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The first Mormon structure was the Kirtland Temple, followed by the grander Nauvoo Temple. In Utah, Mormons built ward houses (often called chapels), tabernacles, and more temples. Their architecture is eclectic and derivative. Functional and pragmatic are the norm. They also pioneered city planning and built a literal Zion.

This section provides the settings to which the Prophet Matthias—four months out of jail, who was found guilty of contempt of court and malicious assault on his own daughter—arrived at Kirtland on November 5, 1835 and sought to meet the Mormon Prophet Joseph Smith. Matthias announced himself as Joshua, the Jewish minister (there was no need to reveal himself as the infamous Matthias, whose name had appeared in all the newspapers accused of murder and theft) when he met Smith, with his scribe writing furiously at his side, who revealed details of his early sacred history in Palmyra New York. It notes that the meeting of Matthias and Smith was one of hundreds of strange religious events that occurred all across the United States from the 1820s through the 1840s.

Pratt, with Oliver Cowdery, Ziba Peterson, and Peter Whitmer, traveled to the Indian Territory. En route, they stopped at Kirtland and Mentor, Ohio, baptizing over a hundred converts, including Sidney Rigdon. They emphasized priesthood authority, the coming millennium, and the building of a New Jerusalem. In Lorain County, Pratt was arrested for debt, but escaped through subterfuge. In Sandusky, they taught the Wyandot, and crossing into Indian Territory, Shawnee and Delaware. Threatened with arrest for unauthorized preaching to Native Americans, they returned to Missouri. Pratt served several preaching missions, including one to the North Union Shakers. In Missouri, he taught school then led a “School of Prophets.” Conflicts with old settlers erupted, and the Mormons were expelled from Jackson County, the first in a series of persecutions that would define his life.

In Ohio, the collapse of the Kirtland Safety Society (bank), part of a nationwide banking failure, fractured the church. Pratt’s wife Thankful Halsey died following the birth of Parley Pratt Jr. Very soon after, he married Mary Ann Frost. Pressured by Joseph Smith on a loan, Pratt broke with the prophet. After reconciliation, he left on New York City mission. There he wrote his masterpiece, A Voice of Warning, influenced by Baconianism, millennialism, and his preference for biblical literalism over spiritualizing. Pratt elaborated a theology of Native Americans, and of restoration and authority more in line with Seekerism than Primitivism. In a pamphlet written in response to Methodist newspaper editor La Roy Sunderland, Pratt began to plumb deeper theology.

This chapter begins a two-chapter treatment of the early Mormon temple cultus. Beginning in the “School of the Prophets” with images of sealing to salvation, ritual purification (washing and anointing), the Kirtland, Ohio, temple cultus of the 1830s incorporated the charismatic and evangelistic “endowment of power,” laying the groundwork for the Nauvoo, Illinois, cultus of the 1840s. Kirtland also witnessed the introduction of the important and powerful figure of Elijah as the angelic patron of temple and intergenerational association.

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.

This chapter argues that early Mormons created temple spaces to gain special blessings of God's spirit beyond the conversion experience. The Kirtland Temple fulfilled this function but remained in infrequent use after most of the Saints in northern Ohio left the area in 1838. New temples were built by subsequent Mormon communities in places like Nauvoo, Illinois, and later in the intermountain West. New theologies of human redemption were enacted in these spaces that went well beyond the neo-evangelical Mormon theology of the Kirtland era. No early Latter Day Saint systematized the emerging temple theology practiced in Kirtland. However, as a vernacular theology, their temple cultus can in part be approached as the outworking of an iconic reading of the scripture.

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.

This chapter narrates Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints' and Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' interactions at the sacred shrine from 1900 to 1964. The sometimes awkward early twentieth-century meetings between these two groups set the patterns for later interactions at the temple. A rich folklore about the temple was generated by the two competing denominations, and they shared in disseminating tales to one another. In the process, they reconstructed the Kirtland Temple's history to meet their present denomination's needs. In many ways, the Kirtland Temple proved to be a mirror for these groups, reflecting the image of the beholder. That the other group could not see the same image proved an obvious point of contention. At the same time, the temple began to be more physically accessible to members of both churches as an American tourist industry arose that would transform pilgrimage to the temple.

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 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.

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.

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 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 concluding chapter argues that individuals “build” sacred sites through varied discourse on what a site means. Indeed, each pilgrim and each site guide are best seen as building the Kirtland Temple and contributing to its collective meaning. Despite the relatively fixed location of the site, the agents who build the Kirtland Temple are actually in the process of constructing confessional and ideological sites rather than a singular site, temples rather than a singular temple. The physical temple itself simply provides the finite set of terms out of which groups have created many different variations. As such, the physical site itself has become a platform for improvised ecclesiastical performance and contestation. Moreover, various Mormon groups use the temple as a place to shape, transform, and justify their particular group commitments.

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.

Smith culminated his metaphysics of translation in the rites of the Nauvoo temple in the early 1840s. The temple rites were a striking combination of Smith’s targums, the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, Freemasonry, ancient mystery religions, and his sense about the connections of humans and texts. This liturgy was Smith’s final rereading of the Hebrew Bible’s primeval history, and it pulled his followers to Eden and thence to heaven as transformed, divine beings. These rites were an apotheosis not just of Smith’s followers but also of his metaphysics of translation. In the temple, Smith worked to define space and time in terms of human beings. In an echo of Hebrew genealogies, Smith measured time in parental bonds effected by a force he called priesthood. These bonds at the base of time tied God to humanity and humans to each other.