Do new temples bring new patrons?

As the Church rushes to build ever more temples for a membership that’s now growing only slowly, the GAs must face the question of whether new temples are actually bringing in new patrons. Because that’s the goal, I would think: to make the temple accessible to members who couldn’t get to it before.

When a temple is first built in a place, a country or a region of a large country, it should draw in many new patrons who couldn’t attend (or at least couldn’t attend regularly) before. In large countries like Brazil or countries where travel may be difficult like The Philippines (I’m just guessing, with all the islands), it makes sense that building temples in different regions would make temple attendance accessible to more members. But at some point, when most members who want to go can go, a new temple is likely to just redirect temple patrons from one to another rather than actually bringing in anyone new.

Utah is the obvious place where this point of diminishing returns for new temples is coming, if in fact it hasn’t already arrived. I thought it would be interesting to take a look at attendance there as a preview for what might happen as more and more parts of the world approach a point of temple saturation.

Between April and December of last year, on a nearly daily basis, I checked the number of available seats for endowment sessions in each temple in Utah for the next day. I also checked the number of available seats for sessions a month or two in the future to get an idea of each session’s capacity. (And to account for the fact that a few seats are scheduled even a month or two out, I took the capacity for each session as the maximum of any capacity for a session on the same day of the week and at the same time on any day within 60 days of the day of the session.) I then took the difference between capacity and seats remaining the day before as the number of endowment session patrons.

I originally planned to show graphs of daily patron counts, but there’s so much variation within weeks that it’s hard to see trends, so I’m going to show weekly counts instead. Also, to make the data easier to look at, when a temple was closed for just one day (like July 4th) or for the few days when I missed gathering data, I filled the day in with the average for the same day of the week within 30 days in the past or future.

Because the question I’m interested in is the effect of one temple on another nearby, I’ll show a few pairs of nearby temples. Here are Jordan River and Draper.

Both temples show increased attendance when the other closed. In May, when Jordan River closed, Draper’s weekly counts went from about 2600 to about 3000. And again in October, its weekly counts went from about 1800-1900 to about 2800. On the Jordan River side, when Draper closed in July, its weekly count went from the range of 6000-7000 to nearly 8000.

There are other interesting trends to see here too, like that when Jordan River re-opened after being closed, both times it experienced a big spike in patrons that then quickly dropped off. Also, overall, both temples look like they had maybe a decline in attendance through the year. I wonder if this is a typical seasonal trend, where people make a New Year’s resolution to attend the temple more, and then life interferes and attenuates their attendance until the beginning of the next year reminds them to try to attend more. I really have no idea, though. More data could help me answer this if I get around to gathering it.

Here are Mount Timpanogos and Saratoga Springs:

Saratoga Springs wasn’t just temporarily closed, but rather was first opened during 2023. When it opened, Mount Timp’s weekly counts fell from the range of 6000 or more to nearer 5000 or even less. And on the other side, when Mount Timp closed in November, Saratoga Springs had a temporary increase in counts, from below 4000 up to nearly 6000.

Also, unrelated to my main question, it’s interesting to see that Saratoga Springs had weekly declines in patron counts for its first ten weeks open, going back up only when Mount Timp closed. This isn’t really surprising, but it is interesting to see the process of a newly-opened temple drawing crowds at first and then the crowds diminishing with time. And on the possibility of generally decreasing attendance through the year, Mount Timp appears to be an even clearer example than Jordan River or Draper in the previous graph.

Finally, here are Provo City Center and Payson:

When Provo City Center was closed in June, Payson had an increase from less than 4500 patrons a week to nearly 5000. When it was closed again in November and December, though, Payson didn’t have an obvious increase. On the other side, when Payson was closed in October, Provo City Center increased from 4000-4500 to over 5000 for a couple of weeks.

But, you’re probably objecting as you look at these graphs showing temples in pairs, temples in Utah are far too close together for one temple’s closure to affect only one other. When Jordan River closes, shouldn’t it also affect Oquirrh Mountain? And Mount Timp? And Saratoga Springs? And heck, maybe even Bountiful?

To answer this concern, and to more formally try to estimate how many patrons who typically attend one temple instead attend another one nearby when their typical one is closed, I ran a series of regression models. If your eyes glaze over at the mention of stats, you might want to skip the next paragraph, but if you bear with me, I’ll try to be as brief and clear as I can.

