Showing all posts in Temple

Back in 2020, I wrote a post where I looked at the large number of temples President Nelson was announcing, in contrast with the slow pace at which their construction was taking place. Of course since then, the pace of announcements has only increased. In that post, I mentioned that he had announced 24 across the previous year and a half. Now, he announced 35 new temples in each of the past two years, and slowed only a bit to 15 in Conference a few weeks ago. In this post, I’m going to update the analyses I did for the 2020 post, as well as adding a couple of new ones. Nearly all my data is just taken from the Church’s list of temples, which lists announcement, groundbreaking, and dedication dates.

This first graph shows counts of temples announced, temples having ground broken, and temples dedicated each year since 1950. Note that for 2024, I estimated announcements as two times the number we’ve already had (as we’ve had one of two Conferences), and ground breakings and dedications as three times the number we’ve already had (as we’re about a third of the way through the year).

The biggest feature is of course the turn-of-the-millennium rush to get to 100 temples, where a bunch were announced, had ground broken, and were dedicated in pretty short order. The recent increase in announcements hasn’t been followed as reliably by groundbreakings and dedications, although dedications are clearly up since the pandemic. But they aren’t nearly up to the level of announcements.

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When I blogged last month looking at temple activity in Utah, and how patrons move between temples when their first choice is closed, several commenters asked about utilization: What fraction of endowment session seats are being filled? In this post, I’ll show some summaries from the same endowment session data I used in the last post.

But first, commenters also pointed out that I left out a huge disclaimer in that post: The data I have is only for people who schedule online. Online scheduling is still relatively new (maybe even only becoming available during Russell M. Nelson’s presidency if I remember right), and many members therefore have decades of experience just going to the temple for endowment sessions and counting on open space being available. So it wouldn’t be surprising if a substantial fraction of temple patrons don’t show up in my analysis because they didn’t schedule online. Also, to be complete, it’s also possible that people could schedule a place but then not show up for their appointment, although I’d guess that’s probably less common. In sum, the true attendance numbers are very likely higher, perhaps much higher, than what I’m showing. I’d love to hear from anyone who’s a temple worker or attender what their impression is of how many people attend without scheduling online or how many schedule online and then don’t attend. And thanks again to commenters on my last post who raised this issue and shared their experience with this.

While I’m offering that big caveat, let me tell you about two other smaller one related to data exclusion. First, in looking at utilization, I’m using only English language sessions. Utilization rates for sessions in other languages are affected by a second effect in addition to members’ general interest in attending the temple: the number of members nearby who speak the language the session is presented in. For English, there are presumably always plenty of members nearby who speak the language, so differences in utilization can be attributed more straightforwardly to differences in willingness to attend. The second exclusion of data is that I dropped all Monday sessions. Provo consistently had a few sessions on Mondays, but because it was the only temple open for endowments that day, I didn’t consistently gather the data. It’s only a small number of sessions anyway, so I just excluded all Mondays.

This first graph shows counts of total endowment session seats and seats used, aggregated across all Utah temples.

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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.

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This guest post comes to ZD courtesy of Zatch. Zatch is a lapsed physicist living and working in Washington DC with his wife, son, and another kid on the way. Zatch’s Bloggernacle credentials are that one time he was in this Borderlanders article under his alter ego Zeke: https://forthosewhowonder.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/07/Adolscent-Borderlanders1.pdf

In high school, I was voted “most likely to never buy a car,” and in college my wife studied urban planning. Thus it shouldn’t be a surprise that, after recently attending a cousin’s wedding in the Draper Temple, one of the first things we talked about was how inaccessible the Draper Temple is to anyone without a car. For those who don’t know, the Draper Temple is far up on the hillside, 3+ miles (5+ km) from and 500+ feet (155+ meters) of elevation above the freeway. Unless you are into hiking or mountain biking (things we actually saw people doing on the way in), it is not easy to get there without a car.

