Near the end of his book Holiness to the Lord: Latter-day Saint Temple Worship, Jonathan Stapley says of his purpose in writing the book:
Scholars, media, and other observers have often had to choose between silence and exposé. The topics addressed in this book bridge the gap.
For me, this was the best aspect of the book. I haven’t read much on the temple, but what I have has been apologetic, like Boyd K. Packer’s The Holy Temple. It has been decades since I read it, but my memory is that it disappointingly doesn’t have much to say about what actually happens in the temple. It’s hand-wavy and makes very clear that everything is super duper 100% wonderful and sacred and never to be spoken of. At the other end, I haven’t read any straight up anti-Mormon exposé stuff since I was a missionary (weird, I know–I was in Texas and it was the 1990s and I wanted to know what I was up against), but I definitely recall the tone: Those Mormons are insane! Can you believe the absurd things they do in their temples?!?? Stapley very much steers away from both of these tones. Instead, he’s just very matter-of-fact about explaining what happens in the temple, the thinking behind it, if any was available at the time it began, and context around it.
After an introductory chapter that explains the process of going to the temple, the various ordinances performed there, and temple garments, roughly half of the rest of the book is a historical overview of the development and changes in temple worship, and the remainder is on particular themes. These chapters consider temple cosmology, including the Second Anointing, race and the temple, and the connection of the temple with funeral rites (mostly around the practice of dressing the deceased in temple robes before burial). The book is not long, only 164 pages (plus endnotes) and includes a few illustrations. I also found the length to be a plus, as a reader with some interest in the topic, but probably not enough to sustain me through a dense 500-page tome.
Just to give you a sense of the book, here are a couple of parts that I found enlightening. In discussing church leaders in Kirtland washing themselves before going to “minister before the Lord” in the temple, Stapley adds this helpful aside:
It is nearly impossible for modern readers, with their daily hot showers, detergents, and washing machines to imagine the physical change elicited by this recapitulation of scripture. . . . When Joseph Smith washed and scented his body in January 16, 1836, not only was a daily bath unheard of, but bathing at all during the winter was apparently uncommon. [p. 48-49]
This is exactly the type of contextual explanation that I love getting from historians. How important washing and anointing was in 1836 is just hard to imagine from the perspective of a developed country in 2026, so I appreciate Stapley pointing this out.
Another example: In opening Chapter 5 on change in the temple liturgy, Stapley addresses the question of how temple ordinances have been changed so much over the years, in spite of Joseph Smith himself famously saying that
Ordinances instituted in the heavens before the foundation of the world, in the priesthood, for the salvation of men, are not to be altered or changed.
He shows that there’s been a shift in how the word ordinance is used among Mormons since the 19th century, where we now equate them with particular rituals. But at the time, Joseph more likely meant something akin to laws. Stapley cites an example the 4th Article of Faith, which we now have beginning “We believe the first principles and ordinances of the gospel are . . .” but which Joseph originally wrote as a follow-up to the 3rd (about laws and ordinances of the gospel), “We believe that these ordinances are 1st, Faith . . .” If faith was an ordinance, it makes sense that referring to the temple liturgy as an ordinance originally meant the underlying principle rather than the precise form of the ritual.
I very much enjoyed reading the book. It was fun to even learn some things I hadn’t known before unrelated to the temple, just because Stapley added them for context, like that women were first called as proselytizing missionaries in 1898 (p. 61). I hope you enjoy the book too!