The Mormon Temple and the Freemasons

There are really two questions hiding inside the Masonry debate, and almost everyone asks only the first: did Joseph Smith copy the temple endowment from the Freemasons? He became a Mason in spring 1842 and introduced the endowment seven weeks later, and the two share some outward features — so the charge writes itself.

The second question is rarely asked and far more interesting: if the two resemble each other, where did the Masons get theirs? Trace that thread and the “copy” story changes shape. The Masonic ritual Joseph encountered was not an ancient secret handed down from Solomon’s builders; in its developed form it was barely a century old, and its temple imagery came straight out of the Bible. This is the same pattern as the broader question of whether Mormons are Christians: the answer turns on a definition — here, on what you mean by the word copy.

What the two ceremonies actually share

An honest answer starts by naming the overlap plainly rather than minimizing it. The temple endowment and the Masonic degrees share a family of ritual devices: modes of recognition such as signs and grips; an obligation of confidentiality; ceremonial clothing; a candidate who advances through staged instruction; a guarded word; and teaching by symbolic drama rather than by lecture. The first Latter-day Saints to receive the endowment were practicing Masons, and they recognized the resemblance immediately. None of that is in dispute, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

But shared vocabulary is not shared source. Two buildings can use the same kind of brick and be raised by different architects to different plans. To find out whether the endowment was lifted from the lodge, you have to ask where each ceremony got its script — and that means asking a question critics almost never pose: where did Freemasonry get its ritual in the first place?

Four timelines: temples, Masonry, and Joseph Smith

Read together, the four streams reframe the debate: temple worship runs unbroken from Moses through the Book of Mormon and into Kirtland (1836), while the Masonic ritual being compared was assembled in 18th-century England. The data lives in the four tables below.

Timeline 1 — Temples in the Old & New Testament

Timeline 2 — Temples in the Book of Mormon

Timeline 3 — The making of Masonic ritual

Timeline 4 — Joseph Smith and the restoration of temple ordinances

The Point: Temple worship runs unbroken from Moses through Solomon, into the Book of Mormon, and into Kirtland (1836). The Masonic ritual being compared was assembled in England between 1717 and 1738. The endowment’s foundation predates Joseph’s Masonry by six years — and the tradition it claims to restore predates Freemasonry by millennia.

The rough stone made complete: same source, same goal

Follow both traditions past their shared setting and they share something deeper: a single symbol, inherited from the Temple, that turns the building of Solomon’s house into a blueprint for the building of a person. In Freemasonry it is called the ashlar — a block of stone that stands for a human life. Both traditions take a rough stone and make it complete. But they mean very different things by “complete,” and they disagree about whose hand does the work.

The rough ashlar made perfect

The lesson begins on a Mason’s first night. In the first degree, the Entered Apprentice is shown two stones and told they picture his own soul. The rough ashlar is a block as it comes from the quarry — rude, irregular, unpolished; it represents man in his natural, uncultivated state. The perfect ashlar is that same stone once the craftsman has squared and smoothed it true, fit to be tested by the square and set into the wall — man refined into usefulness.

The natural man made complete

The image, though, is older than any lodge — it is biblical. Peter calls believers “lively stones… built up a spiritual house” (1 Peter 2:5); Paul, a temple “fitly framed together” (Ephesians 2:21). The Restoration takes that same rough stone and calls it by its scriptural name — the “natural man” (Mosiah 3:19) — but reads the shaping very differently. Here the stone is not polished by the man alone. It is shaped by a path of covenants, and the finisher is Christ.

Did Joseph Smith copy it? The chronology

Return now to the original charge with both timelines in view. The Masonic events of 1842 are real, but they sit on top of a decade of temple development on the Latter-day Saint side — and on top of a century of ritual-building on the Masonic side.

The famous “seven weeks” between the lodge and the endowment is genuine — but it is the tail of the story, not the head. On the Latter-day Saint side, the ordinances were taking shape six years earlier in Kirtland, with the plan to reveal them on record in 1841.

Joseph Smith’s Masonic life, in full

The chronology above answers the copying charge, but it leaves out the human story — and that story explains why the question carries so much weight in the first place. Freemasonry was not an exotic society in early nineteenth-century America; it was civic furniture. Lodges anchored the social life of towns across New York and New England, and the fraternity counted Washington and Franklin among its own. It was also, in Joseph Smith’s youth, the center of a national firestorm: in 1826, a former Mason named William Morgan disappeared from Batavia, New York, after announcing he would publish the fraternity’s rituals. His presumed murder ignited America’s first third party, the Anti-Masonic Party, and a decade of anti-Masonic fervor that burned hottest in the very region of upstate New York where the Smith family lived. Joseph grew up in the middle of that controversy, not apart from it.

Nauvoo Masonry, when it arrived, grew explosively. Eighteen Latter-day Saint Masons petitioned to organize a lodge in December 1841; Joseph Smith and roughly forty others applied for membership the following day, and the Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Illinois installed the Nauvoo Lodge and initiated Joseph on March 15, 1842 — raising him to the degree of Master Mason the very next day, an accelerated “at sight” advancement that was within the Grand Master’s prerogative but fast enough to raise eyebrows among Illinois Masons at the time. The lodge kept initiating candidates at a pace that alarmed the Grand Lodge of Illinois, which eventually suspended and later revoked its authority over the Nauvoo Lodge. For a people repeatedly driven from their homes, the appeal was practical as much as fraternal: Masonry promised networks of mutual aid that reached beyond the Church’s own membership — protection the Saints had conspicuously lacked in Missouri.

Masonry shadows even the last minutes of Joseph Smith’s life. As the mob stormed Carthage Jail on June 27, 1844, Joseph’s recorded last words were “O Lord my God!” — words many of his contemporaries, Masons among them, recognized as the opening of the Masonic cry of distress: an appeal one Mason makes to another for rescue. If it was the distress call, it went unanswered; there were Masons in the mob. The bitter irony was not lost on the Saints, and relations between Utah Masonry and the Church remained cold for more than a century — the Grand Lodge of Utah excluded Latter-day Saints from membership until 1984. Today that tension has largely dissolved: the Church does not prohibit its members from becoming Masons, and Latter-day Saint Masons serve openly in lodges, including in Utah. For the fuller story of the man at the center of Masonic ritual — and how his legend relates to the Bible — see our companion piece on Hiram Abiff.

So — did Joseph Smith copy the temple ceremony from the Masons?

By the narrow meaning of copy — lifting an existing ritual and renaming it — no. The temple ordinances were developing six years before Joseph entered a lodge, the plan to reveal them was on record in 1841, and the content, purpose, and access of the endowment differ from Masonry at the root. By the looser meaning — did Masonry’s forms influence how the endowment was presented? — some outward elements show a resemblance the Saints acknowledged and explained rather than hid.

And the second question reframes the first. The Masonic ceremony was not an ancient vault Joseph cracked; it was an eighteenth-century moral drama staged at Solomon’s Temple and drawn from the Bible. Both the endowment and the lodge point back to that same temple — one claiming to restore it, the other borrowing it as allegory. Borrowed forms, revealed substance: and the borrowed forms turn out to be far younger than the headline assumes.

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