This is actually a conversation my spouse and I have a lot. Between work, school, missions, etc. the two of us have lived in at least 8 temple districts across the US. Ignoring Utah for a moment (a place where they literally built cities around the temple), nearly every temple near which we’ve lived has been located not in the city it is named for, but rather one of the city’s wealthy suburbs:

• Tucson -> Catalina Foothills
• Indianapolis -> Carmel
• Detroit -> Bloomfield Hills
• Atlanta -> Sandy Springs
• Oakland -> Oakland, but up a steep hill from downtown and still in a wealthy neighborhood
• Washington D.C. -> Kensington, MD

My personal inclination is that the entire temple-going experience favors those with money. If it were up to me, clothing rental would be free, childcare would be provided, and we’d be opening more cafeterias instead of shutting them down (especially since, as I’ve claimed without evidence, many temples are in wealthy residential areas without places to eat). But that is a rant for another post.* Today I want to focus on one specific aspect of temple attendance: getting there.

Assumptions

I started from the most recent list of temples on the church website. From there, I filtered out any that have not yet had a location announced, but I did include several that are currently under construction but where the location has been announced. I cut out any temples that were named for geographic features rather than cities (e.g. Gila Valley, Mount Timpanogos). This left me with a list of 212 temples, which I grouped into regions using the same bins that Ziff used in his most recent temple-related post.

As my measure of “ease-of-access,” I used Google Maps to estimate how long it takes to travel from the city center (as defined by Google) to the temple, traveling by 1) car, 2) public transit, and 3) foot.** I set the departure time to 7am on a Saturday to avoid issues from current local traffic. The choice to use city center as a point of origin is easily the weakest point of my analysis, but I still think it’s a reasonable assumption for a couple of reasons:

1. For members who live in the specified city, you could assume (and this is clearly an assumption) that they are randomly scattered throughout the city such that on average they live near the city center. Some will live in the northwest, some in the southeast, but hopefully those differences all cancel each other out when you include enough people.
2. For members who do not live in the specified city and who must arrive by bus, train, or other public transit, I think it’s plausible that they would be dropped off at a terminal somewhere near the city center and then continue to the temple from there.

I thought about using the nearest (non-temple adjacent) meetinghouse as a point of origin instead of the Google-appointed city center, but that would have at least doubled the effort so I didn’t do it. This might give us a better indicator of the average member location than what I did, so please let me know if anyone gives it a try.

Results

The first question I decided to answer is “How many temples are accessible by public transit?”

I noticed that some of the Utah temples (e.g. Ogden) were showing no public transit option even though I know for a fact that’s not true. Given that the Ogden temple is two blocks from what I would consider the city center, I’m guessing Google has a hidden “why on earth would you take a bus for this?” feature. To compensate, I added a 15-minute walking distance filter; that is, if you can walk from the Google-declared city center to the temple in 15 minutes or less, it counts as having a public transit option. The following table shows the number of temples in each region, and the percentage of temples inaccessible via public transit.

Region	# of temples in region	# with no public transit	% with no public transit
Africa	8	6	75.00%
Asia & Pacific	32	10	31.25%
Europe	14	1	7.14%
Latin America & Caribbean	53	25	47.17%
Eastern North America	27	9	33.33%
Western North America	54	17	31.48%
Utah	24	7	29.17%
Worldwide	212	75	35.38%

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I thought this might be an interesting question because if ever people are going to be inspired to want to go to the temple, you’d think it would be during Conference. Sister or Elder So-and-So gives an inspiring talk about temple work, and even though temples are of course closed during Conference, it’s easy while watching or listening to just whip out your phone or computer and make a temple appointment.

I looked at this question using the Church’s same handy online temple appointment scheduler that you’d use to make an appointment. Helpfully, it reports the number of seats available for a proxy ordinance session, so it was straightforward for me to check the number of seats available before Conference weekend, and then again afterward. For comparison with Conference weekend, I also checked the change in number of seats available across the four weekends around Conference weekend, two before, and two after.

