Neighborhood Bigots Object to New Latter-day Saints Temple in Las Vegas—While Playing Slot Machines at Bars

Over a dozen bars and pubs operate 24 hours a day within five miles of the Lone Mountain neighborhood of Las Vegas. Most offer gambling and serve alcohol throughout the day and night, opening the door to disorderly behavior, drunken driving and a variety of crime. So, when a small group of activists went in search of a development permit to oppose, they of course turned to... a Latter-day Saints temple. That’s right, the bars and 24-hour-a-day slot machines operate without objection, but local Latter-day Saints have once again had to put up an epic fight to worship as they wish in their own neighborhood.

What’s really going on here?

For The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its parishioners, this kind of hate is nothing new.

The Latter-day Saints community of Nevada is large and growing. According to the Church, over 180,000 parishioners live in the state. For their routine weekly services, Latter-day Saints use smaller churches called “meetinghouses,” where the public is invited to observe and attend.

Temples, on the other hand, are sacred spaces for the ceremonies of the Church and are open only to the faithful. They are often architecturally significant. As depicted by Art in America in 2022, “The iconic prominence of the Church’s space-age temples is not an accident; they are architectural emblems of the denomination’s rapid growth during the Space Age.” When these temples are opened to the public briefly in the weeks before their consecration, it is common for hundreds of thousands of non-parishioners to visit. Many temples have won architectural awards.

Yet whenever a new temple goes up, small groups of objectors inevitably appear. Small, but loud. They never directly address the matter of the temple itself, but talk about traffic, noise or lights. Anti-religious bigots are rarely proud of themselves, of course, so the public website opposing the Church is all about the law and the neighborhood, with a sprinkling of anti-Latter-day Saints news stories mixed in to raise reader hackles.

But in the background, a low but virulent buzz of anti-religious sentiment is usually in the air. In comments online about the temple, bigots opine hate like, “There’s a reason mormons once were driven from five states and had an extermination order issued against them,” or “It’s going to be an absolute travesty and the church is going to be replacing a lot of windows. Big rocks just lying around everywhere in the desert community.”

For The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its parishioners, this kind of hate is nothing new. Since the late 80s, all of Las Vegas has been served by a single temple, even as the Church has rocketed in size. And as the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported this year, the arguments against that original temple were similar to those being used today at Lone Mountain. But the quiet whispers of hate were even quieter then, long before the advent of social media.

Since the Las Vegas City Council gave unanimous approval of the new temple in July, the protestors have filed a lawsuit in an effort to drag out and delay the approval process in court. Their suit faces an unclear future, since “Not in My Backyard” isn’t in the statutes as a defense against having a church in one’s neighborhood. Perhaps the protestors should head down to one of the dozen or so bars in their same area and have a few drinks while doing a little gambling, an activity in their neighborhood they embrace.

It may be their best bet.