In Defense of the Provo Temple
In the October 2021 general conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, church president Russell M. Nelson announced the reconstruction of the Provo Utah Temple. Out of reverence for its most sacred spaces, the church occasionally refurbishes the interior design of its aging temples. Recently, it has undergone extensive efforts to secure the structural integrity of its most vulnerable temples against earthquakes or other natural disasters. I welcomed the news that the Provo Temple would be treated with a similar degree of respect and care.
A month later, the church released renderings for its newly imagined temple design. Rather than simply update the temple’s foundation or interior, this new proposal would apparently require the demolition of the current building, with a completely different temple constructed on the place of the former. As currently constituted, the Provo Temple represents one of the most unique and interesting architectural achievements in the history of the church. The proposed redesign, on the other hand, looks nearly indistinguishable from the other temples currently under construction in Utah.
The Provo Temple turns fifty years old today. In the half-century since its dedication, the temple has served thousands of Provo locals, Brigham Young University students, and missionaries at the church’s flagship training center. There is simply no other temple like it anywhere in the church. The Ogden Temple, designed as a sister temple to Provo, was similarly stripped of its distinctive character with its 2010 reconstruction. The loss of the Provo Temple would mark the final extinction of mid-century modernist temples in Utah. Its loss is a tragedy not only for Mormon architecture, but also for the countless believers whose lives have been touched by this sacred structure.
Experts suggest that a building is most vulnerable to demolition between the ages of twenty and fifty, during which time the public is more inclined to view its design as unfashionable or out-of-date. After fifty years, public attitudes shift to reflect an appreciation for the aesthetic and historical value of a piece of architecture. On its fiftieth birthday, it’s worth considering what the Provo Temple represents — historically, artistically, and spiritually — and why it’s worth preserving.
The Provo Temple is, by most accounts, a bit of an oddball. From its conception, the temple’s experimental design marked a radical departure from the stately neo-Gothic sanctuaries native to Salt Lake, Logan, St. George, and Manti. In the late 1950s, trailblazing church president David O. McKay commissioned architect Emil Fitzer to design a temple that would serve the needs of a dense Mormon community while also providing a model for new, smaller temples to be built across the world. Its interior design plan, now imitated in dozens of younger temples, was a pioneer in its time. Fitzer’s vision called for a central celestial room encircled by six instruction rooms, enabling the temple to operate at unprecedented capacity. The temple’s concern for functional, graceful simplicity and machine-like efficiency reflects not only the ethos of the Modernist style, but also that of an evolving church — a church with its sights set on global expansion in a restless contemporary society.
Its unique exterior, consisting of a broad base, a paneled drum, and a tiered fountain spire, has cemented the temple’s status as a Provo icon. It’s impossible to imagine the Provo skyline without this distinctive piece of architecture. Since the temple’s design forgoes the elaborate ornamentation of pioneer-era temples, it can be easy to miss the building’s many elegant details.
Arch patterns, expanding with each reiteration, adorn each panel of the temple like Russian nesting dolls — a modernist nod to the gothic arches of the past. This motif is then subtly mirrored in the spire above, itself a kind of nested arch. The final arch, it seems, is Squaw Peak, which constitutes the temple’s majestic backdrop. The horizontal repetition of this figure around the circumference of the drum, as well as its infinite vertical expansion, presents a thrilling visual rhythm. To me at least, it suggests the essential unity and interconnectedness of the human race, as well as its potential for eternal increase — a message, of course, which the temple’s rituals attempt to convey.
A sense of fluidity softens the geometry of the exterior, with the top end of each panel gently inflected like a wave and each level of the spire flowing into the other. The drum floats on a body of gold glass which reflects the skies and appears to change color depending on the intensity of the light. Everything about this temple seems to be pointing us heavenward: its quasi-pyramidal shape, its ever-expanding arch pattern and multi-tiered spire, the angel Moroni with his trumpet pointed to the sky, and even its location in the heart of Rock Canyon. It’s been suggested that the temple echoes ancient Egyptian architecture in which angular, layered temples were situated against the backdrop of dramatic cliffs, signifying grandeur and godhood.
