My Last Comment on the Temple in Cody? (Probably Not)

Yesterday, Saturday, I received an important communication from one “Jack Anderson” — perhaps it’s his real name, perhaps it’s not — that reads as follows:

The Brighamite Mormon church was founded by a sexual predator and is infested with sexual predators.

It is perfectly reasonable for the good people of Cody to do whatever possible to drive the groomers out of their town and back to Utah.

I’m actually pleased that Jack A. isn’t trying to hide behind pretexts like zoning issues, “light pollution,” and the height of the temple spire.  His forthright call for for a crusade to strip the Latter-day Saints of their  First Amendment religious freedom and their human rights and to expel them from Wyoming is refreshing for its candor.

As I said to Jack A., I hope that he will be as vocal as he can possibly be, and that he will become the recognized face and the acknowledged voice of the opposition to the Cody Wyoming Temple.

I also recommended that he consult the work of Jennifer Roach concerning sexual predation within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  She is a former Protestant minister and a trained professional counselor.  In a radically novel approach, she actually consults empirical data before commenting.  Her presentation on the subject at the 2023 FAIR Conference is already available for free, I think, to registered guests.  It will shortly be made even more generally available.

In the meantime, I would like to comment on a couple of issues that have been raised in connection with the proposed temple for Cody.

• Some critics — so far as I can tell, mostly if not all of the disaffected former Latter-day Saint type — have been pointing to the opponents of the Cody Wyoming Temple as an illustration of the fact that Latter-day Saints are not widely liked.  The inference made from this is that we and/or our church are objectively unlikeable, that we behave in unlikeable ways, and that, accordingly, we have brought the hostility upon ourselves.

First of all, it is true that we aren’t popular, generally speaking.  (See “‘We have work to do’: Latter-day Saint image takes another hit in new poll: Americans view Jews, Catholics, Protestants, evangelical Christians, Muslims and atheists more favorably than members of Utah’s predominant faith.”)  We are disdained by a broad swath of the American public (and, I’m confident, well beyond the borders of the United States).

And it is, in fact, obviously true that, were we not Latter-day Saints — a voluntary identity that we take upon ourselves of our own free will and choice and that we are free at any time to jettison — we would not draw the ire of anti-Mormons or the disdain of much of the general population.

But does it necessarily follow that it is Latter-day Saint misbehavior that results in our disappointing, indeed shockingly poor, approval numbers?

Maybe.  Maybe not.  It seems to me that it would be hard to argue that Latter-day Saints have behaved more offensively than did atheists such as Vladimir Lenin, Enver Hoxha, Joseph Stalin, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, and many more.  And yet, if the survey data to which I allude above is to be believed, atheists have a higher approval rating than Latter-day Saints do.  And it would be difficult to point to a Latter-day Saint analog to al-Qaeda, the Taliban, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Boko Haram, or ISIS, or to identity any twentieth-century Latter-day Saint parallels to Islamist terror attacks in Madrid, London, Paris, San Bernardino, and many other locations around the globe.*  And yet, if we trust the survey data, Muslims have a higher approval rating than do Latter-day Saints.

I doubt that the folks who claim that Latter-day Saints are unpopular because they deserve to be unpopular, that we have earned popular disdain, would endorse the same assertion with regard to European Jewry in the years between, say, l’affaire Dreyfus in 1894 and the end of the Nazi death camps in 1945.  I suspect that they would hesitate to justify the Eastern European pogroms in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on the basis of Jewish misbehavior.

• Another argument that I’ve been encountering against the Cody Wyoming Temple is that if construction actually goes forward, it will raise property values in the neighborhood for which it is proposed — thus thrusting innocent Codyites into higher tax brackets.

It’s a curious phenomenon when people complain that something will increase the value of their property.  But let’s take it seriously.  I suppose that the Church could do such concerned citizens a favor by turning the parcel of property that it owns for the temple over to someone else and then joining the new owner in a petition to turn the land into, say, an auto wrecking yard.  Doing so would definitely lower property values and, thus, reduce the property tax burden on the lucky neighbors of the new Acme Auto Wrecking and Scrap Metal Yard.  I expect that they would be very, very happy.

In this connection, by the way, my friend and Interpreter Foundation colleague Allen Wyatt recently called to my attention a 2011 study of ‘The Impact of LDS Temples on Local Property Values,” by Steven J. Danderson, who, at the time, was teaching finance at the university level.  It offers a far more nuanced account of the question.

I’ve posted on five prior occasions here about the controversy that has been swirling around the proposed Cody Wyoming Temple.  (See, in chronological order, “A small tempest about a small temple in Cody,” “In the world after the Fall,” “Once More, on the Conflict in Cody.” “An Update on the Continuing Crisis in Cody, Wyoming,” and “Peggy Brown, Dale Brown, and the Cody Wyoming Temple.”  This is my sixth comment.

*  I say “twentieth-century” in order to bracket the Mountain Meadows Massacre, which occurred, ominously enough, on 11 September 1857.  Still, I don’t grant that the Mountain Meadows Massacre constitutes a genuine parallel — largely because I doubt that a significant proportion of Americans have even heard of it, but also because it is a substantially different kind of event.  (See my “Searching Out the Truth about the Mountain Meadows Massacre” and the books recommended there.)

Posted from Newport Beach, California