Boston LDS temple tumult called beneficial to church

KILLINGTON, Vt. — An insider who helped broker the challenges that arose over construction of the Boston LDS Temple in the mid-1990s told a group of history buffs Friday that the project's highly educated opponents let ignorance about the LDS Church rule over reason.

But Grant Bennett believes that ultimately, the high-profile controversy has served the church well, simply because it forced LDS officials in both Massachusetts and Salt Lake City to explain the specifics of their faith in what ultimately became a widespread public education campaign.

He detailed those efforts for a standing-room-only crowd during the opening day of the 40th annual meeting of the Mormon History Association.

Bennett, who was serving as a bishop for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Belmont, Mass., in 1995 when President Gordon B. Hinckley announced a temple would be built there, said he believes there have been long-term benefits to the church.

A decade after the controversy began, the state has an LDS governor in Mitt Romney; two top administrators at Harvard are LDS; and former Brigham Young University basketball star Danny Ainge is leading the Boston Celtics.

"We take government, education and sports very seriously," he said, winking at the implication that his fellow residents are now more conversant about and comfortable with the LDS Church and its members.

Bennett said through the years of legal wrangling that preceded the embattled building's completion, there were definite lessons to be learned.

Foremost, he said, is that Latter-day Saints, who usually are in the minority outside Utah, are often "slow to reveal who we are and what we really believe." Failing to do so fosters ignorance about the faith, which "becomes a fertile breeding ground for rumors, and in a small number of cases, outright lies."

Belmont is home to many of the nation's leading intellectuals — "more Nobel laureates than anywhere else in the nation" — who make up the faculty at Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and dozens of other universities in the Boston area. In fact, an urban planning professor at Harvard became a chief opponent of the project after buying a home in the area, even though he understood there were plans to build it "in his back yard," Bennett said.

Rumors and fears over almost every logistical aspect of the temple spread like wildfire throughout the community, he said. Residents feared property values would plummet, traffic would become unbearable and the temple spire would lord over their landscape.