The Provo Temple, then, is a monument of contradictions: geometric but flexible, concrete but fluid, alluding to something very old while trying something very new. No other temple better encapsulates the central contradiction of contemporary Christianity—the struggle to make sense of ancient ideas in a modern world, or the impulse to link a time-bound humanity with a timeless God.
Sometimes the temple is derided as resembling a birthday cake or a spaceship (as if either of those were bad things). Others see echoes of a lotus flower. The temple’s eccentricity is its own kind of gift. You, the viewer, have to decide what to make of it. Like the temple endowment, the architecture is a living symbol, demanding careful reflection while offering broad flexibility of interpretation. It may be the only temple which is also a sculpture.
Maybe the most poignant interpretation hearkens back to the Book of Exodus. Local tradition holds that the temple was meant to depict the presence of Jehovah with the camp of Israel. “And the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud to lead them along the way, and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light.” The spire, originally painted orange-gold, was thought to connote the pillar of fire, while the drum, floating on the reflected sky, was meant to represent the cloud. Yet again, the temple weaves a connecting thread between the ancient and the modern, reiterating the hope that God will lead His desert-dwelling people into a future land of promise.
The Provo Temple first welcomed me as a brand-new missionary, wet behind the ears but bursting with energy and conviction. And yet for all my sincerity, I couldn’t shake the feeling, just below the surface, that I had perched myself in a rather precarious position. I began my stay at the Missionary Training Center with the conviction that God had sent me to proclaim His message to a starving world. But as the weeks wore on, I started to sense that my rock-solid foundation was sandier than I cared to confess. I had a good story to tell, and I believed in it, but I had to admit that it sounded far-fetched. A farm boy prophet, a backwoods theophany, buried treasure and ministering angels and Christ Himself in upstate New York. Add to this the fact that I was nineteen years old, secretly gay, and would soon be telling this very American story on the frozen streets of Russia — and you’ll get a sense of the absurdity of it all.
If I was honest with myself, even the most basic elements of my belief were slippery. What did I even mean when I spoke of faith? Was I calling people to repentance or to social conformity? And why would God care so much that we dunk ourselves underwater and recite a set of magic words? More pressingly, why on earth would I, a clueless teenager from the sleepy cradle of suburbia, think myself so important and enlightened as to declare the definitive truth of the universe? I couldn’t even fry an egg.
It seemed like none of the other elders worried about things like that. I was sure, at least, that none of them felt the way I did about other guys. So when I headed to the Provo Temple on a cool Tuesday morning in mid-August, I did so with the nagging sense that I did not belong there, that my pronounced and embarrassing differences might render me incapable of communing with God. But I knew that I needed answers, and if God was going to speak to me then I had as good a right as any to hope for it in the temple.
The morning sky was a pale blue with shocking streaks of orange pink, as if God was up early trying out a new set of paintbrushes. The temple facade reflected the first warm rays of the rising sun, and the angel’s golden trumpet directed my vision up beyond the harsh cliffs of Squaw Peak toward something higher and farther and yet strikingly immediate.
An elderly couple, wrinkly and warm, welcomed me into the house of the Lord. I changed into simple white clothes and took my place in the instruction room. As the endowment ceremony unfolded itself, I began to struggle, alternately dozing off or questioning the purpose of all the choreography. I felt my mood begin to sour. It didn’t help that I had come to the temple on an empty stomach, hoping that a fast might make me more receptive to whatever I was trying to hear. My mission companion, seated alongside me, nodded along contentedly with the ceremony as if everything made obvious sense. As my frustration flared up, I whispered a silent, urgent prayer for patience and clarity. My mind began to settle. I breathed in slowly. Exhaled.
Crossing over into the celestial room, I felt the atmosphere change instantly. I might as well have been plunged into a deep pool of water. It was perfectly still, silent, almost icy — not cold, exactly, but hushed and suspended and crystalline. I chose a soft white armchair and sank into it. I couldn’t find it in me to start my prayer, so I just sat there and drank the silence. I was utterly afraid of what might happen, or what might not happen, but as I drank I felt the fear wash off of me. My skin felt sparkly and clean.
