On Monday, the town of Fairview, Texas, launched a public campaign asking leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to voluntarily reduce a temple steeple from 120 feet to 100 feet. Salt Lake Tribune columnist Gordon Monson raised the underlying question in these pages last year: Are fights over temple steeple heights worth having? His answer, after surveying disputes from Boston to Heber City, was that they “do more damage than good.” From Fairview, it depends on whether the church chooses to respond to our community’s concerns.

Some Utah readers might wonder why a zoning dispute in a Dallas suburb belongs in these pages. The decision that will resolve it rests with leaders headquartered a few miles from where you’re reading this.

Fairview is a town of about 11,000 people, organized around a 35-foot residential height limit that protects the open character that brought families here. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is building a temple here with a 120-foot steeple more than three times that limit, and easily the tallest structure Fairview has ever seen.

This is not about anyone’s faith. Fairview has Latter-day Saint neighbors and a meetinghouse that has been part of our community for years. This has only ever been about whether a structure of this scale fits the town it sits in.

It’s also not a fight we picked. Our zoning board initially rejected the design. But under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA) a federal law that allows a prevailing church to recover attorneys fees from a losing town, Fairview faced a legal bill that could have bankrupted us. We were forced to settle.

The timing matters. The church has a new president, Dallin H. Oaks, sustained in April. New leadership brings new opportunities not to reverse past agreements but to express the values that distinguish great institutions from merely legal ones.

Through a campaign called FairviewSpeaks, we’re asking the church’s First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles to lower the steeple to 100 feet, the height our town originally requested, fully in scale with the surrounding neighborhood. I addressed my letter to those bodies directly. The response came from the Temple Department, not from the senior leadership we hope will have the wisdom to make the right decision for our entire community.

This isn’t a hypothetical ask. The original design called for a 173-foot steeple, nearly twice Town Hall’s height. After hearing from Fairview, the church reduced it to 120 feet. We’re asking for 20 more feet to finish the job. The church has done this before: Under President Russell M. Nelson, it voluntarily reduced the steeple of California’s Yorba Linda Temple in response to community concerns. That was seen as an act of goodwill. Fairview is asking for the same.

A 100-foot steeple changes nothing about what happens inside the building. The ordinances performed there carry the same meaning at 100 feet as at 120. What changes is what the building says to everyone who passes it for the next century — whether this is a community the church chose to fit into or one it simply built over.

Construction is underway. The steeple has not yet been built. There is still time, and Fairview’s door is open.

This dispute is already national, and it will remain so as construction proceeds. The communities where the church builds and where it hopes to build are watching. Twenty feet is a small thing to ask. What it would say about the church, to Fairview and to every community that comes after, would not be small at all.

John Hubbard is the mayor of Fairview, Texas, and a spokesperson for the FairviewSpeaks campaign. More information is available at FairviewSpeaks.com.

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