I am surprised that I haven’t seen anyone here comment about the 2019 the Oakland Temple open house that preceded the post-renovation re-dedication. Part of my family, some TBM, some very inactive, some nevermo, attended the open house. I’m a nevermo who has been on the temple grounds a few times over the last 30+ years.
When the open house was announced the TBM relatives decided to attend and invited the rest of us along. The TBMs traveled hundreds of miles to our town, then a few days later we all traveled several more hours to Oakland. The TBMs invested a fair amount of time and money to make this trip, so what was the incentive?
Among the TBMs, there is a sentimental attachment to the Oakland Temple since several of them were sealed there. Maybe that’s why they came. Or maybe they thought that if they could get us nevermos and inactives into the temple we will see the error of our ways, and, glory be, be converted. Perhaps it was a mixture of sentiment, temple-touring, and missionary work, but I can only speculate. If they came for sentiment, I assume they were happy there. If they thought that some of us would feel the spirit, they seem doomed to disappointment.
Anyway, we all made our way to Oakland and took our places in the temple tour line on a beautiful spring day. The first presentation was in the stake center auditorium, then we moved on to the ward chapel for another short presentation, then into the temple itself wearing protective booties over our shoes.
Because I have read a lot about the temple on exmormon, postmormon and other websites, I had a good idea of what to expect about the rooms and the presentation. Our proud, earnest tour guide guided us through a labyrinth of corridors and rooms, upstairs, downstairs, now right, now left. We didn’t get to go into the brides’ room and somehow missed the chance to look down the hall into it. I did like that attention had been paid to making the stairs easy to climb.
I have heard people express awe about the infinity mirrors in the sealing rooms. Now I have seen the mirrors and can’t picture myself and husband ever going there.
TBMS tout the celestial room as a wonderful spiritual place. Perhaps I missed the message. I saw a massive chandelier dominating a rigid room where the couches and chairs repelled sitting and contemplation. I felt a need to keep my arms and hands tucked close to my body and to not touch anything. Just breathing in there seemed sacrilegious. In the sunshine and breezes up in the temple’s roof garden I finally felt some peace and contentment.
As we explored the temple grounds and the visitors’ center, I realized I was witnessing the Disney-fication of a religious space. The temple gardens with their relentlessly cheery flower beds and strategically-placed speakers broadcasting choir music reminded me of Disneyland. The Disneyness extended into the visitors’ center where large, bright video screens display images of scrubbed and polished missionaries. The images and sounds bombard you everywhere you go and super-friendly missionaries seize on any potential conversational opening.
I went downstairs to the genealogy library for a bit of solitude, but there was no escaping the indoctrination even there. If a visitor managed to find a corner away from the video screens, faith-promoting audios played in the background. I can’t imagine trying to research in that environment. It wasn’t always like that – in earlier decades it was more a place of serious research and less of a faith-promoting venue than it is now.
Our tour of the temple left me with impressions of shallowness and inauthenticity. I detected no sense of history or tradition in any place we went on the temple grounds. The place projected no depth, no gravitas, no heart. It felt like a religious theme park or even a casino, all flash and little else. I would say that the ward chapel did seem less theatrical than the visitors’ center did. Maybe different philosophies are at work in the two different spaces. Has anyone here noticed this dichotomy?
Afterwards, I was curious to see how the TBM relatives would act and what they would say about the temple, if anything, to us heathens. Crickets. Not one of them brought up anything about the temple and what we saw there. Several months later I asked my nevermo daughter what she thought about it. “Boring” was her response. And I’m still in the dark about the intentions of the TBM relatives. If I ask them directly, I’m not sure I will get a true answer, so I am chalking it up as an enlightening experience and moving on.
I have no questions of the folks here other than asking if any of you attended the open house and what you thought of it. The experience confirmed for me that I have no interest in joining the Mormon Church.
A place in Oakland that I find more soothing and spiritual than the temple is the Chapel of the Chimes. https://oakland.chapelofthechimes.com/. Architect Julia Morgan created crypts and passages filled with fountains, small gardens, colorful tiles, and seats for visitors. I grew up going to the Chapel to leave flowers for the relatives interred there and always knew that the urns contained the ashes of dead people, but that never felt morbid for me. Chapel of the Chimes is a business that maintains a genuine human scale. People can come in and sit or wander as they want during business hours. It’s quiet there, and a little mysterious. You might want to check it out if you’re in the neighborhood.

