Why Mormons Leave

The reasons › The founding claims

The temple and Freemasonry

The endowment was introduced seven weeks after Joseph Smith became a Mason, borrowed its signs and tokens from Masonic ritual, and has been revised repeatedly since.

Nauvoo Temple (flipped Daguerreotype) · Lucian Rose Foster · Public domain

What members were taught

The endowment was revealed to Joseph Smith and restores the ordinances of Solomon's temple. It has always been performed the same way. Its resemblance to Masonry, if you have heard of it, is because Masonry preserved fragments of the ancient original.

What the record shows

The endowment was introduced seven weeks after Joseph Smith became a Mason, borrowed its signs and tokens from Masonic ritual, and has been revised repeatedly since.

The temple is the center of Latter-day Saint worship and the thing members are most reluctant to discuss. That reticence cuts both ways. Members are told very little about the ceremony before they enter, and the few who know its history are discouraged from talking about it. So when a member discovers, usually online, that the endowment's tokens, signs, and penalties are recognizably Masonic and that Joseph Smith introduced the ceremony within weeks of joining the Salt Lake City lodge's predecessor in Nauvoo, there is often no one to ask.

The 2011 survey found the Masonic connection a major factor for 43% and the changes to the ceremony a major factor for 35%. The second figure is worth pausing on. The ceremony is taught as eternal and revealed; members who attended before 1990 made covenants, with penalties, that members after 1990 never heard. Those who attended before 2019 heard women covenant to obey their husbands. A ceremony that changes with the culture looks, to many respondents, like a ceremony that came from the culture.

In the survey's regression analysis, "changes in the temple ceremony" was one of a handful of issues that predicted leaving rather than staying. Members who could tolerate a great deal of difficult history found it harder to keep attending a ritual they had stopped believing was ancient.

What people actually name

From the crowd-sourced 2014 comprehensive list, lightly edited.

  • Joseph Smith was initiated as a Master Mason in March 1842 and introduced the endowment in May 1842; the handshakes, signs, penalties, and much of the staging match Masonic ritual of the period.
  • Penalties in which participants mimed their own death were removed in 1990; the requirement that women covenant to obey their husbands was softened in 1990 and removed in 2019; other wording changed in 2005 and 2023.
  • The ceremony is presented as unchanging and eternal, so each revision raises the question of which version God intended.
  • Members are asked to make covenants before hearing them, and many describe the first experience as frightening, boring, or alienating rather than sacred.

What the Church has said

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