Because it was still a bit laborious for me to gather the data, I reduced the sample in several ways:

• I looked only at endowment sessions (because they’re the most time-consuming of temple ordinances).
• I looked at only sessions for the week following the weekend I was checking. For example, for Conference weekend, which was April 1st-2nd, I looked at sessions for Tuesday April 4th through Saturday April 8th. (Most temples are closed on Mondays. The exceptions I’ve found are Aba Nigeria and Provo Utah, but I excluded the few sessions on Mondays for these temples.)
• I looked at only a sample of open temples. I chose them by region, to try to be at least kind of representative of the areas where the Church has temples. Within each region, I chose the temple that appeared to generally offer the most endowment sessions, because I figured more sessions would give more data and more chance to find an effect.
• For each session, I checked its available seat count just twice, once on the Friday evening before the weekend, and again on the Monday evening after the weekend. (Note that for a few temples in the Pacific and therefore many time zones ahead of me in the US, I checked their counts in mornings instead, to be sure that I wasn’t checking so late on Monday that some of their Tuesday sessions had already begun.)

In addition to the worldwide sample of temples, I was also in the middle of gathering data for another project on all temples in Utah, so I was able to include them as well. The temples outside Utah in the sample are the following: Aba Nigeria, Boise Idaho, Campinas Brazil, Chicago Illinois, Dallas Texas, Guatemala City Guatemala, Hamilton New Zealand, Lima Peru, Madrid Spain, Manila Philippines, Mesa Arizona, Mexico City Mexico, Nuku’alofa Tonga, Orlando Florida, Preston England, Seattle Washington, and Washington D.C. The open Utah temples are the following: Bountiful, Brigham City, Cedar City, Draper, Jordan River, Logan, Monticello, Mount Timpanogos, Ogden, Oquirrh Mountain, Payson, Provo City Center, Provo, and Vernal.

This graph shows results for non-Utah temples. The bars show the average change in number of available seats per endowment session between Friday and Monday (again, the actual sessions are the following Tuesday through Saturday). For each temple, the left bar shows the average change across the two weekends before Conference, the middle bar shows the average change across Conference weekend, and the right bar shows the average change across the two weekends after Conference. The lines that point up and down from the top of each bar and end in short horizontal lines are standard errors. (If you don’t want to read some statsy explanation at the link, you can just think of them as a measure of reliability: if these are small, we have more confidence that the true average change is close to the bar height, and if they’re big, we have less confidence.) Where I’ve shaded in the before-Conference or after-Conference bars, this means that they’re statistically significantly different from the Conference bar for the same temple. (The specific statistical test I used was a t-test, two tailed, meaning it looks for differences in either direction–bigger or smaller.)

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Right before the turn of the millennium, President Hinckley rolled out a new temple-building campaign that reimagined what a temple could be. The Church began building temples that were far smaller than their predecessors, but were also much closer to where members lived.

It has been a couple of decades since then, and President Nelson has his own slew of newly-announced temples. I don’t think he’s made an explicit point like President Hinckley did, of saying they’ll be smaller. I think the sizes are clearly varying by location.

I got to wondering how much of the temple capacity of the Church is still in Utah, or still in the US. My impression is that even with many of the small Hinckley-era temples being built in the US, there are still often quite large temples built here, even in the Mormon corridor. Look at Payson, Utah (dedicated in 2015), for example, or Gilbert, Arizona (dedicated in 2014).

To answer my question, I looked on the Church website at how many endowment sessions there were in each open temple, and how many seats were available in those sessions, for two dates in February: the 14th and the 25th. I checked the number of available seats at least a month before the session dates so that few would be likely to be scheduled. I chose these date to have one weekday and one Saturday, and to not be right next to each other, so a temple that might be closed for cleaning on one day, for example, might open back up on the other. Also, I chose to look at endowment sessions because they’re by far the most time-intensive of vicarious ordinances, so they’re the biggest potential bottleneck.

There are 161 temples with at least one endowment session on February 14th or 25th. (I did notice that a few temples that weren’t listed as having sessions available when I started gathering data did when I checked back in the last few days, so it’s possible that a few more will open between now and then so I may be undercounting a little.) Here’s a breakdown by region.

