SALT LAKE CITY, UT — In a move hailed by church financial planners and no one else, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has announced a groundbreaking innovation in religious public relations: copy/pasting the exact same temple groundbreaking press release for all time and eternity.
“Efficiency is a spiritual gift,” said Brother Daryl Finnegan, Assistant to the Assistant Managing Editor of the Church Newsroom. “Why reinvent the wheel when we can simply CTRL+C the Lord’s work?”
The Church, which has announced a record-breaking number of indistinguishably beige temples, all designed to look like Skeletor’s assisted living home, in towns like Two Forks, Idaho, and East Dustpan, Nevada, says it’s embracing “template-based revelation” to conserve both sacred tithing funds and the patience of its overwhelmed media interns, nicknamed the “hotshots,” for the number of fires they’ve had to put out over the years.
“Each temple is uniquely inspired,” clarified Finnegan. “But also, like, architecturally they are basically pre-fabricated houses for The Lord. We are really trying to emphasize the template aspect of temples and temple press releases.”
Finnegan continued, “Our press release template includes the phrases ‘sacred edifice,’ ‘bring blessings to the area,’ and ‘that zoning board just got owned.’”
Church leaders hope this “Groundbreaking Groundbreaking Copy” strategy will flood search engines with wholesome, keyword-rich content about 40,000-square-foot temples in prairie towns of 1,800 people, thereby burying less faith-promoting stories involving multi-billion-dollar shell funds, global abuse cover-ups, and Stake Presidents named in civil lawsuits.
“Google’s algorithm responds best to terms like ‘gold statue weathervane’ and ‘marble-clad ordinances,’” explained Finnegan. “Meanwhile, terms like ‘securities fraud investigation’ and ‘mishandled sex abuse case’ are being pushed past page four. By the time a curious member scrolls that far, they’re already in gospel deep-dive mode on how Moroni statues resist lightning strikes through the power of the Aaronic Priesthood.”
LDS members are reportedly overjoyed to hear about yet another 10-acre patch of dirt being dedicated somewhere that sounds vaguely like a Cracker Barrel side dish. Sister Karen Elms of Provo described her excitement:
“Every time I read one of these groundbreaking announcements, I get a warm confirmation that the Church is true and also that it’s Satan that wants financial transparency.”
Meanwhile, local news outlets in the affected towns have also started to save time by running the church’s press release verbatim, with only the town name swapped out. One particularly harried editor in Grits Hollow, Wyoming confessed:
“I just use Find and Replace. Last week I accidentally left ‘Rigby, Idaho’ in the headline, but nobody noticed. Or cared.”
When asked if future groundbreaking ceremonies would involve any actual ground being broken, Church officials responded that it depends on the weather and how long it takes to get the gold-plated shovel out of storage.
As we prepared this story for print, the Church PR team had just announced the 338th temple of the Restoration in a spiritually significant parking lot behind a shuttered Shopko. The press release is expected to include a quote from a local Area Seventy describing the moment as historic, uplifting, and a testament to the growth of the gospel in this region of western Nebraska and/or eastern Montana, whichever one we just said.
