The urban planning departments of countless small towns across America are preparing for the twice-yearly General Conference of the Church of Latter-day Saints, when they will find out whether they’re getting an unwanted religious megaplex or if they get to pretend to fix downtown for another six months.
“Oh crap, is it the first weekend of April already?” said Tobias Hunt, a city planner for Bellevue, Nebraska as he hurriedly cleared off a large desktop calendar. “We’ve been so focused on the political gridlock that the Department of Government Efficiency has planned for us, we almost forgot there’s a church with a massive war chest who treats zoning laws like polite suggestions.”
Since the small town of Fairview, Texas was besieged by the church over its denial of a 176-foot steeple in a zone limiting structures to 35 feet, the Church has become embroiled in several legal battles for their strategy of building great and spacious buildings that sit empty and function as billboards in even the tiniest of country hamlets. After Cody, Wyoming protested the Church’s placement of a temple in a residential neighborhood, Church officials stated that “…Heavenly Father doesn’t give a [redacted] about zoning laws.” The Church’s Presidential Newsroom immediately complained that the comment was taken out of context.
The town of Lewisburg, West Virginia was caught off-guard when the Church announced a temple in their city during October 2017 General Conference. “We saw the old K-Mart lot was empty and figured it’d get turned into a ‘Spirit Halloween’,” said Mayor Bradley Smith, “but sure enough, the next time I drove by, there was a giant Mormon temple. I’m guessing though they have plenty of skeletons in their closets as well.”
Unless You’re Bored of Board News:
Church Labels Fairview, TX Zoning Laws as “Anti-Mormon Literature”
Several towns have taken a more proactive approach, banning any building from having a steeple that resembles erect male anatomy, or outlawing bronze-ox-mounted basement-jacuzzis. Richard Breyer, a zoning official for Grenville, New Mexico, said his town had passed a law in 2021 requiring all religious buildings to have inverted steeples. “The potholes around town can get a little hairy, but we like the uninterrupted skyline.”
No response to our request for comment was made by the Temple and Family History Executive Council, however Temple Official Neil L. Anderson was seen cracking his knuckles and chuckling menacingly as he prepared to throw a dart at a wall map of towns with yearly budgets of $50M or less.
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