I ran one model for each temple in northern Utah. I included only these temples because they are close enough that patrons are likely to switch between them when one is closed. (This is unlikely to be true for Vernal and Monticello. I also excluded Cedar City and St. George because although patrons clearly switch between the two when one is closed, St. George was closed for nearly the entire year.) Each model predicted the daily endowment session patron count for one temple (the dependent variable) from (1) its total number of endowment session seats for the day, (2) a set of dummy codes for days of the week, and of central interest (3) another set of dummy codes indicating whether nearby temples were open or closed. The total seats and days of the week variables were just to control for those effects, so I could more precisely get at the effects of nearby temples being open or closed. In each model, I dropped any variables that did not achieve statistical significance (p < .05). (Statistical significance just means that given the variability in the data, the variable’s effect was big enough that it seemed unlikely to occur by chance alone if the variable’s true effect were zero.) What’s nice about using dummy codes for nearby temples being open or closed is that the expected increase in patrons for the temple whose patron count is the dependent variable.

This next graphic shows the results. Note that I was pretty generous in including temples in the “nearby” list for each temple, but the farther away ones always failed the test of statistical significance. Also note that while I’ve arranged the temples roughly where they are geographically, nothing is to scale, and I had to push some of them around to make the graphic easier to draw.

Anyway, what’s being shown here is just the estimated count of people who typically attend one temple going to another when their primary temple is closed. So, for example, when Logan is closed, 144 of its usual patrons go to Brigham City. There’s no corresponding number going in the opposite direction because the effect of Brigham City being closed on Logan’s patron count wasn’t statistically significant. The true count is almost certainly not zero, but it’s probably just easier to detect the effect of a big temple on a nearby small temple than the reverse. Along the same lines, looking further down in the graphic, the smaller temples Oquirrh Mountain and Draper have arrows pointing in from other temples sending patrons when closed, but no arrows pointing out for these temples sending patrons to other temples when they’re closed.

Anyway, the actual values in the graphic are certainly wrong and incomplete in many ways in addition to the problem of estimating the effects of smaller temples being closed. That Mount Timp received 659 patrons when Saratoga Springs was closed (or not yet open) but sent zero to Saratoga Spring when it was closed seems unlikely, especially given the second line graph above. It probably just means that both temples had so much day-to-day and even week-to-week variability in patron count that it was difficult to statistically detect a pattern against the noise.

But getting back to my original point, I think what’s really interesting here is that at least some, or perhaps even many temple patrons are able to go to a different temple when their usual temple is closed. So when a temple is temporarily closed, the decrease in total number of temple patrons across northern Utah is less than just subtracting the temple’s usual daily patron count. This is good news for the Church getting a lot of temple attendance. But the other side of the coin is that it also means that building new temples close to all these existing temples will increase total patron count less than the total patron count of the new temple. New temples won’t be so much bringing in members who previously weren’t able to attend the temple. They’ll just be redirecting patrons from one temple to another.

For example, consider the Lindon Temple. It’s unlikely to be bringing in brand new patrons who couldn’t attend the temple before. Instead, it will redirect patrons from Orem (which wasn’t included in my analyses above because it didn’t open until 2024) or Provo or Mount Timp or Saratoga Springs. The same goes for Taylorsville and Layton and Syracuse and perhaps also to Red Cliffs and Desert Peak, all temples either under construction or close to opening in Utah.

From the graphic above, I added up each temple’s average daily patron count. Then I also added up the estimated counts of patrons sent to other temples when the temple was closed. For example, Ogden averaged 1121 patrons on days it was open, and it sent 615 patrons to other temples when closed (470 to Bountiful plus 145 to Brigham City). This means an estimated 615 / 1121 = 55% of regular patrons of the Ogden Temple went to other temples when it was closed. When I summed these up for all the northern Utah temples, the result was 61%. The true value is probably higher: recall that dropping variables that weren’t statistically significant meant that Oquirrh Mountain and Draper and Brigham City sent an estimated zero patrons to other temples when closed. As more temples are built, this percentage will increase toward 100%, but ever more slowly, and the increase in total attendance from each new temple in the same area will become smaller and smaller. And what has begun in Utah will start happening anywhere there’s a concentration of Church members and multiple temples. The first temple built in an area will dramatically increase access to the temple and therefore likely temple attendance. But each new temple that’s built fairly close by will increase marginal attendance less and less.