Temple Changes
The claim:
"Why did the Church remove the blood oath penalties and the 5 Points of Fellowship at the veil from the endowment ceremony in 1990? Both of these were 100% Masonic rituals. What does this say about the Temple and the endowment ceremony if 100% pagan Masonic rituals were in it from its inception? What does it say about the Church if it removed something that Joseph Smith said he restored and which would never again be taken away from the earth?"[1]
The temple endowment, the ceremony Latter-day Saints receive in their temples, has been edited over the years. Pieces that were in it for a long time, including some borrowed-looking Masonic elements, were taken out in 1990. If God revealed this ordinance, the CES Letter reasons, why does it keep getting revised? And how can the Church drop something Joseph Smith said was restored to stay?
The temple ceremony has changed, more than once, and more than a little. The CES Letter has that much right. The question is not whether it changed but what the changing means, and the best person to answer that turns out to be Joseph Smith himself, who said something about his own first version that never made it into the CES Letter.
This page is about the changes. For whether Joseph copied the endowment from Freemasonry in the first place, see Masonic Connections.
Joseph called his own first version "not arranged right"
The CES Letter's whole case assumes Joseph Smith handed the Church a finished, sealed ceremony in 1842 and that any later edit is therefore a betrayal of it. He did not, and we know that because of what he said on the very day he first gave it.
On May 4, 1842, in the upper room of his store in Nauvoo, Joseph gave the first endowment to nine men. In that same conversation he turned to Brigham Young and told him the ceremony was "not arranged right but we have done the best we could under the circumstances in which we are placed," and asked him to "take this matter in hand and organize and systematize all these ceremonies with the signs, tokens, penalties…"[2]
The man who introduced the endowment, on the day he introduced it, called his first attempt unfinished and handed the job of developing it to the next prophet. He did not treat the 1842 wording as the eternal thing. It was a starting point, and he said so out loud.
Brigham Young then did exactly what he was told: he systematized the ceremony at the St. George Temple in 1877. The record has a thirty-five-year gap, since it comes down through the journal of Brigham's secretary writing in 1877, and a careful reader is right to want that precision. But the pattern it describes, a ceremony meant to be developed under later prophets, is the pattern the next 180 years actually followed.
Key Point
Joseph Smith introduced the endowment in May 1842, said in the same conversation that it was "not arranged right," and explicitly handed it to Brigham Young to develop further. The CES Letter's "Joseph said he restored it and it would never be taken away" framing assumes he treated his 1842 ceremony as the eternal substance of the Restoration. He did not. The eternal substance was the priesthood and the covenants; the dramatic form was a starting point Joseph himself wanted improved.[2:1]
1990 was not the moment a fixed ceremony first changed
The CES Letter writes as if the temple sat untouched from 1842 until 1990, and then suddenly moved. The documentary record looks nothing like that. By 1990 the ceremony had already been substantially revised under five previous prophets.
Brigham Young systematized it in 1877. Wilford Woodruff convened a meeting in 1893 to harmonize how it was performed across temples. A committee chaired by Apostle George F. Richards revised the language in 1922 toward, in the words of the record, "less harsh and more symbolic" form. The oath of vengeance was removed in 1927. Filmed presentations came in for the Swiss Temple in 1955. The 1990 changes came next, then a revision of the initiatory (the washing-and-anointing ordinance given before the endowment) in 2005, an equalizing of the women's covenant language in 2019, and fourteen further documented changes in 2023.[3][4][5]
On the timeline above, the 1990 revisions are one dot among many, not the day a frozen ceremony suddenly cracked. The picture the CES Letter draws, of an unchanging rite that finally changed, is just not how the history reads.
The covenants stayed; the staging changed
One distinction answers most of this question. Think of the endowment as having two layers.
One layer is the ordinance itself: the covenants a person makes with God, the priesthood authority that administers them, and the story the ceremony tells of creation, the Fall, and the way back to God through Jesus Christ. The other layer is the presentation: the way that ordinance gets staged. Whether it is taught by live actors or on film, the exact wording of the instructions, the gestures, the cultural props used to make the lesson stick.
The first layer has held steady since 1842. The same five covenants (obedience, sacrifice, the law of the gospel, chastity, and consecration) run from the earliest years of the ceremony to the version given today, which opens by naming all five.[6][5:1] What has been edited is the staging.