I bowed my head and closed my eyes and thought about that farm boy, whose story now seemed not so distant from my own. And I asked God if his story was true. I felt a burning. I drank it deeply.
I arose and nearly left the room, but something pulled me back. I reclined directly under an image of the resurrected Christ. I’m sure there were other people in the room, but I can’t recall a single soul in that space. I sat alone with Christ, face to face, drenched in perfect stillness. And I suddenly received an answer to a question that I had never dared to ask.
Imagine every one of your bones, your lungs and your vitals and each of your organs, and every drop of your blood — imagine all of it filled with light. Golden, and piercing, and radiant. Imagine it bouncing off the walls of every cell, flooding your veins, refracting wildly off your ribcage. Imagine if every breath you took filled you more deeply, your innards overflowing, the golden excess spilling out through your eyes and ears and nose.
It was something like that. A particle of pure Christian love. He broke off a piece and let me hold it for a while. And I knew instantly, and beyond question, that He knew me better than I did, and that He loved me anyway; that somewhere deep beyond layers of flesh and water, I was made up of that same golden element — glorious, dangerous, eternal. It was the answer that I never thought I needed, to a question I was terrified to ask. And in the years since, other questions have come and gone, and some have never left and probably never will. All of them whither and disintegrate in the blistering light of that one great communication.
Part of the problem with the Provo Temple is that it doesn’t fit neatly into any of our comfortable categories. It’s not old enough to be revered as a relic of pioneer history. It’s not new enough to reflect the church’s most recent aesthetic trends. And since its design is so unconventional, a lot of people just don’t happen to like how it looks.
Whatever your personal taste, you owe it to the House of the Lord to discern what it’s trying to say about itself. If we view it in its proper context, we can recognize the building as a one-of-a-kind symbol of restored Christianity in the space age—bursting with enthusiasm, fearlessly embracing modernity, moving relentlessly into new, cosmic frontiers.
But it means something else to me.
In so many ways, I too find myself unable to fit neatly into one category or another. Even the way my Creator designed me is offensive to some. It can be all too easy to make fun of people like me, or dismiss us, or push us out and replace us with something that better fits the mold. But why shouldn’t a body like mine be a temple, too?
The Provo Temple is a beacon to the misfits. To the black sheep, it whispers: I will leave the ninety and nine, and I will come to you. To the weirdos, it says: ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people. To the square pegs in round holes, it declares: There is no end to matter. There is no end to space. There is space for you, too, in this house.
Allen Roberts, architect of the Tijuana, Mexico Temple, spoke recently about the communicative power of temple architecture. “Every building reflects the values of its owners and architects and builders. So the question is, when you look at any temple or any building: What does that building say about the values of that organization?” What does it say when we tear down the House of God and replace it with the latest cookie-cutter model, less risky but also less distinctive?
I want to believe that there is still room in the church for something unique. I want to believe that holiness doesn’t have to mean sameness. I want to believe in a creative, courageous Christianity — a Christianity that refuses to retreat from the modern world, but that loves it as God does.
Jesus throws down the gauntlet. “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” It sounds like a dare. Try not to believe in my redemptive, restorative power. Try to kill this radical vision of universal love. I will prove you wrong. “But he spake of the temple of his body.”
Until we start to view the temple as a symbol of the embodied Christ, we’ll always underestimate its significance. We’ll always be scrambling to replace it as soon as it goes out of style. But what is the body of Christ, exactly? Paul makes it clear. “For by the Spirit are we all baptized into one body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free; and have been all made to drink into one Spirit…And those members of the body, which we think to be less honourable, upon these we bestow more abundant honour; and our uncomely parts have more abundant comeliness.
And whether one member suffer all the members suffer with it; or one member be honoured, all the members rejoice with it. Now ye are the body of Christ, and members in particular.”
Happy birthday, Provo Temple. And many more.
Note: Brother Juan Becerra, from the Church Community Relations Department, is the representative assigned to receive feedback on the Provo Temple reconstruction. Please contact him at JTBecerra@ChurchofJesusChrist.org to encourage the temple’s preservation. You can also indicate your support at change.org.
