The search for a distinctive Latter-day Saint place carried followers of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from New York to the western frontier of the United States over the church's first two decades. The prophet-colonizer Brigham Young declared a spot for a temple at the edge of a valley in 1847. He imagined the temple as the centerpiece of a new kingdom headquartered in what would become Salt Lake City, Utah. It took forty years for Young's vision to materialize, and much would change for the religion in the intervening years.

The Salt Lake Temple tells the story of the building's transformation from an improvised community project to the premier icon, symbol, and sacred space of a now global religion. Marianno and Neilson examine the evolving meaning and significance of the temple to the present day as the church globalized and built more temples. The Salt Lake Temple explains the shifting interactions between sacred space, identity, and religious meaning, revealing the contemporary importance of a granite temple in the American West to a twenty-first century worldwide religious movement.