If that sounds like a convenient line to draw, it is one the Lord drew Himself, a dozen years before there was an endowment at all. In August 1830, as Joseph prepared to bless the sacrament, he received a revelation now in Doctrine and Covenants 27: "it mattereth not what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink when ye partake of the sacrament, if it so be that ye do it with an eye single to my glory."[7] On the strength of that revelation the Saints later switched the sacrament from wine to water, and nobody thinks the ordinance was wrecked by the change. By the Lord's own statement, the emblem can change while the covenant stays put. The temple runs on the same form-and-substance principle, stated at the very start of the Restoration.
The Church teaches this openly. Its Gospel Topics article on the subject says "the core doctrine and central covenants of the temple ordinances have remained consistent," and quotes President Harold B. Lee from 1959: "We are having new methods, but the truths are the same regardless of how they are presented."[6:1] President Russell M. Nelson put it most directly in 2021: "Current adjustments in temple procedures, and others that will follow, are continuing evidence that the Lord is actively directing His Church."[8] He expects more changes. In this Church, the ceremony adjusts because the guidance never stopped.
Revealed worship has always worked this way
Scripture shows the same pattern everywhere: God reveals a form of worship, then revises the form across generations while the substance carries through. The CES Letter takes it for granted that anything truly from God must stay frozen. The Bible gives that assumption no support at all.
Israel's worship is the clearest case. God first revealed a portable tent, the tabernacle Moses carried through the wilderness. Centuries later that gave way to Solomon's permanent stone temple, a complete change of form. Then the Babylonians destroyed it, and when the Jews rebuilt, the single most sacred object, the Ark of the Covenant, was simply gone. For roughly six hundred years the Holy of Holies stood empty, a bare stone where the Ark once sat, and that ark-less temple was the operating temple of Ezra, of the Maccabees, and of Jesus Christ Himself.[9] Then Herod doubled it in size again. Same revealed worship, four dramatically different forms.
Early Christian worship did the same. In the book of Acts, people are baptized the same day they believe. By the 300s, a convert went through a multi-week or multi-year process of instruction, anointing, disrobing before baptism, and clothing in a white robe afterward, none of which the first Christians did.[10] The substance held; the form was transformed.
A standard that says "if the form changed, it cannot be from God" would have to throw out Solomon's temple, the Second Temple, and most of Christian history along with it. The Latter-day Saint pattern is actually a tighter version of the same biblical principle: form adapting under living prophets while the covenant holds.
The borrowed gesture
The CES Letter's strongest exhibit is the Five Points of Fellowship, a sequence of contacts used before 1990 at the veil, the partition a person crosses at the end of the ceremony to represent the return to God's presence. The CES Letter places this rite side-by-side with the Masonic version, and the match is close enough to rule out coincidence.
The symbolic penalties that were also removed in 1990 used wording that echoed Masonic ceremony, and behind that wording sits a much older practice: conditional self-cursing oaths ("may such-and-such happen to me if I break this promise") run all through the ancient world and the Hebrew Bible, from Ruth to Job, long before Freemasonry existed.[11] But the Five Points was different. It was a specific gesture, not just a phrase, and there is no ancient precedent for that exact sequence the way there is for the oath form. The gesture itself was borrowed from the Freemasonry of Joseph's day and used as a teaching vehicle to deliver a covenant moment, a moment whose Christian meaning was entirely foreign to anything in Masonry.[12][13]
Why borrow it at all? Because in 1842 it was a familiar piece of stagecraft for a frontier audience that included many Masons, an effective way to carry an unfamiliar lesson. By 1990 the Church was global, that cultural reference no longer registered, and what had once helped now mostly confused and gave critics an easy target. So it was removed, and when it went, not one covenant went with it. The promises to God on either side of the gesture stayed exactly where they were. The full origin question of how much the early endowment drew on Masonry is a larger subject, handled on the Masonic Connections page.
Worth Acknowledging
The Five Points of Fellowship the CES Letter reproduces is the closest Masonic match in its whole section, and the gesture itself, beyond its wording, was borrowed from Masonic ritual as scaffolding for a covenant-making moment foreign to Masonry. It was removed in 1990 without disturbing any covenant. One reading says the institution quietly shed an embarrassment. The other says the scaffolding had done its job, and every covenant on either side of it stayed exactly where it was. The record supports either reading. Where a reader lands depends less on this one gesture than on whether the Lord is directing this Church.
