Inside the Mormon Temple — Sacred Ceremonies, Secret Handshakes, Special Underwear, and Non-Members in the Parking Lot

Your Mormon friends disappear inside for hours doing ceremonies they can't describe to you. Non-members can't attend their own children's weddings. There's special underwear involved. This explains all of it.

Your Mormon friends disappear inside the temple for hours doing ceremonies they cannot describe to you. Non-members — including parents — cannot attend their own children's temple weddings. And yes, there's special underwear. This episode explains all of it. Jess and Hannah walk through the two-stage worthiness interview required for a temple recommend; the washing and anointing ritual (which involved physical contact with temple workers until 2005, when internet exposure made the optics impossible to manage); the endowment ceremony including the secret name given to women and the covenants to give everything to the church if required; the handshakes called tokens; the sealing ceremony that excludes non-member family; and baptism for the dead, which has been performed for Holocaust victims without consent.

In this episode: the temple recommend interview — two stages, the questions asked, and who asks them; the washing and anointing ceremony and the 2005 policy change; the endowment — secret names, tokens, penalties (pre-1990), and the covenant to consecrate everything to the church; why the woman's secret name is given to her husband but his is not given to her; the sealing ceremony and what it means for families with non-member parents; baptism for the dead — the theology, the practice, and the Holocaust victim controversy; the celestial room; why non-members can't attend weddings in countries where civil and religious ceremonies must be separate — and how the church handled that differently before 1999.

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