A Temple-Announcing Spree

President Nelson announced eight new temples in General Conference on Sunday. This keeps up his pace from last year, when he announced 16 new temples across the two Conferences. Actual construction of all these new temples hasn’t kept up, though. Ground was broken for 11 new temples in 2019, but none have been started this year. This is why President Nelson’s spree seems to me to be more one of temple announcing than temple building. In any case, thinking about this gap between announced temples and built temples motivated me to look back at the data on the Church’s pace of the announcing, beginning construction on, and dedicating temples across the past few decades.

The graph below shows the year-by-year count of how many temples were announced, had construction begin, and were dedicated each year since 1950. I took the data from the list of temples on the Church website, and from Wikipedia where the information wasn’t available on the Church website because a temple is not yet dedicated or is being renovated.

The most obvious feature of the graph is the giant spike around the turn of the millennium, when President Hinckley started the Church building smaller temples, and then pushed to get 100 temples completed by the end of the year 2000. You can see how the spike appears first in announcements, then in construction starts, and finally in dedications. There’s also an earlier spike in the 1980s that it looks like didn’t get resolved nearly as fast as the Hinckley-era spike. Finally, looking to more recent years, there are some peaks in temple announcements during President Monson’s tenure, but later in his time in office, they really declined, before suddenly jumping to 19 in 2018, and then as I already mentioned, to 16 last year and eight so far this year. Looking at President Nelson’s approach to announcing temples, and the fact that President Monson clearly was quite sick in his past few years, I wonder if President Nelson wasn’t the architect of the dramatic increase even before he became Church President.

Another way to look at this same data is to check, for a particular point in time, the status of all temples that have been announced. How many haven’t had construction begin? How many are under construction? And how many are complete? I checked the status of all 225 temples that the Church has announced or built as of the end of quarter (i.e., March 31st, June 30th, etc.) for each year since 1950. At the end, I included June 30th, 2020, even though it hasn’t happened yet, so I could include the eight new temples that were just announced.

I like how this graph shows the gradual addition of completed temples for the first few decades, and then the spike in the early 1980s that was slowly worked through from announced to under construction to completed (note that the announced and under construction pieces almost disappear in the late 1980s). The Hinckley-era spike is in there too, in the bend in the late 1990s, and then at the end, the Nelson-era spree of announcements shows up at the top.

The completed temples so dominate the graph above, though, that I thought it might be interesting to split out and look at just the temples that are either announced only or under construction.

With the completed temples removed, you can really see how big the Nelson increase is. The current count of 57 temples either announced or under construction ties the peak number during the Hinckley era, which was for June 30th, 1999. But, as you can see in the graph, the Hinckley-era peak was mostly temples under construction (47) versus announced only (10). The current situation is almost the reverse, with 14 under construction and 43 only announced. And this isn’t an effect of the coronavirus either. As of December 31st of last year, there were 15 temples under construction and 35 only announced.

A possible objection to this graph is that by ignoring completed temples, it exaggerates the Nelson spike in announcements, which might not be that big as a percentage of all temples. In this next graph, I am still only showing the announced only and under construction temples, but rather than showing them as counts, I am showing them as percentages of all temples that had been announced to date (i.e., including all completed temples).

This really reduces down the Nelson-era spike, and it also makes the Kimball-era spike in the early 1980s look a lot bigger. The Church announced 20 new temples between 1980 and 1982. That wouldn’t be all that many now, but as of the end of 1979, the Church only had 17 temples, so the plan was to more than double the number. Similarly, the Hinckley-era spike included 45 temples announced in two years (1998 and 1999) when the Church had 51 temples as of the end of 1997. President Nelson’s total is 43 announced in two and a half years (giving him credit for 2018), but that’s from a starting count of 160 at the end of 2017, so it’s nothing like the previous announcements that roughly doubled the number of temples, and it doesn’t show up as being nearly as big in this graph.

Going back to the first graph, though, what seems clear is that unless the Church really ramps up temple construction, there is going to be a big backlog of temples that have been announced but not built, or in many cases, even started. In the Hinckley-era spike, construction followed announcement, as the 45 new temples announced in 1998-1999 were followed by 50 temples being dedicated in those same years. The Church’s current construction isn’t keeping pace in at all the same way. There have been 43 temples announced since the beginning of 2018, and only 12 completed.

I’ve seen some people say that this is kind of a vanity project for President Nelson, where he wants to stamp his name on a bunch of temples that he likely won’t live to see completed. This might be a little harsh, but it doesn’t seem unreasonable to me. Certainly putting his stamp on other aspects of the Church seems very important to him, what with releasing an official proclamation and a new logo and renaming Church-associated things like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square.

Regardless of the reason, though, in announcing temples that likely won’t be completed for many years, the Church is borrowing against future member enthusiasm in some sense. Especially if President Nelson keeps this up for a few more years, future Church presidents will face the harsh reality of either announcing fewer (or no!) new temples, likely for a span of years, or just exacerbating the problem and announcing temples that won’t actually be built for for decades.

This last graph shows, for temples completed during each year since 1980, the average number of months elapsed since the temple had been announced. For context, I also show the number of temples completed each year by the blue area. I put markers on the average months data series to try to make it easier to see around the gap years when no temples were completed.

Temples completed in the past few years have gone an average of over seven years from announcement to completion. This figure is likely to only increase, probably dramatically, unless the Church drastically increases its temple-building efforts.