Changes made under pressure
The oath of vengeance, added in 1845 after Joseph and his brother Hyrum were murdered at Carthage, was removed in 1927 in the middle of intense public pressure during a U.S. Senate investigation of the Church.[14] The timing was no coincidence. But the oath was a later addition under Brigham Young, not part of Joseph's original ceremony, so removing it moved the temple back toward Joseph's version, not away from it. And the faithful view has never required revelation to arrive in a vacuum: the 1890 Manifesto ending polygamy also came under heavy federal pressure, and the Church canonized it as revelation anyway. Outside pressure can be the occasion for a true course-correction rather than a substitute for one.
The women's covenant language has shifted along similar lines across 1990, 2019, and 2023, toward full equality before God. The wording of each step is set out in the in-depth version.
Is the Lord directing this Church?
If prophets can revise what earlier prophets presented as sacred, how do we know today's version is the right one? The Restoration's answer is that it never claimed today's version is permanently final. It claims the current version is the one God is directing His Church to use now, with more refinements expected. The right question is not "is every present detail eternal?" but "is the Lord directing this Church?" The full three-part answer is under "The hardest objection" in the in-depth version.
That question is too big for an edit history to answer. It is answered, one way or the other, by the evidence for the Restoration as a whole, and the front of that case is the Book of Mormon.
What has stayed constant from 1842 to today is the part Joseph's instruction did not touch: the covenants of obedience, sacrifice, gospel, chastity, and consecration. The staging around them has been reworked again and again, which was the assignment Brigham Young received along with the ceremony itself: take it in hand, organize it, systematize it. A hundred and eighty years of prophets have kept doing what Joseph asked.
Want the full case, including the strongest arguments the critics make and every source? Read the in-depth version.
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Temples & Freemasonry," no. 5, p. 108. ↩︎
L. John Nuttall journal, entry of February 7, 1877, recording Brigham Young's recollection of Joseph Smith's instruction following the May 1842 endowment. Nuttall served as Brigham Young's secretary and recorded the statement during the 1877 St. George Temple endowment systematization that Brigham was actively executing. The rendering above follows the Internet Archive transcript of the journal, with "Bro. Brigham" expanded to "Brother Brigham," and the transcript's OCR-dropped "we" ("done the best could") restored; the closing ellipsis marks the elision of the sentence's final phrase. David John Buerger's printed transcription concurs in substance, reading "…the best we could…" and "…and I . . . wish you to take this matter in hand and organize and systematize all these ceremonies with the signs. tokens penalties…" (Buerger 1987, Dialogue 20:4). Internet Archive full text: https://archive.org/stream/TheJournalOfLJohnNuttall/The journal of L John Nuttall_djvu.txt ↩︎ ↩︎
David John Buerger, The Mysteries of Godliness: A History of Mormon Temple Worship, 2nd ed. (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2002), chapters 7–8. Buerger documents the 1990 changes that removed the symbolic penalties and the Five Points of Fellowship at the veil, alongside earlier and later revisions. The 2nd ed. is significantly expanded from the 1994 first edition. https://www.signaturebooks.com/books/p/the-mysteries-of-godliness ↩︎
"Timeline of changes to temple ceremonies in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints," Wikipedia. Confirms 1842 introduction, 1843 women's first endowments, 1877 BY systematization with Adam-God content in the new veil lecture, 1893 harmonization, 1920s shields/clothing changes, 1927 oath of vengeance removed, 1953 film versions (with Fantasia footage), 1960s preacher's hymn discontinued and "black skin" Satan language removed, 1990 major changes, 2005 initiatory revised, 2019 equalization and shortening, 2023 fourteen changes. Wikipedia also asserts a clean "1902 – The Adam–God doctrine was removed from the endowment ceremony"; Buerger finds that dating undocumented (see the table above), so this article does not rely on the timeline for that entry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_changes_to_temple_ceremonies_in_the_Church_of_Jesus_Christ_of_Latter-day_Saints ↩︎
Jana Riess, "More Jesus, less touching: 14 changes to the Mormon temple endowment ceremony," Religion News Service, February 10, 2023. https://religionnews.com/2023/02/10/more-jesus-less-touching-14-changes-to-the-mormon-temple-endowment-ceremony/ ↩︎ ↩︎
"Adjustments to Temple Work," Church History Topics, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Articulates the principle that "the core doctrine and central covenants of the temple ordinances have remained consistent" and quotes Harold B. Lee (1959): "We are having new methods, but the truths are the same regardless of how they are presented." https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/history/topics/adjustments-to-temple-work?lang=eng ↩︎ ↩︎
