Holiness to the Lord: A Conversation with Jonathan Stapley

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Aug 24, 2025

Jonathan Stapley, a historian with two decades of temple study, delves into the sacred complexities of Latter-day Saint life. He discusses his new book, exploring the temple's origins, Joseph Smith's transformative rituals, and generational shifts in practices. Jonathan candidly addresses difficult questions about worthiness, temple recommends, and the pain of conditional participation. He also shares insights on the connection between temple rituals and Freemasonry, enriching our understanding of the faith's evolving spiritual mission.

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INSIGHT

Rituals Shape Religious Meaning

Rituals give shared actions meaning by encoding beliefs into repeated, non‑productive acts.
Joseph Smith ritualized biblical archetypes to transform people into priests and priestesses.

INSIGHT

Masonic Forms, Different Purpose

Joseph Smith encountered Freemasonry and borrowed its social technology, not its narrative content.
He repurposed ceremonial forms to present Latter‑day Saint theological meanings like the plan of salvation.

INSIGHT

Purpose Trumps Mechanism

Focus on mechanisms (where forms come from) distracts from purpose (what ritual does).
The temple's purpose differs fundamentally from Freemasonry despite surface similarities.

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We’re excited today to talk about the temple. It’s a topic we love—one that sits at the heart of our faith—but because of its sacred nature, it can sometimes be difficult to explore openly.

Our guest today is historian Jonathan Stapley, who has spent the past two decades studying the temple and its role in Latter-day Saint life. His new book, Holiness to the Lord, is coming out this fall, and it incorporates a remarkable collection of never-before-seen archival records.

The book explores the temple’s earliest origins and the ways Joseph Smith drew on the book of Revelation and biblical archetypes to transform ordinary people into priests and priestesses through covenant, community, and ritual. Jonathan also documents the generational shifts in temple practice over time and the sacred work the temple has been doing in the lives of Latter-day Saints from the beginning to today.

We’re especially grateful that Jonathan was willing to engage some of the harder questions—things that don’t always fit neatly in a Sunday School setting, but that many of us carry quietly. He speaks candidly about temple recommends, garments, and evolving expectations around worthiness. We got to ask him about the temple’s connection to Masonic rituals (how similar are they, really?) and about how we sit with the very real pain that can come with conditional temple participation—especially when its means leaving family members behind for temple sealings.

Jonathan brings both deep scholarship and lived faith to this conversation. He helps us see the temple as a living, evolving expression of our faith—one that reflects a divine invitation to connection, transformation, and covenant belonging, and that draws us into Joseph’s bold, sacred project: to bring heaven to earth.

Preorder the book from Bookshop.org
Preorder the book from Amazon

Join us for an event discussing the relationship between ancient and modern temples at The Compass Gallery on Sept 21.

Read what we've published about temples in our magazine, Wayfare.