I’ve been to many religious buildings around the world. Rarely are you proselytized. In most cases you are left alone to enjoy the building or you might be given a historical tour.

Anytime you go to a Mormon open house or historical site you feel like you just walked on a car lot. You just want to look around but and you cringe when the fake smiling salesperson comes out. Something in your mind says time to go.

I know what you mean Vern!

While in Nauvoo Historic District I got so fed up with the spiel that I finally roasted one of the poor, older lady missionaries. She made the comment that no other church has modern prophets so I named a few that did and she looked so depressed. I often wonder if she had even heard of any other religion besides The Church Formerly Known as Mormon.

When the Draper Temple open house was going on, my husband and I were asked in advance if we would help direct the visitors as they were entering the temple.
We had to be all dressed up in our Sunday best.
It was so crowded...there were bus loads of people and shuttles. It did remind me of Disneyland a bit, or going to a movie screening, because they had the velvet theatre ropes.

"...the Disney-fication of a religious space"

That's a good description -- everything scrubbed, clean, and with an eye to PR.

Mormons always think that they're temples are so goddamned beautiful and alluring. But they are not. They make verrrrry few people want to pull off the Interstate and have a look-see. And once attacked by the giant leeches that are the missionaries, they know never to come back. I've only seen other Mormons get all feel-goody about the temples.

My ex BIL described the Ogden Temple as a bowling trophey, and I could never see it as anything else.

"I am surprised that I haven’t seen anyone here comment about the 2019 the Oakland Temple open house that preceded the post-renovation re-dedication."

I didn't visit the Oakland temple during the open house, although my sweet TBM friend and neighbor did invite my husband and me several times. We live only about a 30-40 minute drive from that part of Oakland. I was mildly interested but just had too many other things to do. However, a good mutual friend did go to the open house with my TBM friend, so I will share her observations (for whatever these second-hand observations are worth).

Our mutual friend is originally from Italy and a very devout Catholic. When I asked her how her visit to the open house had gone, she immediately launched into how she was shocked at what she learned about Mormonism from a presentation there (I think it was a film--could have been a talk or tour, but I can't recall at this point). She spoke rapidly in Italian, and I am not fluent, but I clearly understood that she particularly could not believe that Mormons believe Jesus came to the Americas and that Native Americans are descended from Jews. She kept saying that she didn't mean to be disrespectful of their beliefs, but that she was still astonished at what she had learned.

Her other main point was that she was truly surprised that our TBM friend believes the Oakland Temple is so beautiful. She kept saying things like (I am paraphrasing, in English), "Are you kidding? There are ten Catholic churches in my town [in Italy] that are all gorgeous compared to that. It looked like a hotel lobby!" She also said, "I am sad for [our TBM friend] if she thinks that is a beautiful building."

I think my Italian friend had believed Mormonism was far more similar to more mainstream Christian churches than it is different. Anyway, none of what she told me surprised me, but I thought her opinions might be of interest given the OP's comments.

As for me, I am glad I never went to the open house because in retrospect, I would also have felt a bit guilty visiting the temple knowing how my TBM convert cousin's close family members suffered at being excluded from her wedding a few years ago.

They took away lady's handbags and made everyone sit and have deacons put paper booties on their feet before going on the tour of the Sacramento temple.

One lady in my group said she needed her container of tampons and a kleenex for her nose. They let her have them and said to put them in a pocket.

Someone had rummaged through my bag. When I got it back, everything seemed upended and in a mess. I don't know what would have happened if we'd lost the tickets that matched the ones on our purses. They kept the purses, so we had no safe places on our persons for keeping them. Thankfully, my husband was there and put the tickets in his pocket. No one took away men's wallets or checked their pockets.

when they do their "ordinances." What goes on in the temple is one of the most hideous things you would ever witness. It is obscene how much money they spend on these places for what they do in them. Disneyland is a much better value.

