When a Temple Isn’t a Building at All/Virtual Temples
What if you could do a virtual temples at home? Not every branch of the Restoration wanted a temple, and the groups covered in this closing conversation show just how far the idea could stretch — from outright rejection to a virtual temple.
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Gospel Tangents
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Bickertonites: No Interest at All
The Bickertonites are the clearest case of a group opting out of the temple tradition entirely. The church traces back to William Bickerton, the last apostle called by Sidney Rigdon before Rigdon’s own short-lived organization collapsed. In the chaotic years after Joseph Smith’s death, it wasn’t unusual for a small branch to drift between competing claimants depending on which traveling minister made the most persuasive case, and Bickerton’s group briefly aligned with Brigham Young’s church before Young’s 1852 public acknowledgment of polygamy, after decades of official denial, ended that association for good. Bickerton reorganized his branch independently, and it grew into a church centered on working-class, heavily Italian American communities in Pittsburgh and Detroit. Unlike nearly every other group in this series, the Bickertonites never built toward a temple, an endowment house, or even a symbolic room — the concept simply wasn’t part of their theology.
Virtual Temples That Exist Online
The more striking development is what happens when the idea of a temple gets detached from any building whatsoever. Several small, independent groups are now performing temple ordinances — the core ritual function a temple exists to serve — without a physical structure at all.
David Ferriman runs what’s effectively a Zoom-based ministry: he and his wife hold their own priesthood offices (he describes a Melchizedek priesthood, she a “Magdalene priesthood,” alongside Aaronic and “Miriam” priesthoods), and they perform temple ordinances, sealings, and other ritual work over video call, for a membership defined more by openness than by orthodoxy — same-sex sealings, plural sealings, and alternate scripture are all accommodated. He eventually wants to build a physical temple.
The Reformed Mormon movement, associated with Rob Lauer and Evan Sharley (both former members of John Hamer’s own Toronto congregation), goes a step further by removing hierarchy almost entirely. Rather than ordained clergy performing ordinances, the movement publishes something like a handbook that lets individuals set up their own home endowment — a framework rather than an institution, closer to open-source religion than to a church with a temple at its center.
A third group, the True Latter Day Saints, took a more traditional approach to the same idea: like the Cutlerites’ building in Manti, Iowa, they repurposed the upper floor of their own “red brick store” (in Manti, Utah, this time) as an endowment space — proof that the 19th-century pattern of a consecrated room above an ordinary building hasn’t disappeared, even as other groups move the same function onto the internet. And the Nielsen-Naylor congregation in Bluffdale, Utah — a group that split off from Centennial Park, itself a split from the FLDS — reportedly has early-stage plans for an actual temple building, suggesting the physical-building impulse hasn’t vanished even among the newest offshoots.
What Ties It Together
Across these cases, the throughline is that a “temple” was never really defined by its walls. For the Bickertonites, the ordinance tradition simply didn’t matter enough to carry forward. For the internet-era groups, the ordinances matter enormously — enough to perform them without a building, over a screen, or in someone’s living room. Hamer’s parting advice to any group considering a temple of its own is to plan deliberately, the way the Missouri fundamentalist group featured earlier in this series did, rather than building something modest and later outgrowing it. Across the full series, the idea of a temple has traveled from Kirtland and Nauvoo through pyramids and domed ceilings, Cutlerite endowment rooms, Strang’s unbuilt fortress temple, and finally here — to a ceremony performed entirely online.
Listen to the full conversation wherever you get your podcasts.
Don’t miss our other conversations with John: https://gospeltangents.com/people/john-hamer/
Copyright © 2026
Gospel Tangents
All Rights Reserved
CHAPTERS
0:00 The Bickertonites: Sidney Rigdon’s Last Apostle
4:01 Brigham Young’s 1852 Polygamy Announcement & Bickerton’s Break
5:16 Why the Bickertonites Never Cared About Temples
6:53 Norway, Illinois: A Temple Platted for the Norwegian Saints
8:29 The Town Converts to Strangism Almost Overnight
10:10 Modern Groups: Reformed Mormon Church & Christian Fellowship
11:42 The Reformed Mormon Movement: Rob Lauer & Evan Sharley
13:34 True Latter Day Saints & the Manti, Utah Red Brick Store
14:22 Nielsen-Naylor: Bluffdale & Malad, Idaho Temple Plans
15:43 John’s Closing Advice: Plan Ahead Like the Missouri Group
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