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I read a mention somewhere recently of the fact that you can rate and review LDS temples on Google Maps just like you’d rate or review a restaurant or bookstore. I thought it might be interesting to take a look at this rating data, just to see what’s there. For each of the 168 temples that has been dedicated, I noted the following:

• Number of ratings of each possible number of stars (1-5) — note that all that’s shown by Google Maps is a little chart, but if you poke into the HTML, you can find the actual counts of ratings
• Top words from the reviews and how often they were used — Google Maps helpfully compiles these
• Year the temple was dedicated — from Church website
• Location of the temple, which I aggregated into the following regions: Utah, West US (excluding Utah, divided at Mississippi River), East US, Canada & Alaska, Mexico & Central America & Caribbean, South America, Europe, Africa, Asia/Pacific (including Hawaii)

I also browsed through some of the reviews, and copied snippets that I found funny or interesting. I’ll share those in an upcoming post.

Average ratings

To start, the most interesting question to me is which temple is rated highest. Unfortunately, although I can give you an answer, there’s just hardly any variability to speak of. On the 5-star scale, temples’ ratings range from Tokyo Japan at the low end with 4.48 up to Detroit Michigan at the high end with 4.97. Really, across temples, it’s just a bunch of ratings of five stars, with only the occasional four or lower. And in retrospect, this probably isn’t all that surprising, as it’s overwhelmingly going to be Mormons rating the temples, and they’re overwhelmingly going to give five stars. There are definitely non- or ex- or anti-Mormons rating temples, and sometimes giving lower ratings to show their displeasure, but compared to ratings by Mormons who love to see the temple, they are few and far between.

So instead of looking at average rating for each temple, I went back and looked just at the percentage of ratings that were five stars. Looked at this way, the data has a little more variability. The lowest value is 75.3% for Suva Fiji, and the highest is 98.2% for Palmyra New York. It doesn’t look like there are any real differences by dedication year, but there might be by region. Here’s a graph. I’ve ordered the regions by highest to lowest average.

It’s interesting that the US regions have the highest averages, followed by the other Americas regions, followed by the rest of the world. I did two statistical tests (t-tests, two tailed) to compare the groups of regions, one comparing US versus other Americas and the other comparing other Americas versus the rest of the world. Both were statistically significant (p < .001). This means it’s unlikely that we would see differences this big between the groups if the underlying populations actually had the same average percentage of five-star ratings.

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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.

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I’ve heard anecdotally in discussion on Facebook that people attending the temple since the changes in ordinances that came to light last week have found it much more crowded than usual. This seems like it shouldn’t be too surprising. That changes were coming was rumored at least in December, and I’m usually not the most plugged in to such things, so if I heard rumors in December, other people probably did long before that. Given the typical sameness of the temple from one visit to the next, people might be extra interested to go to see when they know it will be different. Add to that the fact that the changes may make the temple more palatable for feminists and other egalitarian-minded folks (although many also understandably feel deeply ambivalent about them), and a whole swath of people who might be on the fringes of temple attendance might want to return.

But of course what I’d love to have is some hard data to see if I can find evidence that this is really happening. Of course I don’t have actual temple attendance data, but what I do have that might serve as a very rough proxy is counts of the number of endowment sessions in each temple. I got these by looking at the individual temple pages on the Church’s site, all linked from this page that lists all the temples. Counts of sessions aren’t as good as counts of temple patrons, but the reality is that there’s zero chance that I’ll ever get anything like that, so I’ll just be happy with what I do have. Even more fortunately, I started taking monthly samples of endowment session counts in the middle of last year, so I have a little bit of past data to compare to. I haven’t counted all sessions for every day in each month, but what I have done is pick two days in each month–always a Saturday and the following Tuesday near the middle of the month–and count sessions on those days. (I chose Saturday and Tuesday because they’re the beginning and end of the temple week.)

This graph shows the total number of endowment sessions across all temples on the two sampled days for each month from April of last year to this month. (Note that the sampled days for this month haven’t even occurred yet; I’ve tried to take session counts in the week before the sampled days so I can get the most up-to-date information if the folks at the temple decide to make a late addition or deletion of a session.)

The total number of sessions looks pretty flat across time. It looks like January has a little dip from December rather than an increase. So, no evidence for the idea that temples are busier?

Not so fast! The situation is complicated by the fact that the totals are not coming from a constant set of temples. New temples open. Old temples are closed for renovation and then re-open later. Every temple (I think) is closed periodically for a few weeks at a time. This last issue means that I couldn’t just solve the problem by showing counts only for the set of temples that were open constantly through the entire period.

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