{"id":50313,"date":"2025-06-11T03:00:22","date_gmt":"2025-06-11T09:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=50313"},"modified":"2025-06-11T12:42:00","modified_gmt":"2025-06-11T18:42:00","slug":"selling-temples","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2025\/06\/selling-temples\/","title":{"rendered":"Selling Temples"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

It\u2019s no secret that <\/span>some are worried that the Church is overbuilding temples<\/span><\/a>. While most make some sense in terms of the Church\u2019s goal of having a temple close and accessible to members, anecdotes abound about temples being put very proximate to other temples that are already suffering from low attendance, and in the worst case scenario the question may naturally arise about what to do with temples who through the vagaries of long-term geodemographic fate end up hardly used at all and sitting virtually empty month-by-month with perhaps a caretaker senior couple.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

If the worst case hypothetical comes to pass\u2013and again I\u2019m not saying that it will, just that it\u2019s a possibility\u2013the question naturally arises as to what we are comfortable doing with the unused temples.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In a sense we\u2019ve gone through this before with having to leave the pre-Utah temples, but that was a different context in which the decision was made for us. Brigham Young wouldn\u2019t have been able to just assign a guardian or two to Nauoo to keep it up for the next hundred years before it was usable again. Much more difficult is the question about what to do when we have all legal rights to the temple, it\u2019s just simply unused and has no realistic prospects of being used in the future.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This is a hard thing for some of us to conceptualize since my childhood assumption of an upward growth trajectory forever is meeting the reality of secularization, smaller families, and diminishing proselytizing returns in the developed, and sometimes developing, world. So the day may come when \u201cwait until the Church is big enough to service the temple\u201d is not practical.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Even if we continue to tread water demographically population flows within an area might lead to the same situation as if there was a population collapse. If there\u2019s a Chernobyl 2.0 and 3-Mile Island Temple becomes a no-go Zone only frequented by urban explorers, or if rural areas become hollowed out as a declining population moves more to the city like what is happening currently in Japan, the result will be the same\u2013temples sitting empty and unused for the foreseeable future.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

So what would we do with them? I don’t have a strong opinion about any of this, I just want to think \u201cout loud\u201d through the implications and possibilities.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

We do sell meetinghouses occasionally for similar reasons (the meetinghouse my mother was baptized in is now a Baptist church), but temples have a more capital-S sacredness to them, so I suspect we would be more hesitant to, say, sell it and let people repurpose it into a daycare or private school like the grand mainstream Protestant churches out here on the East Coast.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

No, I assume we\u2019d demolish it first. Of course, since decommissioning temples is a new thing for us we don\u2019t have a lot of precedent to rely on, but we might be able to crib some insights into how other faiths have handled similar situations. For example, some faiths have land-use restrictions on their properties that they sale (even if their ability to be legally enforced past the first sale of the property is arguable<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

Would we be particular about who we are selling the plot to and what it would be used for? In the Catholic Church there\u2019s a whole aspect of canon law that deals with who you can sell old church buildings (which serve both their \u201ctemple\u201d and \u201cmeetinghouse\u201d functions) to since, on some level presumably they believe that the consecration to some extent remains, so it would be problematic from a Catholic perspective if it was used as, say, a strip club, abortion clinic, or Masonic temple.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

So that’s one approach, but I don’t know that we\u2019d care as much. I get the sense that in the Latter-day Saint context once something is de-consecrated, as it were, it doesn’t have the same sense of residual sacrality.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

That brings up another compare\/contrast point. We have sacralization\/consecration ceremonies, but unlike some faiths we don\u2019t have de-sacralization ceremonies. People aren\u2019t excommunicated by the laying on of hands. I\u2019ve heard different takes on whether it’s appropriate to use garments as rags once the symbols are cut out\/burned. When temples are remodeled as far as I know it is considered \u201cprofane\u201d (in the technical sense of the term simply meaning everyday and not set apart) once the construction crew gets to work (I\u2019ve always thought it would be weird and uncomfortable to be the first renovation guy that takes down a temple wall with a sledgehammer).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

So again, I don’t have a strong opinion on how we should handle this if it comes to pass, but just some possible implications and issues we would have to address policy and theology-wise if this is something we\u2019re faced with as people increasingly disappear from the landscape.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s no secret that some are worried that the Church is overbuilding temples. While most make some sense in terms of the Church\u2019s goal of having a temple close and accessible to members, anecdotes abound about temples being put very proximate to other temples that are already suffering from low attendance, and in the worst case scenario the question may naturally arise about what to do with temples who through the vagaries of long-term geodemographic fate end up hardly used at all and sitting virtually empty month-by-month with perhaps a caretaker senior couple.\u00a0 If the worst case hypothetical comes to pass\u2013and again I\u2019m not saying that it will, just that it\u2019s a possibility\u2013the question naturally arises as to what we are comfortable doing with the unused temples.\u00a0 In a sense we\u2019ve gone through this before with having to leave the pre-Utah temples, but that was a different context in which the decision was made for us. Brigham Young wouldn\u2019t have been able to just assign a guardian or two to Nauoo to keep it up for the next hundred years before it was usable again. Much more difficult is the question about what to do when we have all legal […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10403,"featured_media":50316,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2900],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-50313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-temples"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/9307bc10-817f-461f-a4ce-6ec14109fa67.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50313","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10403"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50313"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50313\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50411,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50313\/revisions\/50411"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/50316"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}