Temple Endowment

The endowment is the central ordinance of the Latter-day Saint temple, and it is also the point at which a reference work has to decide what it is willing to print. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints holds the detail of the ordinance sacred and asks that it not be discussed outside the temple. Transcripts and recordings circulate, obtained without the church's consent, and any reader determined to find them will. The atlas does not reproduce them, and this article says so rather than leaving the omission to look like ignorance.

What can be said, because the church says it, is this. The endowment is received once for oneself, ordinarily before a mission or a marriage, and afterward may be received many times by proxy on behalf of people who have died. The church describes it as a course of instruction in the plan of salvation, presented in sequence, in which the participant makes covenants with God and receives what the movement calls an endowment of power. It takes place inside a dedicated temple, not in an ordinary meetinghouse, and lasts a little under two hours. Participants dress in white. Admission requires a current temple recommend, issued after interviews with a bishop and a stake president, so a parent, a sibling or a friend outside the church cannot attend, and neither can a member without a recommend.

Those who have received the endowment wear the temple garment as ordinary underclothing afterward. The church has described it publicly as a reminder of the covenants made, and that is as far as this entry goes.

The endowment has a documented history and the church has published a good deal of it. Joseph Smith first administered it on 4 May 1842 in the upper room of his red brick store at Nauvoo, to a group of nine men, before any temple existed. Women began to receive it in 1843. It was administered on a large scale in the Nauvoo Temple through the winter of 1845 to 1846, while the city was being abandoned, in what amounted to a race against the eviction of the whole community. In Utah it was performed first in the Endowment House in Salt Lake City and then in temples as they were completed. Brigham Young directed that the ceremony be committed to writing, and the text was set in order at St George in 1877.

It has been revised since, and the revisions have been reported publicly at the time: notably in 1990, in 2005, and in 2019, the last of these altering wording relating to women. That an ordinance held sacred is also revisable is a direct consequence of the doctrine of continuing revelation, and Latter-day Saints generally describe the changes in those terms.

The hardest historical question is Freemasonry. Joseph Smith was initiated into a Masonic lodge at Nauvoo in March 1842, seven weeks before he first administered the endowment, and the two share vocabulary, structure and a number of specific elements. The church acknowledges the similarity and holds that the content is restored rather than borrowed, with Masonry preserving a corrupted remnant of something older. Most historians outside the movement read the relationship as a much more direct one. Both readings are held seriously and the atlas records the disagreement rather than resolving it.