Is anti-LDS animus fueling opposition to a temple in Texas?

A building from “some alien civilization.”

That was how Fairview, Texas, Mayor Henry Lessner described what a proposed Latter-day Saint temple would look like if constructed in a neighborhood in his Dallas suburb of 11,000 residents.

“I’m sorry if you don’t like that,” he said, reading from prepared remarks during a packed and livestreamed Aug. 6 Town Council meeting, “but that’s what it looks like.”

Four hours of public comment later, the council voted unanimously against the proposal.

When pressed in an interview by The Salt Lake Tribune on his word choice, Lessner said he was merely speaking in terms of the scale of the proposed multistory, 43,000-square-foot structure, which, at 173 feet (steeple included), would soar above the surrounding buildings.

Views about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints itself, he repeatedly emphasized, have nothing to do with his opposition to the project.

“There have been no negative comments about the LDS Church,” Lessner said, including other community members in that assessment. “I’m aware of [the church’s] history, that they were persecuted. That’s part of their DNA, I think. But that is not happening here in any way, shape or form.”

Some area Latter-day Saints, however, have been taken aback by some of the harsh rhetoric they’ve encountered from opponents — the mayor’s included.

“I just couldn’t believe,” church member Chris Koerner said of the mayor’s Aug. 6 statement, “that he was speaking to thousands of people like that flippantly and disrespectfully.”

Add to that the town council’s 2006 apparent decision to approve a 154-foot bell tower for a Methodist church, and some Latter-day Saints doubt the assurances that religious hostility isn’t animating at least a portion of the pushback in this Bible Belt enclave.

About the Fairview temple debate

In December 2023, the church announced it had selected a Fairview residential neighborhood for its McKinney Temple, the area’s second after the Dallas Temple. The first community open house about the project followed in March of this year, and with it a growing movement to live up to the town motto: “keeping it country.”

Online and off, residents have mobilized to resist construction of the temple in a part of town that restricts building heights to 35 feet and home lots to a minimum of one acre.

“We moved out to a rural community,” Joel Schuh, a Fairview resident whose lot is adjacent to the proposed site previously told The Tribune, “100% to get away from something like this.”

Lessner, for his part, has said he would approve a temple “similar” to the one in Dallas, a more modest slate gray construction with six spires affixed to the ground rather than atop the structure and rising no more than 95 feet. Alternatively, Latter-day Saint leaders could, he noted, keep their current design if they were willing to move it to the town’s commercial core.

Temple proponents, meanwhile, have pointed out that religious buildings are often built in residential areas and that their scale and design (with ascending steeples) serve religious aims by prompting the eyes and mind heavenward.

Melissa Lenore McKneely, a spokesperson for the church, said in a statement that the Utah-based faith is “grateful for all those who attended and spoke to the Fairview Town Council about the proposed temple and for the many Latter-day Saints who shared their personal experiences about why a temple is so important to their faith and beliefs.”

McKneely noted that the temple application “meets all zoning requirements for a place of worship in this community,” a point the mayor disputes.

Unlike traditional Latter-day Saint meetinghouses, used for regular community worship and activities, temples play a particular function in the faith. Only inside their dedicated halls can the faithful perform the most sacred rituals necessary to return to live with God, including uniting couples in marriage for eternity.

‘Secrets and deception’

This fight is hardly limited to Fairview. Across the country, communities have fractured over whether the church’s temples — which have been rolling out at record pace — belong in the small and sometimes rural neighborhoods the church has placed them.

What appears different this time is that, unlike other places where either the church (as was the case in Utah’s Tooele Valley) or civic officials (see Heber, Las Vegas and Cody, Wyoming) blinked, neither side appears willing to back down in Fairview. The result: a showdown that news outlets, podcasters and social media commentators have been unable to resist.

Lessner seemed to be aware of this outsized audience when, speaking in the Aug. 6 Town Council meeting, he eviscerated the “extreme arrogance” (“nice, sweet arrogance, if such a thing exists,” he told The Tribune separately) of the church’s attorneys, whom he accused of using the immense wealth of their client to bully towns like his into building their towering temples with their brightly lit facades and hundreds of parking spots wherever they want.

He saved his sharpest critique, though, for some Latter-day Saints in his own community.

“Shame on the local leaders for stabbing our town in the back,” he said. “They knew exactly the impact this building would have on our town and obviously don’t give a flip, which is really disappointing.”

If the town is “somehow forced to accept” the temple, Lessner predicted, it would become a monument to “LDS arrogance.”

Pointed remarks followed from public commenters, who described the building as a “monstrosity” and accused the church of being “built on secrets and deceptions” and acting above the law in a manner that is “un-American.”

‘Don’t tell me this isn’t religious persecution’

It would be wrong to cast the debate as a simple matter of the church and its members in one corner and the rest of the town in the other. A number of Latter-day Saints in the area have voiced concerns publicly about the proposed structure’s scale while some proponents have come from outside the faith.

Nonetheless, the critiques have pricked the ears of church members, who are accustomed to fellow Christians trying to paint them as outside the boundaries of respectable religion.

“I have been involved in city government off and on for 20 years,” McKinney Latter-day Saint Rainey Rogers said at the Aug. 6 meeting. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen the animus that I have felt from this City Council toward a religious group in all my life.”

He continued: “Don’t tell me this isn’t religious persecution. We feel it.”

He noted the Town Council’s 2006 apparent decision to OK a 154-foot bell tower for a Methodist church a mile away from the proposed temple site.

The tower was never built and the question of why has become a sticking point. Lessner, who was not on the council at the time, cited a 2006 ordinance approving construction of the church without mention of the bell tower as proof that the town did not give it the final green light. Council minutes from that same year, however, explicitly stated the tower was approved. (The Tribune was unable to reach the church.)

Lessner’s son currently serves as the senior pastor of the church, a position he assumed, according to the mayor, around 2015.

“How many people behind us were here to protest the bell tower?” Rogers asked in reference to the opposition seated in the audience that tense August night. “None. Do you know why they weren’t here? Because The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints wasn’t building it. That’s why.”

Michael Hancock, a Latter-day Saint who lives about 20 minutes from the proposed site, made a similar argument in an interview.

“It’s interesting to consider that there’s no shortage of megachurches in the area,” he said, “that don’t appear to have received as much of a fight from the community.”

Even more explicit has been the pushback Muslims have faced in response to a proposed mosque in McKinney.

“The population of the community … it’s primarily Christian,” one speaker at a recent community meeting said, according to the Dallas Observer. “So I think a lot of the community residents would find this, I don’t want to say an eyesore, but an eyesore.”

The same article cited another local’s concern that his children would be “indoctrinated” by the mosque’s mere presence.

Breaking bread

Chris Koerner is a Latter-day Saint father of four who lives just outside Fairview and less than 10 minutes from the proposed temple site.

“My daughter was in middle school last year,” Koerner, who has lived in the area for a decade, said. “And they brought up the [Mormon] pioneers and the teacher taught just how bad we were and how we force our beliefs on everyone.”

The entrepreneur quickly added that such moments are rare, explaining “we get along.”

Until, perhaps, now.

“My guess is they are kind of becoming anti-Mormon throughout this whole process,” he said, “which gives me anxiety because we want the temple to do the opposite.”

According to McKneely, the church “will explore other avenues to ensure the temple proposal receives the due process it is entitled to under the law.”

To date, Lessner said the town has been put on notice by two parties threatening legal actions — a pair of Latter-day Saints and the church itself. To which he says: Bring it.

In the meantime, when an interfaith group gathers to break bread at the area’s Latter-day Saint meetinghouse, the mayor said he’ll be there.

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