Note: This commentary is a part of my “Saints Who Swear” series wherein I challenge attacks from apostates and haters of the LDS Church. I have chosen to use very salty language. I swear, a lot. If swear words offend you in the slightest, please do not read on.
Some anonymous person, anonymous like most apostates on social media, runs a website called LDS Discussions. He/she/it has tons of apostate garbage, like it is a full-time job, about how untrue the Gospel of Jesus Christ is through the lens of the LDS Church. A recent post on Twitter led me to this person’s research into how Joseph Smith supposedly crafted the LDS Temple Endowment from Masonic rituals — as if this claim is both new and true.
Of course, the LDS Temple practices, what we call ordinances, such as its Initiatory and Endowment sessions, draw a lot of outside attention, primarily because these ordinances are sacred to faithful Saints. By now, deep into the age of the Internet, these ordinances are hardly a secret precisely due to exposure by apostates. At some point, people like and including LDS Discussions got weirded out by ordinance practices and “uncovered” or “reported” to the world how crazy those practices are — so weirded out that they leave the Church and then want everyone to do so too.
If you are reading this you probably know that faithful Saints enter the temple to make sacred covenants. Millions of Latter-day Saints have done so. I have done so and continue to do so. I love the temple and its ordinances. But apostates write their “exposes” A) like the rest of us don’t know what “we’ve gotten ourselves into,” and B) like we give a shit about what they say. BTW, this is me not giving a shit about LDS Discussions and writing, as I do under Saints Who Swear, about how ridiculous apostates are.
So, let’s get to it. Is there any faithful Latter-day Saint who doesn’t know that Joseph Smith was a Mason? Is there any faithful Latter-day Saint who isn’t aware that Masonic rituals look, sound, and feel an awful lot like LDS temple ordinances?
I was 22 years old, a convert nearly two years, and a new student at Brigham Young University, when I read about the similarities between Masonic rituals and LDS temple ordinances, especially the Endowment. I read about how Joseph moved up the Masonic ladder faster than anyone had done at the time. He knew it all –almost as if he knew the rituals before the Masons did.
Gee, how could that be? Apostates don’t think it could be. Apostates believe in the faith of their own Church of Apostasy that Joseph simply begged, borrowed, or stole Masonic rituals and turned them into LDS temple ordinances. What a clever young man, that Joseph Smith.
In truth, Joseph called the Masonic rituals the “apostate Endowment.” He taught that the Endowment was revealed anciently to God’s prophets and that eventually, as everything sacred does, the Endowment became corrupted. The corrupted Endowment is the Masonic ritual that Joseph entertained. Joseph knew of the pure Endowment way before he entered a Masonic temple and participated in the corrupted rituals.
LDS Discussions believes that the narrative about an ancient Endowment is bullshit. His/her/its narrative believes that the Masonic rituals were of comparatively recent history, not ancient. LDS Discussions does not believe in a Masonic narrative that does accept its ancient roots. He/she/it believes a more popular and competing non-religious narrative that Masonic rituals were created out of thin air in the 1700s. “We now know that the Masonic ceremony did not originate until around 2,000 years after Solomon’s temple…”
He/she/it knows that. What bullshit. Nobody knows that. Masons don’t even know that. As I alluded to, the most popular Masonic narrative holds to the founding of Freemasonry in 1717 in England. Many Masons believe its roots are ancient and they have had big debates about it. The more popular version is generally accepted because historians cannot trace Masonic roots anciently. Hence, LDS Discussions happily announces that even Mormon apologists don’t believe that the Masonic rituals are ancient and are the “apostate Endowment.”
Quoting a guy from Fair Mormon, an organization of LDS apologists, “Unfortunately, there is no historical evidence to support a continuous functioning line from Solomon’s Temple to the present.” Yeah, no shit. Look at what that guy said. “No historical evidence to support a continuous functioning line.” Historians cannot find a “continuous functioning line.” Well then, the ancient narrative cannot possibly be true. Thanks, historians.
Here’s an idea for faithful Latter-day Saints: What if we just take the word of a prophet of God that Masonic rituals are the “apostate Endowment”? What if we just stay smart enough to understand that an absence of ancient history is not proof that ancient history did not exist? And maybe, just maybe, what if we simply ignore imagined narratives from apostates? Do you think you can do those things — things that faithful Saints do?
