To read more from Daniel, visit his blog: Sic Et Non. 

I’ve seen the report that, on a vote of 5-2, the city council of Fairview, Texas, has given grudging conditional approval for construction of a proposed Latter-day Saint temple in their small town, which is located in the greater Dallas-Fort Worth area.  The approval comes after a lengthy and often rather acrimonious process that involved refusals, compromises by the Church, architectural modifications and reductions in size, and considerable commentary, not all of which was helpful.

In such cases where there is vocal opposition, it is difficult to know how widespread the opposition actually is.  Do the opponents represent a local consensus?  Are they merely a minority of loud activists?  And what are their actual reasons for opposing the building of a temple?  Are the stated motivations — e.g., concerns about lighting, the height of a steeple, and/or traffic — the real ones?  Are there theological objections that the opponents are too savvy or too embarrassed to openly acknowledge?  (Sorry but, since we’re talking about Texas, that’s not entirely inconceivable.)

Lighting and traffic were the common stated concerns for opposition to the Newport Beach California Temple.  But I remember watching an online petition against that temple as the controversy raged.  Many comments on the petition were overtly anti-Mormon.  We were, a number of signers indicated, heretics, blasphemers, racists, misogynists, bigots — and altogether unwelcome in the community no matter what our lighting arrangements were and no matter how well the traffic flowed.  I sincerely hoped that those comments would actually be submitted to the relevant government authorities along with the petition itself.

I’ve spent a lot of time in Newport Beach since then, and the temple has proven to be a beautiful asset to the neighborhood.  Moreover, I can’t imagine that it generates even a fraction of the traffic that is caused by the enormous evangelical Protestant megachurch complex that sits  just a minute or two down the road from it.

It may shock you to know that some opponents to our temples don’t even always act in good faith.  An example: I served in the mission home in Zürich during the last part of my time as a missionary in Switzerland.  On one occasion, I spent some time reading through press clippings related to the construction and dedication, two decades before, of what is now called the Bern Switzerland Temple.  One article particularly amused me.  It showed an image of the Salt Lake Temple — which is already many times as big as Switzerland’s much more modest structure — enlarged to perhaps four or five times its actual size and superimposed on the area where the Church hoped to build a smallish temple for its European membership.  “Do you want this in your neighborhood?” the article demanded.  And, of course, no sane person would want such a monstrosity in his or her community.  Heck, it was tall enough that it would probably change the local weather.

During the period of construction for Brigham Young University’s Jerusalem Center for Near Eastern Studies in the mid-1980s, there was fierce opposition to it, including rallies and debates in the Knesset, television shows, newspaper editorials, and even thinly-veiled death threats.  At one point, the anti-Mormon charlatan Ed Decker brought his carnival sideshow to town, screening his ridiculous but once wildly popular 1982 pseudo-documentary film, The God Makers, to a Knesset subcommittee.  (I was told by someone who was there for the showing that the awkward silence at the end of the film was broken by the subcommittee’s chairman, who said, simply, “I’ve seen similar films about Jews.”)

BYU’s Jerusalem Center has now been a significant fixture of Jerusalem’s physical and cultural landscape for nearly four decades and, as far as I can determine, is a well-received and even perhaps beloved place.  I’m hoping that, after  the controversy in Fairview subsides and the completed temple is accepted as a part of the community, there will be a similar evolution in attitudes there.  (As things stand, the majority of Fairview’s residents may already be fine with it.  I simply don’t know.)

My late father-in-law was involved with preparations for the Denver Colorado Temple, where there was also a great deal of opposition.  (The temple was finally built on the third site that was selected for it, after being rejected at the two previous proposed locations.)  I find it hard to believe that anybody in the area resents it now, unless the resentment be grounded in theological reasons.  There was at least some opposition to the Preston England Temple, as well, including fears that the temple would ruin the area.  It hasn’t.

I am pleased that legal processes were followed in Fairview.  Some, of course, would have the Church cave in at the very first whiff of opposition, which, they allege, is the way a real Christian church would react.  They suggest that we’re bullies if we don’t surrender, if we make any effort to defend our rights.  However, if we followed the policy they suggest we might not ever be able to build anything.

