it would show up in my nightmares.
Other connections are less dark. Mormons sometimes say their temples allow them to step “out of the world” for a few hours. Mostly, of course, that means they consider the buildings a refuge from a chaotic, godless society. But the temples do look a little as though they came from “out of the world”—if not from another planet, then at least from some distant or imagined landscape. Non-Mormons tend to feel the same way. After the temple outside Washington was finished in the mid-’70s, somebody climbed onto a Beltway overpass with a can of spray paint and scrawled a message reading, “Surrender Dorothy!”
Interesting view. I served a mission in Oakland California, so the temple was something we talked about when door knocking, and some people expressed the same idea…it sticks in their minds and visits them in their dreams. That lead to some good experiences, but not always. I’m not sure I get the point of what the author is making? Is he saying the temples should be more modest, and it is a strange thing they are so “intimidating”? or is he admiring the fact LDS members try to make it something not of this world? (what does “Surrender Dorothy?” mean?)
PiperAlpha wrote:what does “Surrender Dorothy?” mean?
It’s a reference to
The Wizard of Oz. Some people think the Washington D.C. temple looks like something from the Emerald City. Ah. Got it. Thanks doug. I had to turn to wikipedia to get that one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_Dorothy I had to look up “beltway”. 😆 Our temple is the complete opposite. It is on an obscure bit of freeway, and just down the road there’s an almost identical non-LDS church. It doesn’t stick out much.
SamBee wrote:I had to look up “beltway”.
😆 Our temple is the complete opposite. It is on an obscure bit of freeway, and just down the road there’s an almost identical non-LDS church. It doesn’t stick out much.
That’s just since the lights were toned down. When it was first open there were a number of near car wrecks when cars would round a curve and suddenly be confronted with the temple. A friend years ago who lived in DC said it was like suddenly being confronted by the “mother ship”.
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