Temple Garments and Temple Changes in the 20th and 21st Centuries

1904 marked the beginning of what would become a grueling, four-year-long Senate hearing of U. S. Senator and Apostle Reed Smoot. It is intriguing and important to learn how this crucible of intensive government examination into every aspect of the Church led Church leaders to a posture of much greater openness about the temple to outsiders. In fact, those hearings, followed by a backfired blackmail attempt by a man who threatened to release illicit pictures he had taken of the interior of the Salt Lake Temple, led church leaders, really for the first time, to go on the offensive and proactively tell our own story about LDS temple beliefs and practices. In this episode of Church History Matters, we’ll talk about the Smoot hearings and the blackmail attempt, as well as dig into the origin of temple garments, their symbolism, and changes made to their design over the years. We’ll also discuss major innovations in how the temple endowment was presented, which included some help from Walt Disney Studios; a cool, floating temple boat idea that never happened; as well as how President Gordon B. Hinckley’s temple innovations and prolific temple-building ministry became an inflection point which set the church on a trajectory to build thousands of temples in the years to come.

This is the ninth episode of our 10-part podcast series on Temple Worship. For a full transcript of this episode, as well as show notes and additional resources, visit our website at https://doctrineandcovenantscentral.o...

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Originally published May 7, 2024

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