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8 Tour Guiding, 1959–2012 “Good morning, folks. It certainly is nice to have you come to see us here in this lovely old Kirtland Temple, this morning,” began Ray Lloyd, a temple guide, on a 1959 tour. “You have never seen a building like this before,” he continued.It “is the only building of its kind standing in the world today,that we know of, that was built by direct command of God.”1 Fifty years later, as a guide, I began my tours in the Kirtland Temple visitor center with these words: “Welcome to the Kirtland Temple. . . . [T]he Kirtland Temple is a National Historic Landmark and it’s also sacred space for many who come here.” With these short introductory statements, Lloyd and I advanced two different ways of guiding guests through the historic shrine. Lloyd gave a directly confessional belief about the Kirtland Temple; I offered what might seem to be a more distanced, descriptive statement. But in fact, we both offered confessional statements.The content of our confessions was simply different . Lloyd was invested in an RLDS piety that saw his own denomination as the one true church and the Kirtland Temple as a unique manifestation of the will of heaven. In contrast, I was invested in an ecumenical Community of Christ piety that saw its church as one of many true churches and the Kirtland Temple as a manifestation of frontier revivalism and inspiration. I was equally invested in demonstrating my mastery of academic language and advancing nonreligious forms of legitimation (notice my mentioning of the Kirtland Temple as a “National Historic Landmark” and use of the polyvalent academic term “sacred space”). In sum, the RLDS church that Ray Lloyd inhabited and the Community of Christ/RLDS church that I lived in had marked differences. 146 part 3. performance The evolution of tour guiding at the Kirtland Temple reflects select and crucial changes within the Community of Christ/RLDS denomination over the course of the late twentieth century. Specifically, tour performances offer a window into the historical memories that the church deemed important, show how it desired itself to be known by the wider world, and reflect how the denomination interacted with its competitors and changing allies. The KirtlandTemple tours tell as much about the Community of Christ’s general leftward turn in the late twentieth century as they reveal about changing academic knowledge of the Kirtland Temple’s past (and sources of authority deemed legitimate by scriptwriters and performers). For much of my analysis of guide performances, I use six different scripts used by guides at Kirtland—one from 1959, two from 1980, two from 1990, and one from 2000.2 A few words of caution are necessary, though. The six different scripts that I quote were produced for different ends. The 1980 scripts, for instance, were written by anonymous site staff members for a guide manual. Tour guides used the 1980 scripts as models for their performances , but they were not necessarily bound by them. The scripts formed suggested outlines of information that could be shared on tour. In contrast to the official status of the 1980 scripts, the 1959 script that I quote in my introduction actually was written by Ray Lloyd for a talk he gave to a group at another site (probably a church group). Within the text of the 1959 script, he represented his information as material that he regularly shared at the Kirtland Temple. The same is true for one script from 1990; the author, writing for a distant administrative supervisor, represented the script as information that he typically shared on tours. Of course, scholars cannot know how much the audience for whom the authors presented the “typical tour” shaped what they wrote. In sum, some of the scripts (1959 and one from 1990) are artifacts of live performances (or at least textual representations of what a performer wanted others to believe was shared on a typical tour). Other scripts (1980, one from 1990, and 2000) are prototypical accounts of a tour that were created for staff education and intended to be memorized or used as the basis for guide performances. Consequently, the scripts that I use provide windows into guide performances at the temple, but they cannot be taken straightforwardly as unmediated records of actual performances.Other sources must necessarily be used to reconstruct past temple performances. Although much of my focus in this chapter is on tour guides and what they shared, the guides were...

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