Temples & Freemasonry
Walk into a Latter-day Saint temple and the central ceremony you take part in is the endowment. It dramatizes the Creation, the Fall, and the journey back to God, and along the way a member makes sacred covenants and learns a set of signs and gestures. Freemasonry is a centuries-old men's fraternity with a ritual of its own: secret handgrips, passwords, and a memorized play performed in the lodge. The CES Letter charges that the endowment is simply the lodge ceremony in new clothes, that Joseph Smith joined the Masons, watched their rites, and rebuilt them into a temple ordinance he then called revelation.
What gives the charge its bite is the calendar. Joseph was raised a Master Mason, the third and highest degree, on March 15 and 16, 1842. Barely seven weeks afterward, on May 4, he gave nine men the endowment for the first time.[1]
And the two ceremonies really do look alike on the outside: handgrips, gestures, a memorized play, and a word-for-word exchange called the "Five Points of Fellowship" at the veil. Page 109 of the CES Letter prints the endowment and the Masonic third degree in two columns so the reader can see the wording line up.[2]
That resemblance is genuine, and pretending otherwise would only cost the reader's trust. Scholars on both sides, faithful and critical, agree that Joseph picked up some of the lodge's gestures and used them. The shared forms are not where the argument actually lives.
Where it lives is one question: do the matching forms carry the matching meaning? Two columns of similar wording show that the wording is similar. Seven weeks of overlap show that Joseph had the opening to borrow. Neither tells you where the ceremony's ideas came from.
And here the lodge comes up empty. It teaches nothing about the Creation, nothing about the Fall, nothing about the Atonement, no covenants of obedience or sacrifice or chastity or consecration, no return into God's presence. Those pieces are the heart of the endowment, and the section that calls the whole thing a copy never produces a Masonic source for any one of them.
The doctrine came first
We can trace where the content came from, and the trail starts long before any lodge in Nauvoo.
Back in January 1831, eleven years ahead of his initiation, a revelation told the Saints they would be "endowed with power from on high." By late 1835 he was already laying out washings, anointings, and the endowment to the Twelve as real doctrinal content. In January 1836, a full six years before he set foot in a lodge, he and the First Presidency washed and anointed one another in the Kirtland Temple. Then in January 1841, fourteen months before he became a Master Mason, a revelation named the still-unbuilt Nauvoo Temple as the house for
"your anointings, and your washings, and your baptisms for the dead, and your solemn assemblies."[3]
So the teaching was spelled out, given a name, and assigned to particular buildings well before 1842 arrived. What showed up that spring was a layer of presentation. Seven weeks is plenty of time to pick up some forms. It is no time at all to invent a doctrine that was already on paper a decade before.
Masonic Connections walks the full timeline against the documents.
What a word count shows
For two centuries people compared the two rituals by feel. In 2025 a linguist named David Eddington fed the actual texts into a computer and let the numbers answer.
By his measure, the endowment shares somewhere between 9.7 and 17.2 percent of its concepts with a nineteenth-century Masonic rite.[4] To put that in perspective, the Odd Fellows, a fraternity that admits it patterned itself on the Masons, come in at roughly 24.7 percent. The endowment scores under even that mark. A ceremony built to be a knockoff would not come out looking less like its supposed model than a self-declared imitation does.
Stranger yet, the text Eddington's program flagged as the closest cousin was not Masonic at all. It was a set of instructions Cyril of Jerusalem gave to new Christians around 350 AD, all about washing, anointing, clothing, and covenant. Joseph had no path to that document. No English version existed in frontier Illinois, and he could not read the Greek.
The resemblances that go below the surface of handgrips reach back not to a lodge in Nauvoo but to the ancient church, fifteen centuries earlier.
What 1990 took out
This is where the CES Letter throws its hardest jab. If the endowment came from God, it asks, why did the Church quietly delete its most Masonic-looking pieces in 1990? Gone were the symbolic penalties. Gone too was the Five Points of Fellowship at the veil.[5]
But set what left against what stayed. Everything cut in 1990 was on the lodge-resembling side of the ledger. The covenants did not budge. Obedience, sacrifice, the law of the gospel, chastity, consecration, every promise a member makes, all of it remained right where it had always been.
The 1990 revision pared away the parts that traced most easily to Masonry and held on to the whole core.
Run the borrowing theory forward and it predicts the reverse. If Masonic material were the load-bearing wall, knocking it out should have collapsed the building. Instead the most Masonic-looking pieces turned out to be exactly the pieces the endowment could let go of and lose nothing that mattered, which is how staging behaves when it sits on top of a meaning it never produced. For what each revision since 1842 actually changed, including Joseph's own comment on the first day that the ceremony was "not arranged right," see temple changes.
So the borrowing is the way into this question rather than the end of it. Give the critic every date on the calendar: the initiation, the seven weeks, the shared gestures, the 1990 cuts. Not one of them touches the Creation, the Fall, the Atonement, or the covenants a member kneels to make on the way back to God.
Joseph had been teaching and recording those things for years before he ever entered a lodge. What he picked up from the Masons was a way to put an ordinance on stage. The doctrine inside it, the Creation and the Fall and the covenants that carry a member back to God, was already his, and the lodge had no version of it to lend.
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Temples & Freemasonry," no. 1, p. 107. "Just seven weeks after Joseph's March 1842 Masonic initiation, Joseph introduced the LDS endowment ceremony in May 1842." ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Temples & Freemasonry," p. 109. The page 109 side-by-side sets the endowment's pre-1990 "Five Points of Fellowship" against the Masonic third-degree formula; the wording is nearly identical. ↩︎
D&C 38:32 (January 1831) promised the Saints they would be "endowed with power from on high"; washings and anointings were performed in the Kirtland Temple in January 1836; D&C 124:39 (January 19, 1841) commanded the Nauvoo Temple "for your anointings, and your washings, and your baptisms for the dead, and your solemn assemblies," fourteen months before Joseph's March 1842 Masonic initiation. The full documentary trail is laid out at Masonic Connections. ↩︎
David Eddington, "A Textual Comparison of Masonic Rites and the LDS Temple Endowment," Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 66 (2025): 311–326. https://interpreterfoundation.org/journal/a-textual-comparison-of-masonic-rites-and-the-lds-temple-endowment/. Measures 9.7–17.2% conceptual overlap with a nineteenth-century Masonic rite, below the roughly 24.7% fraternal-borrowing floor of the Odd Fellows, and finds the endowment more similar in bigram analysis to Cyril of Jerusalem's Mystagogical Catecheses (c. 350 AD) than to the Lodge. ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Temples & Freemasonry," no. 5, p. 108. ↩︎