The LDS Church recently made changes to their temple endowment ceremony. Rumor has it that the Cutlerite endowment has changed very little since the death of Joseph Smith. Steve Shields said it appears Cutlerites believe women hold priesthood in their temple ordinances!
Alpheus Cutler is the founder of the group often referred to as the Cutlerites.
Steve: Alpheus Cutler’s church has always been small, and they do not proselytize. They don’t believe in that. Alpheus Cutler is said to have been given a revelation that in the last days there will only be two and from that small branch, God will redeem Zion. So, they don’t worry too much about that. They’re getting older.
GT: They’re the ones who still have a temple ceremony. Is that right?
Steve: Yes, they do. The upper room work is conducted in their building in Independence. I’ll say on a regular basis. That doesn’t mean every day or every week necessarily. I don’t know any more about it than that. Nobody does except them and I respect that. I’m very curious, of course.
Steve: So, that building is, in all intents and purposes, it’s a temple and it would resemble the Kirtland Temple model except Kirtland had no font. But, the upstairs room for the priesthood on the second floor, they weren’t necessarily doing rituals there, but they did some washings and anointings upstairs on the third floor in the attic level. And so, on the second floor of the Cutlerite buildings in Minnesota and Independence, that’s dedicated as a holy place. They call it the upper room work. They don’t use the term endowment. They do know what that means because we’ve talked about it with them. But, I do know. They’ve told me this, that women are ordained as high priestesses in the celestial church, not in the outer church, not in the public church. They have no priesthood in the public church.
GT: Oh, so women have a temple priesthood, but not an Ecclesiastical priesthood.
Steve: Exactly. Yeah, that’s right. That’s the extent of my knowledge about that. A few years ago when…
GT: That’s interesting, Michael Quinn, in my current interview, just kind of said the LDS have the same thing. Jonathan Stapley said, “Well, we don’t want to call it priesthood.” But Quinn wasn’t nearly as careful on that.
Steve: Yeah. Well, I’m in the Quinn camp on that issue.
How big are they? Check out our conversation….
We’ll also discuss a break off from the RLDS Church called the House of Aaron.
Steve: The House of Aaron is based at Eskdale, Utah. And they used to be called the Aaronic Order or the Order of Aaron. Morris Glendening was the founder, promoter of that. In the recent 10 or 12 years, they’ve been having lots of conversation with Fred Larsen and the Remnant Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. John Conrad, who is the leader of the House of Aaron, his father was Bob Conrad, who was the chief high priest successor to Morris Glendening as chief high priest. John has gone out to Independence many times with folks their church. They’ve shifted a lot since Glendening’s times in the ’40’s. They always said they were not Mormons and yet all of their members had been Mormons.
Have you heard of the House of Aaron before?
In this episode, Steve Shields and I discuss some of the larger and smaller Mormon groups: fundamentalists. Many of these fundamentalists practice polygamy.
Steve: The FLDS has 8,000 to 10,000. The Apostolic United Brethren and has 8,000 to 10,000, somewhere in that range. Those are the two largest organized groups, organized structural institutions. I’ve heard numbers of 50 or 60,000 fundamentalist Mormons all told. There’s either some smaller, like the Centennial Park–I don’t want to call them a group because the Centennial Park priesthood affiliation, maybe as a way to talk about those. You’ve got Naylor and Nielsen. You’ve got the guy up in British Columbia, Winston Blackmore. He’s actually incorporated as the Church of Jesus Christ (Original Doctrine). That’s their corporate filing in Canada. He’s got 500 or so. Nielson and Naylor and Blackmore have been kind of doing some, they’ve not merged per se, but some cross affiliation because Nielsen and Naylor’s problem with the Jeffs family was very similar with Winston’s. So frankly, in all of the fundamentalist Mormons, there’s very little doctrinal difference, if any at all. It has to do with priesthood authority. Who has the legitimate line?
GT: I talked with Anne Wilde and one things that she said was really the largest group are what she would call independent or unaffiliated.
Steve: That’s right. Most of them are unaffiliated but they do fellowship with each other. You’ve got a large following: Fred Collier, Tom Green and others who believe in what they called the patriarchal order. Every father is a patriarch over his own family and has full authority to ordain his children, the male children.
Given that Cutlerites believe endowed women have a temple priesthood (not ecclesiastical), do you think the same thought process applies to LDS women? What do you think about these polygamist groups?
Wheat & Tares 
“So frankly, in all of the fundamentalist Mormons, there’s very little doctrinal difference, if any at all.” What?
I think there is quite a bit of diversity in practice which reflects differences in doctrine or interpretation. For starters. consider the two biggest groups mentioned above. FLDS and AUB. They differ far more than various protestant churches by an enormous amount. The unaffiliated or independent groups are nebulous in their beliefs and hard to tell sometimes but not the same. Differences in belief is why they split, as much as leadership power struggles. Just like the first huge split in 1844 between mountain Mormons who went west with Brigham and prairie Mormons who stayed in the midwest or thereabouts and some congealed into the RLDS which became the Community of Christ..
None of these groups have gone through the CORRELATION MOVEMENT which has an enormous influence on us. The way we so called mainstream Mormons think about women is like in a different universe and little resembles our own historical roots and the other branches more recent changes.Not to mention the opposite direction the former RLDS went with the role of women and the splintering backlash to that. I see major differences between the women I personally knew in my extended family- between my numerous cousins children and my grandparents generation with huge sibling sets. Today LDS women have no Priesthood and “never” did according to correlated retroactive revelation. Every other variation in the many fundy groups is seen as quirky at best and wrong.
One Lord, one faith, one baptism. Yeh right.
Diversity of practice is not the same as doctrinal difference.
Have you heard of the House of Aaron before?
I am somewhat familiar with them because the Eskdale community produced a significant number of music students at the University of Utah in the mid seventies. The community had a strict dress code, which the women adhered too. (Maybe the men didn’t adhere to theirs or maybe they just didn’t attend the U–I don’t know.) According to Wikipedia, the dress code has been relaxed since then, so they would not be as conspicuous.