As an aside, have you ever heard a TBM mention how gaudy, cold, and "empty" the great European cathedrals are? Or if they recognize the beauty, they say: "It's just too bad they don't have the truth."

Sure, they were built with money from the wealthy of old who were probably scumbags trying to buy favor with the Catholic church, but they are amazing both in technology of stonework and stained glass.

Construction of the ancient cathedrals kept hundreds of skilled workers employed -- stonemasons, glass workers, artists and sculptors, etc. And the cathedrals served as true community centers and beehives of activity.

I took history of architecture classes in college, and studied the design of many notable churches and cathedrals. I never was presented with a Mormon temple as being an exemplary piece of architecture. Perhaps there are one or two that a notable, but most are about as notable as Cinderella's castle at Disney.

I didn't attend the "post-renovation re-dedication"—LOL—but I had to reply to your well-written Oakland temple observations. Your post is a good example of how people have gut-reactions that can be trusted, and that we should listen to our heart, instead of all the sales hype and BS that is thrown at us, by people who want to make money off of us.

I was married in the Oakland Temple.

My wedding day was the worst day of my life, rather, the first worst day of many even worse days to follow. The perfect Mormon returned missionary I hastily married turned out to have a history of assault and battery, that my family and I didn't know about. After the wedding, my groom drove me from the Oakland Temple straight to our hotel room, instead of to the garden luncheon my mother and aunts had worked on for days. I tried to nicely explain to him, how much our wedding day meant to me and my family and to him, and how rude it was to not show up. He said he was in charge, now, as my husband. My explaining became pleading. I wanted to still be a virgin in my white wedding dress at the reception, and I promised to make it up to him that night. He exploded into a rage, threw me around the room, and started screaming the words of the D & C, Section 132. (Read that, if you want to be horrified. It's Mormon scripture.) He said that I was now his "possession", and that he could do whatever he wanted to do to me, whenever he wanted, and I was bound to obey my husband. He beat me almost every day, for many months, until I finally went against the church, and got a civil divorce. The wife-beater got married in the temple, in about a year, as soon as it was legal. He beat his second wife, too, and she divorced him, and he married a third wife in the temple. According to the present-day Mormon church, my ex will have all three wives, including me, in the polygamous Mormon "Celestial Kingdom." The children I have, fathered by my second husband, will be the wife-beater's possessions too, in the Mormon hereafter. I was never allowed to marry my Mormon second husband in the temple, even though we were worthy, and even after we had children (we had a great time in bed, BTW). The Mormon church excuses, condones, and even enables wife-abuse. I went to my beautiful dream wedding reception in so much pain I could hardly walk, and later got a bad infection. I was ashamed. I took the blame. My husband threatened me into keeping the abuse a secret. I wanted to die, but I kept working to put my ex through BYU, and trying to be a better Mormon wife, until I went to the BYU library and did some research, and found out about psychopaths.

The Mormon temple wedding ceremony dialog is the same for every couple, and you can find it on the internet. It is a vow that the bride and groom make to obey the teachings of the Mormon Church and the "new and everlasting covenant" of the church. The "new and everlasting covenant" means polygamy. Mormons still believe in polygamy in the hereafter. The words "Love, Cherish, Honor, Respect" are not in the vows. It is a vow of obedience to the cult. My daughter insisted on being married in the temple, and after the ceremony she cried, and said, "That was not what I thought my wedding would be like." Her father and brothers, bridesmaids, the groom's younger siblings were not allowed into the temple to be at the wedding.

What you described was spot-on, and exacely the impressions and feelings I had in that Oakland temple. Thank you for describing it so well. The first time there, we thought we could sit on those couches you described, and as we were starting to sit down, a temple worker came up and hissed at us to not sit down, and to please to move on out of the room, because another group was coming through. We saw no other people coming, anywhere.

