Earlier this year, significant changes were made to the LDS temple endowment. As a follow-up to an earlier essay about the patriarchal theology of the endowment ritual, this essay will explore the evolution of the LDS endowment over the past 33 years regarding the covenants female patrons make.
In the previous essays, we have summarized the research literature on the cognitive and behavioral correlates of conspiracy belief along three general categories—epistemic, existential, and social motives. In this essay, we will explore the functional similarities between religious and conspiracist discourse, using Mormonism as an ethnographic lens.
The Adam-God doctrine may be a “deadly heresy” in the current LDS church, but ideas that have their origins in this doctrine remain at the center of Mormon theology today. Let’s discuss how current temple worship and LDS teachings/policies regarding gender and sexuality continue to be influenced by ideas initially developed as part of Young’s polygynist cosmology.
The lessons this week are focused on directing members to identify the ways they are blessed by restored priesthood authority and the rituals and ordinances pertaining thereunto. A major emphasis of the lesson materials is devoted to gender complementarianism and gaslighting women into accepting the policy of male-exclusive ordination in the LDS church.
This week’s “Come, Follow Me” lessons cover “the Vision” of the afterlife that dramatically expanded Mormon theology in 1832. In my most detailed response on the 2021 curriculum so far, we take a close look at the historical and intellectual context of D&C § 76, and how the modern church is shifting its narrative.
The Easter lessons in the 2021 Come, Follow Me manuals focus primarily on reinforcing Joseph Smith’s charismatic authority, and secondarily on promoting the penal substitution model of atonement characteristic of Christian fundamentalism.
The temple endowment has long been a tool that indoctrinates members to accept a hierarchy that exalts men by subjugating women. Perhaps then it is unsurprising to see the earliest uses of the proxy endowment ritual for the dead being used to do the same to deceased women.
In 1905, two apostles were pressured to resign from the Quorum of the Twelve over their opposition to the end of polygamy. They were merely being true to what Joseph Smith taught was “the most holy and important doctrine ever revealed to man on the earth.”