Doctrine and Covenants 27:2. Revelation given through Joseph Smith, August 1830. "For, behold, I say unto you, that it mattereth not what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink when ye partake of the sacrament, if it so be that ye do it with an eye single to my glory — remembering unto the Father my body which was laid down for you, and my blood which was shed for the remission of your sins." https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/27?lang=eng ↩︎
Russell M. Nelson, "The Temple and Your Spiritual Foundation," October 2021 General Conference. Verbatim: "The Restoration is a process, not an event, and will continue until the Lord comes again… Current adjustments in temple procedures, and others that will follow, are continuing evidence that the Lord is actively directing His Church." https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2021/10/47nelson?lang=eng ↩︎
Mishnah Yoma 5:2: "After the Ark was taken away a stone remained there from the time of the early Prophets, and it was called 'Shetiyah'. It was higher than the ground by three fingerbreadths. On this he used to put [the fire-pan]." Translation from Herbert Danby, The Mishnah (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933). Standard rabbinic source on the Day of Atonement liturgy in the Second Temple. Hebrew text and other translations at Sefaria: https://www.sefaria.org/Mishnah_Yoma.5.2 ↩︎
Cyril of Jerusalem, Mystagogical Catecheses, c. 350 AD. Five lectures detailing fourth-century Christian initiation: candidates strip off old clothing, are anointed with "exorcised oil, from the very hairs of your head" (Lecture 20:3), undergo triple immersion baptism, and the candidate is clothed in "the garment of salvation" (Isaiah 61:10) referenced in Lecture 19:10 and sealed with the sign. F. L. Cross, ed., St. Cyril of Jerusalem's Lectures on the Christian Sacraments (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1977), is the standard modern English edition. Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/stcyrilofjerusal0000cyri ↩︎
Anne Marie Kitz, Cursed Are You! The Phenomenology of Cursing in Cuneiform and Hebrew Texts (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2014). Most recent comprehensive scholarly survey of conditional cursing in ancient Near Eastern literature. Updates and expands Hillers' framework. Argues that ancient Near Eastern cursing functioned as covenant-petition — petitions to the divine world to render judgment if the covenant was broken. https://www.eisenbrauns.org/books/titles/978-1-57506-271-6.html ↩︎
David John Buerger, "The Development of the Mormon Temple Endowment Ceremony," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 20, no. 4 (Winter 1987): 33–76. Identifies tokens, signs, and penalties as the three categories of "very marked" overlap between the May 1842 endowment and contemporary Masonic ritual, while explicitly noting the absence of Masonic parallels for the creation/Fall narrative, major covenants, and washings/anointings. Discusses Brigham Young's 1877 systematization at the St. George Temple as the execution of Joseph Smith's "organize and systematize" instruction. On the veil lecture's Adam-God content, the 1987 article itself carries the hedge that the teaching "may have been included in the veil lecture as late as the turn of the century"; for the undocumented status of the circulating ~1902–1905 removal dating it points (n. 19) to David John Buerger, "The Adam-God Doctrine," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 15, no. 1 (Spring 1982): 14–58. https://www.dialoguejournal.com/articles/the-development-of-the-mormon-temple-endowment-ceremony-2/ ↩︎
Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, "Freemasonry and the Origins of Modern Temple Ordinances," Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture 15 (2015): 159–237. (The journal was renamed Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship in mid-2017; the 2015 publication carries the older title.) A faithful-scholarly response on the Masonic-origins question that concedes the chronological optics openly while arguing the ancient-parallels case. Includes treatment of the LDS Five Points of Fellowship as Christ-at-the-veil framing distinct from the Masonic Hiram Abiff fidelity-among-brethren framing. Bradshaw's later 2022 monograph Freemasonry and the Origins of Latter-day Saint Temple Ordinances (Eborn Books, in association with the Interpreter Foundation) extends the argument further. https://interpreterfoundation.org/journal/freemasonry-and-the-origins-of-modern-temple-ordinances/ ↩︎
Kathleen Flake, The Politics of American Religious Identity: The Seating of Senator Reed Smoot, Mormon Apostle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). The standard scholarly work on the Smoot hearings (1903–1907) as the political-pressure context within which the institutional Church negotiated its post-statehood, post-Manifesto identity. Documents how the hearings made temple oath-of-vengeance content publicly visible via testimony from former temple workers and how this became the political pressure context for the 1927 removal under Heber J. Grant. https://uncpress.org/9780807855010/the-politics-of-american-religious-identity/ ↩︎