The Endowment Is Bad
My whole life I’ve heard how much of a wonderful experience the Temple Endowment is. I finally went to the temple in 2018 and went fairly often between then and when I left the church, but I never really understood why it was considered such a great time. I never once found it enjoyable. Origins aside, it’s such a flawed idea, and I want to get my thoughts on it off my chest. These are thoughts I had even during my believing years, not just exmormon thoughts.
I’ve always been told endowment means gift, but I never found I got anything out of the temple. I’ve identified three things it might refer to, but I want to look at why it fails in each of them.
The first is the “temple things.” The signs and tokens and names. Additionally, temple clothing and the true order of prayer. Supposedly, the signs are what you have to do to get into heaven after you do, but the temple doesn’t teach that. The ceremony itself presents the tokens as if that is something you should know what to do with. During the ceremony, it implies that you can use them to talk to angels, but the temple makes it clear that you aren’t supposed to show anyone, so even if angels were real and you met one, you wouldn’t show them the signs. Similarly, the true order of prayer. Is that something we are supposed to do at home? Do regular prayers not count? It again assumes we understand these things, but nowhere else in the church do these things show up. They are temple things that are only for the temple and don’t benefit us in any other way.
Secondly, the temple is talked about as being incredibly symbolic. I’ve seen every Andrei Tarkovsky, David Lynch, and Igmar Bergman movie many times, so I don’t have any problems with symbols. But the temple symbols don’t add to any greater meaning. Just because the hand symbols represent Jesus doesn’t make them more useful to us. They act more as trivia than deeper learning. The things that supposedly everyone would need to know are not hidden, they are out in the open.
Finally, the endowment has quite a few moments where they break the fourth wall and talk directly to the audience. “You can buy anything with money.” “If these people don’t live up to the covenants made in the temple on this day.” “Some people are receiving these teachings well but not these people.” They don’t make any sense in the conversations between Adam, Satan, and Peter, so it is clear that they are talking to us. But they are so heavy handed, barely able to be considered subtext, and, what’s more, they only repeat what the church already teaches, there is nothing new that would warrant a full ceremony or earn the reputation of being an experience that teaches a lot.
The one area where I will concede is that the temple does bring peace. Even though I am an atheist, I believe in the power of spirituality. Not as a mystic power, but as a way of focusing and calming yourself. But the peace of the temple isn’t anything special. Any place that is quiet that invites thinking would be the same.
These are the only potential benefits I could see as arguments to what the endowment provides, but not of them work for me. In my personal opinion, no one gets anything from it but everyone says they do.
The endowment doesn’t make sense as an ordinance, a word ascribed very lightly. While I don’t believe in baptism or laying on of hands as anything special, they are at least a specific act deemed holy. The endowment is just sitting in a chair for 80 minutes and watching a powerpoint. That barely counts as an action. Also why do the men have to close their eyes for 2 seconds and then stand up?
Even creatively, the endowment is a failure. The script is repetitive. A good editor could cut it down to 30 minutes without losing anything. The modern day choice to not have it as video makes it feel stiff and unnatural, especially because the voice over never feels like an actual human speaking. The rhythm of speaking is forced and monotone, they are only reading lines, never talking to each other. The aforementioned 4th wall breaks keep it tonally confused as well. It’s a chore to sit through, and honestly gave me anxiety with how it is put together.