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Introduction The Kirtland Temple as a Parallel Pilgrimage In 2008, thirty-three thousand people from six continents visited a small, historic Mormon temple, the Kirtland Temple, near Cleveland, Ohio. “I couldn’t value anyplace more than the Kirtland Temple,” related a frequent Latter-day Saint visitor. “The feeling there is similar to what I had in Jerusalem when I visited the garden tomb and the garden of Gethsemane. . . . I sense that angels are not far when I enter it.”1 This pilgrim, a member of the 14 million–strong Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, does not belong to the denomination that owns the Kirtland Temple. Instead, the 170-year-old stone and plaster structure is owned by a 200,000-member Mormon denomination that over time has aligned itself with ecumenical , mainline Protestant Christianity—the Community of Christ (formerly known as the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints).2 This is no small difference for the thousands of Latter-day Saints who annually tour the temple and the Community of Christ historical interpreters who host them. “This is our temple—give it back!” wrote an LDS pilgrim on a 2006 temple tour comment card. Another LDS member wrote,“Thank you for taking care of this very special House of God.”3 Both statements are typical of the comments received by temple guides every week during the height of the summer pilgrimage season and gesture toward a much longer history of tension between hosts and guests at the first Mormon temple. Using the temple as a case study, this book provides a model for understanding the dynamics of religious rivalry at a shared pilgrimage shrine. In the process, this book details the history of an understudied liberal Mormon denomination that stands as the gatekeeper to one of Mormonism’s most hallowed shrines. My book also adds a dimension to the study of Mormonism that has been largely overlooked in the rush to understand Joseph 2 Introduction Smith’s successful American-born religion: Mormonism contains a family of denominations and sects that range from groups on the theological left to the religious right. Mormonism itself is an example of America’s flourishing religious diversity. In Kirtland Temple: The Biography of a Shared Mormon Sacred Space, I explore this topic through the proxy of sacred space and ritual journey. I chart how rival Mormon denominations shape and reflect their religious identities at the Kirtland Temple. Beyond the relatively liberal Community of Christ and the more conservative Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, at least a half dozen smaller Mormon groups also currently patronize the sacred shrine, including polygamous “fundamentalist Mormon”sects and separatist RLDS “Restorationists”who have broken away from the Community of Christ. As the “proximate others” to one another, these diverse Mormons have used the Kirtland Temple as a platform both for airing their differences and for forming transitory, cooperative alliances. Instances of cooperation and contestation between rival Mormon groups abound at the Kirtland Temple. In the past forty years, such groups have threatened lawsuits over the temple’s ownership and produced red-hot polemical literature debating the temple’s purpose. The largest groups have constructed alternative pilgrimage sites and visitor centers near the temple that simultaneously draw on the shrine’s power and contest its singularity. In the 1970s, officials in the LDS church asserted that there was a curse on “the land of Kirtland,” and an LDS apostle ritually lifted “the scourge” in 1979. And, in one extreme instance in the late 1980s, a small fundamentalist RLDS sect plotted an armed siege of the temple and committed religiously motivated murder.To mitigate and avoid such manifestations of sacred site contestation, some rival groups have established rituals of cooperation by practicing periodic ecumenical worship services at the temple, leading occasional joint tours of the site, and establishing intentional cross-denominational friendships. In sum, the Kirtland Temple could well be called the Mormon Church of the Holy Sepulchre. While narrating the development of the Kirtland Temple as a pilgrimage site, this book also provides a theoretical model that explains the dynamics of cooperation and contestation by rival religious groups at a common pilgrimage site—a set of dynamics that I term “parallel pilgrimage.” Drawing on Thomas Tweed’s definition of “parallel ritual,”4 I define parallel pilgrimage as ritual journeys by disparate groups to a site of some shared superhuman significance. In this peripatetic ritual, groups from various religious enclaves draw on a...

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