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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.

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.

To say that what happened as the LDS Church globalized was a shift from the literal to the metaphorical is to understand only one piece of the puzzle. It is my contention that in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, we can see creative slippages taking place within Mormonism between the literal and metaphorical, text and object, and history and space. Rather than simply moving to more metaphorical understandings, the Mormon community has spiritualized and metaphorized and then reconcretized concepts such as gathering and Zion in the material and physical realm so that believers can continue to touch and physically engage these central theological principles.

The Smithification of the American West refers to the process whereby Utah Mormons embraced and emphasized a historical narrative that proclaimed that the prophet Joseph Smith had known all along that the Mormons would wind up in Utah. It suggests not only that Brigham Young was the rightful heir to Smith’s prophetic office but also that Smith knew the landscapes of the American West intimately because he had seen them in prophetic vision.