Mormon Virtual Temples: Reformed Mormons & Home Endowments (John Hamer 5 of 6)

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.

https://youtu.be/PEd9KOTjY8U

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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.