We were told that by the time we finished going through the ceremonies, and arrived into the Celestial Room, that we would be closer to Christ, and have many of our questions answered, and I thought I would be able to talk to my parents about all we had learned. Not! The only spirit I felt was the spirit of Satan.

You made me want to go visit that Chapel of the Chimes! I've seen some of the great cathedrals in Europe, and there isn't any comparison—how ridiculous can Mormons be? Mormon temples are the ugliest buildings I have ever seen, inside and out. Even the second-ugliest buildings are at lease functional, like factories, offices, storage buildings, casinos, hotels, Disneyland, parking terraces, malls, etc. Mormon temples are built to shock-and-awe, to be noticed, talked-about, and to be gawdy billboards adversing a fraudulent cult.

I went inside the Oakland Temple, and made the DEATH OATHS! Secret rituals for dead people—that's creepy. Getting naked, except for a sheet, and being touched on my private parts, by an old lady chanting under her breath—that's really creepy. The death oaths were the worst. The ritual leaders told us that we were to promise to kill ourselves, before we would divulge anything that went on in the Mormon temple, to protect the secret handshakes required to get into Heaven, the "tokens" or names of the secret handshakes. I was not to reveal my "New Name", which no one was ever supposed to know, except my husband. He was to use my New Name, to call me into the Celestial Kingdom, and that was the only way I, or any woman, was ever going to get into the Celestial Kingdom. The women never know their husband's New Name. (Nowadays, all this stuff has come out on the internet, and the Masons have always known, because the invented these in the first place. The Mormons have stopped doing the death oaths.)

To make the death oaths, we were instructed to pantomime suicide three times: 1) slitting our own throat, 2) cutting open our chest, 3) disemboweling ourselves. The ritual leader instructed us exactly the motions to use, and to use the thumb of our right hand, with our fingers extended, and in rhythm, as a group, as we chanted, "I will suffer" (the right thumb goes to the left of the throat). "My life" (the thumb is drawn across the throat, from left to right, in the slitting motion). "To be taken" (the right arm goes down to our side.) The same cutting-across motion and chant was repeated for the chest and abdomen. I was in tears, and had my fingers crossed on my left hand, under my robe, and in my mind, I was saying, over and over "Please, God, I don't mean this!" I, like most brainwashed Mormons, took all of this very seriously.

You are right: "Our tour of the temple left me with impressions of shallowness and inauthenticity. I detected no sense of history or tradition in any place we went on the temple grounds. The place projected no depth, no gravitas, no heart. It felt like a religious theme park or even a casino, all flash and little else."

Exactly. The Oakland Temple was a perfect backdrop for what happened on my wedding day.

I guess that the only thing that I could add was that I was tricked into believing that something amazing was going to be felt or experienced. For me, it never happened and I questioned my worth as a human being for not feeling/seeing/hearing something paranormal or ultra-spiritual. As a believing mormon, I hated going to the very place that was supposed to be the most wonderful place on Earth. I hated every aspect of going to the temple.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/19/2020 09:20PM by messygoop.

I'm so sorry for everything you went through, exminion. Your ex should have been in jail for what he did to you.

I took out my endowments in the Oakland temple when I was 21, just before going on a mission. I was at my prime: young, athletic, in great shape, having to cover my shoulders and thighs above the knee with temple garments at such a young age. What a waste.

I blocked out so much of that first temple experience because it was so weird, disturbing, and unlike anything I could have imagined: Men dressed like the Pillsbury dough boy. A film with Adam and Eve who looked like models from the cover a romance novel. Making blood oaths where I had to pantomime slitting my throat. Raising my hands above my head chanting: "pay lay ale." It was one weird WTF thing after another. When it was all over I was speechless. My parents said, "you sure are quiet, heartbroken." Why didn't I run for the nearest exit after that first experience in the temple? I never acclimated to the temple and attended as little as possible during my TBM years.

I did not go to the recent Oakland temple open house. I don't want to go near the Oakland temple or any Mormon temple ever again. I did see a brochure with glossy pictures of the new opulent interior. It looks like no expense was spared. I'm sure Jesus, the son of a humble carpenter, approves of the enormous expense for the great and spacious building.