Biography of Shared Mormon Sacred Space

The seventy-year-old matriarch of Mormonism’s first family, Lucy Mack Smith, composed a now-famous family memoir in 1845, less than a year after the deaths of three of her sons, all leaders in the early Mormon church. In an early chapter, Lucy recalled a scene from the previous decade where Joseph, her middle son and founder of the movement, led a meeting of Mormon priesthood members at Kirtland, Ohio. The gathered priesthood solemnly considered “building another meeting House,” Lucy recalled, “as the first was now rather small to afford room for the increased congregation. . . . Some thought that it would be better to build a frame [house],” she continued, while “others said that a frame [house] was too costly kind of a house—and the majority concluded upon the putting up a log house.” Then, as if waiting for the right moment to arrive, “Joseph rose and reminded them that they were not making a house for themselves or any other man but a house for God[.] And shall we brethren build a house for our God of logs[?]” To this rhetorical question, Lucy’s Joseph dramatically responded, “No brethren I have a better plan than that[.] I have the plan of the house of the Lord given by himself.” [1] Rather triumphantly, Joseph “gave them the plan in full of the house of the Lord at Kirtland which when the brethren heard they were highly delighted.” Although the minutes from the likely meeting that Lucy recounts do not record the dialogue that she composed in her memoir, Lucy Mack Smith provided a dramatic explanation for the origins of the Kirtland Temple that would have resonated deeply with her fellow nineteenth-century Mormons. Lucy’s Joseph Smith had a pattern for the temple given to him straight from heaven—a shorthand explanation, incidentally, for how Mormons came to believe that most of their church’s rituals, teachings, and ecclesiastical offices emerged, too. Perhaps most importantly, Lucy’s Joseph Smith unified his community with the pattern of the temple. Where there once was debate and confusion, Smith, through the pattern of the temple, brought order and peace.

If early Mormons were a people who believed they were given a divine “pattern” from heaven in all things, they were also a people who believed they were “prepared” by God by their previous experiences to receive such divine knowledge. Here, the context in which early Mormons lived was crucially important to them, as it is in different ways for modern historians who seek to explain early Mormons within their antebellum American setting. When early Latter Day Saints used the word “temple,” they already had a working conception of what that word meant. In Bourdieu’s terms, early Latter Day Saints carried with them a “habitus” that included the term “temple,” as well as bodily expectations of what could be experienced in such a holy place. The shared cultural matrix of early Mormonism affected how Mormons interpreted and acted upon Joseph Smith’s revelatory reworking of an antebellum evangelical concept of a temple. Of course, emphasizing a shared cultural matrix glosses over the manifold differences that early Mormons also held with one another.