Many years ago, I read a letter to the editor of the Salt Lake Tribune from a woman who had, she said, moved to Salt Lake City from Ohio some while before.  She was writing to express her irritation at the fact that there were “Mormon churches on every corner.”  Far too many of them, in her opinion.  (I didn’t write a letter in response, but I wanted to point out to her that we had fled Ohio during the previous century.  Now, though, that she had followed us to Utah from Ohio, did she want us to abandon our homes and move again?)  I doubt that she would be very receptive to proposals to build still more Latter-day Saint buildings in her area.  And there was another lady who wrote, on a website that I skimmed a decade or two ago, to voice her outrage at the fact that, as she drove to her own religious services on Sundays, she was obliged to pass by other churches — she expressly mentioned the Latter-day Saints and the Catholics — where “perverted” forms of Christianity were being preached.  I expect that, if she lives in Fairview, Texas, she was probably active in the opposition to the temple there.

The Fairview city council has evidently suggested — pretty openly — that it was essentially coerced into accepting the greatly downsized temple plan offered by the Church, solely because it feared that its stance would not prevail in court.  It would have preferred something much smaller still, apparently.  (Perhaps an earth-sheltered or even completely subterranean version?)   And critics of the Church have described this as a case of little David (the city of Fairview) being confronted by a gigantic and menacing Goliath (“Mormon Inc.,” as some like to describe it) that would flatly outspend and out-lawyer the town’s hardworking, worthy, and honest burghers.  It was, the critics say, a matter of vicious and coercive “bullying” and, thus, the Church is wholly immoral and deserving of condemnation.

First of all, I see no reason in principle to condemn either party, in a case of genuine legal dispute, for availing itself of the right to have its claims heard in a court of law.  That is the reason that such courts exist.  They peacefully adjudicate disagreements.  And I’m aware of no moral obligation, whether legal or religious, to surrender one’s constitutional rights or legal guarantees.

But, for the sake of discussion, let’s accept the malignant caricature of the “LD$ ‘Church’” proffered by some of its critics:  The fact is that, in American courtrooms, massive and powerful corporations fairly often lose to relatively insignificant plaintiffs.  Even with its supposedly unlimited supply of hired legal guns, the “so-called Church” could lose in a courtroom, especially if its legal arguments are manifestly flimsy.  (The Church has lost a number of verdicts over its history, whatever the merits of the cases may or may not have been.)

Obviously, it could really turn out that poor and defenseless little Fairview might fail to persuade a judge because of the massive legal resources deployed against it by the evil cultic behemoth based in Salt Lake City.  But surely there is at least one other conceivable explanation for the city council’s worry that Fairview might not prevail at trial:  Perhaps they knew, or at least feared, that their case wasn’t a solid one.  Perhaps their lawyers had  warned them that they were on shaky ground and that a ruling — in an inevitably expensive judicial process — could easily go against them.

In such a case, one so inclined might even suggest that the bullying, if there really was any, might hypothetically have been on the city’s part rather than on the Church’s part, and that, so understood, it would be the Church that stood up to the city’s attempt at intimidation rather than the other way around.  I can’t see into the souls on the Fairview city council, so I’m neither judging nor hurling an accusation.  I will say this, though:  I know many of the highest leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and I’m confident that they aren’t malevolent bullies.

It would be far preferable, in all such cases, to assume good faith on both sides, and to forego demonizing those with whom we disagree.  In proof that the Church has behaved badly in Fairview, one ex-Mormon critic points out that he spent a little bit of time in or near that town back in the 1990s, and that the people that he met there were nice.  Perhaps he’s forgotten that, during his time in the Church, several Latter-day Saints were nice people, too.  (I’ve met two or three myself!)  American public discourse is too frequently toxic today, and not only on the presidential level nor even only in partisan politics.

(A parenthetical postscript:  There was bitter opposition on the part of at least some to the construction of the Cody Wyoming Temple — a 9,950 square foot structure,  to be located on a very nearly 4.7-acre lot — which, after successfully withstanding multiple legal and political challenges, is now nonetheless well underway.  I followed the Cody case more closely than I’ve followed the Fairview case, and I often saw allegations that the Cody Wyoming Temple, if allowed to exist, would loom over the city, dominate its skyline, block views of the surrounding mountains, and obscure the sky.  I invite you to examine recent construction photos out of Cody and to judge for yourself how likely those dire prophecies are to be fulfilled.)