Temple Tourism

Visiting temples has been a highlight for me. Winter Quarters was especially meaningful on a recent trip. We’re working our way through the Utah temples passport book with my teens this summer, which has been a nice way to focus our weeks on temple trips. In some ways it feels a little funny to make light of the serious nature of the work by calling it “temple tourism,” but if it gets people to attend more, that’s the goal!

Many people I know get married in exotic or historic temples like SLC, San Diego, Hawaii, Switzerland, London or Preston, etc. Mark my words…we won’t go another 10 years without a policy forbidding this and asking people to be married in their (or an) assigned temple. (I will wager you a bet that this happens.) I don’t think it will be long at all before the inefficiency and trouble this causes tourist-temples will weigh on the brethren and a logical, but heart-breaking rule will come out stating that all temples are the same, and that you should use your closest temple. Good news for the kids in the Avenues, sucks for kids from The Dakotas.

We didn’t attend the Nauvoo temple when we were in Nauvoo because we were there with two small children and sitter. But we’ve sometimes attended the temple when we were visiting family (in Utah, for instance) when there was a grandparent to watch the kids. Now we have a local temple and a child old enough to babysit, so it’s a non-issue.

Hedgehog, Perhaps ther are American mormons who think they have been married in UK temples and are in fact living in sin.

I got married in the picturesque San Diego temple, but in fairness both me and my bride had established domiciles in San Diego at the time. It was only a destination wedding by virtue of the fact that both of our families had to travel by air to get there.

I find it interesting that a small group of “destination temples” has arisen in our culture, possibly as an outgrowth of the rise of the wedding industry. For this, I blame the Church for building a glut of unremarkable cookie-cutter temples, while occasionally building special heritage temples (Nauvoo, Winter Quarters, etc.) in remote locations that wouldn’t normally have a membership base to support them.

Having attended at least a dozen temples in the U.S. and abroad, the novelty of Temple Tourism has mostly worn off–because no matter where it is, or what language it’s in, the ordinances and the movies are exactly the same. Kind of like traveling overseas and going to McDonalds just because you can, and discovering the food there is as bad as you remember it from back home. Once you are inside, the uniqueness is lost. And it doesn’t make sense to travel far to a crowded destination temple when I can have the exact same experiences in my unimpressive, poorly attended local temple, at a fraction of the cost.

However, there are a few exceptions from my personal experiences:

-The celestial room in San Diego has small upstairs balcony-like alcoves that allow you to look out over the whole room, and get a little bit of privacy at the same time. I like having my own space during that time, and prefer to be left alone, so this is ideal. Unfortunately, many temples now have smallish celestial rooms that quickly get crowded. Plus I hate unexpectedly running into someone I know in the temple; small talk in the celestial room is the most awkward kind. I don’t know of any other temple that has similar “privacy” features.
-Also in San Diego, the upper level of the celestial room has an unrestricted stairway that leads to the sealing room floor, which has an atrium flower garden, and a general décor and layout that looks like part of a Star Trek set. It’s nice to exit the celestial room after a session and spend a few moments here, which is usually empty on weeknights.
-A live endowment session in SLC or Manti is worth doing at least once, if only as a historical curiosity. The artisan craftsmanship is a plus.
-Manhattan, NY: I loved the feeling of coming up out of the filthy subway into daylight, then going a short distance to the relatively clean entrance, then up the elevator to the spaces of the temple to fully shed the filth/noise/chaos of the world below. It’s much smaller in there then you might be used to, and the non-contiguous building configuration makes it an interesting experience. They seem to do more with less there, and it’s great.

That is a neat idea. I want to go to the Nauvoo temple myself.

I’ve been to 7, although nearly all were my assigned local temple at the time, and the others were within an hour’s drive time on the Wasatch Front.

I’ll take Mortimer’s bet. The Church, I think, will readily accept temple attendance wherever it may be, and a “local temple only” policy would decimate places like Nauvoo, WQ, Washington D.C. It would also be inconvenient for marriages when the bride and groom want to meet at some temple midway between their families, or one near their childhood home. My cousin got married earlier this summer in Draper, because his bride wanted the Wasatch Front temple with the largest sealing room!

With the current scanning of temple recommends, I’ll bet some Church statistician already data on temple tourism at his fingertips.

Mortimer,
I do not think that any policy will be officially published yet. Also, unlike some other destination temples, the Salt Lake temple has an almost unlimited pool of potential workers, sealers, etc. to handle large volumes of weddings.
The Other Clark also brings up a very valid point about the size of the sealing room. Almost half of the local, young couples from around here get married in Utah. Yes they are in school out there, but I think the size of the wedding party would exceed capacity at our small temple. Just have everyone from back home travel to Utah and get a big room. This may be a big decision for my teenagers in just a few years.

I’ll be the last person to ever take up temple tourism.

It bothers me when I tell somebody I went to, say, Atlanta, and they immediately ask, “Did you go to the temple there?” No, I didn’t. I was busy experiencing Atlanta.

Maybe this is a holdover from the old days. Maybe it made sense, if you lived in Colorado in 1965 and passed through Mesa, to stop and do a session. Today, if you drive across I-70, visiting every temple, you are going to be making a lot of stops. Yet I get the impression that some people feel obligated to do so.