chat

Its not particularly centralised, more like a franchise system, so they vary a lot. There's thousands of lodges still in the UK, like one in almost every town of a certain size, multiple in cities. They're very secretive so membership is a guess.

A lot of them still don't accept women in their cult. A lot of them have ties with Unions (as well as political parties/figures, and other power structures and institutions, mostly in the protestant world), including infamously police Unions.

I suppose a proto-union thing (there being a lot of stone building particularly in the gothic/European Imperial era like victorian/georgian times in the UK), with a somewhat absurd claim to be descendents of or inheritors of the secrets of the builders of Solomon's Temple. But not too different from other guilds, like the Worshipful Company of Haberdashers for example, the sort of pirates, scammers, merchants, artisans, and monopolists who founded the East India Company and built the British Empire.

They might seem nice, and some probably are, but I don't trust them at all - like I wouldn't trust a Scientologist. Religion needs to be conducted in the open and publically by the masses, not in the shadows by cabals and cults or else they get up to all sorts of mischief.

edit: the builders of Solomon's Temple incidentally were according to most accounts demons/devils/jinn, so its not a particularly endearing claim to most christians.