Temple Square and a Global Church

Temple Square, the ten acre block at the city's center, holds the Salt Lake Temple itself alongside the Tabernacle, home to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and a cluster of visitor and administrative buildings that together function as the working center of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Unlike many of the cities in this record, Salt Lake City's religious significance is not chiefly historical: the church's highest governing bodies, its First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, are headquartered there today, directing a membership the church's own statistical reporting places in the tens of millions across more than one hundred countries.

That global reach sits alongside a city that has itself grown well beyond its pioneer origins into a religiously mixed capital of the state of Utah, with a resident population that is no longer majority Latter-day Saint within the city limits proper, even as the surrounding region remains heavily so. The church's public presentation of its faith, through Temple Square's visitor centers and missionary guides, describes current belief and practice for outsiders rather than instructing them in it, consistent with how a living tradition is properly represented rather than reconstructed or sold.