Baptism for the dead

I don’t have as much time to dedicate to this as I would ideally like, but I want to say at least a few things about the recent controversy in the national media over baptism for the dead, sparked by yet another complaint about baptisms performed for people killed in the Holocaust.

First, I am appalled that the baptisms continue after church officials promised to stop them. Clearly there is either a lack of will to enforce the ban on baptisms for Holocaust victims—or the system is set up in a way that officials really don’t have the means to enforce the ban. Either way—whether church officials lacked the will to stop the baptisms or the ability to stop the baptisms—it would seem the promises made to Jewish organizations were empty from the start, ergo a disingenuous attempt at placating critics.

I am angry at the fact that some church members evidently don’t take the ban seriously. And I’m angry at the various ways that church leaders have, from the beginning of Mormon history, nurtured a culture of doubletalk (esoteric teachings and rituals, obfuscating public statements, “lying for the Lord,” secret polygamous marriages, secret committees) that allows members to assume that church leaders don’t really mean it when they tell the world they’re going to stop doing baptisms for Holocaust victims.

I feel ashamed and attacked when Stephen Colbert or Bill Maher ridicule the practice of baptism for the dead. And I feel misunderstood when Elie Wiesel expresses his outrage at Mormons having “converted” Holocaust victims, or when people characterize baptism for the dead as the LDS Church claiming to have “turned dead Jews into Mormons.” During the year before I was endowed, going to the Provo Temple weekly to perform baptisms for the dead was my primary source of spiritual nurture and rejuvenation. I’m deeply ambivalent now about the practice—more on this farther down—but the point is I’m ambivalent because while I now associate negative meanings with the practice, I still see positive meanings to be derived from it as well. This is to say that while I can make the empathetic leap to understand why outsiders find the practice offensive, and while I wish more Mormons would make that leap, I also wish outsiders would likewise make the leap to try to understand empathetically what the practice means to Mormons—and what it doesn’t actually mean to them.

I feel that’s not something I can say to Elie Wiesel. You can’t say to someone who lost his family in the death camps, “You should be more empathetic for the Mormons who performed vicarious baptisms for your family members.” I’d like to at least be able to clear up what I think is a fundamental misunderstanding about what Mormons intend by the practice—but even that is hard to talk about under the circumstances. If you’re going to talk back to a Holocaust survivor, you’ve got to have a moral imperative on your side a lot stronger than “You’re not quite grasping how Mormons understand the situation.”

Let me shift the conversation away from the Holocaust—where I have no right to speak—to an area where I can speak. Let me talk about my own dead to illustrate why I’m ambivalent about the practice of vicarious baptism.

I’ve written elsewhere about how much my convert mother hated her non-LDS father. I have a memory from my growing up years—probably my early teens—of my mother telling me that she had no intention of having vicarious ordinances done for her father because she didn’t want to be part of his family for eternity. Then, several years later, after I’d left LDS Church life, I learned that my mother had submitted her father’s name, and that one of my brothers had been the proxy. I thought of this as a good thing. She was arriving a point where she was beginning to forgive her father for the terrible way he’d treated her.

Fast forward a few more years: I travel from Utah to California to visit my mother’s mother, who’s dying of cancer. When I arrive, I learn there’s been some tension over a scrapbook my mother prepared for my grandmother that contained some allusions to Mormon beliefs which my grandmother interpreted as an attempt to proselytize her on her deathbed (a not unreasonable interpretation).

Near the end of my visit, my grandmother, who’d been attending a nearby Bible church since becoming ill, asked me if Mormons were Christian. I started into a nuanced exposition, but then I realized that what she was really asking was whether I’d accepted Jesus. She wanted to know if she, and her daughter, and her grandchildren, were going to be in heaven together. With some qualms, since I knew she and I weren’t really on the same page, theologically, I told her yes. “Good,” she said. “My pastor told me that Mormons weren’t Christians. But I told him I knew my daughter had raised her children to love Jesus.”

I’m crying as I write this. The day after I had this conversation with my grandmother, she became comatose, and a few days after that, she died. And I got to thinking: Someday my mother is going to submit my grandmother’s name to have her work done. (Which she did, as soon as the requisite time had passed.) And I felt, for the first time as far as I can recall, why people find that offensive. My grandmother made her peace with God before she died. She left this world very clear about her relationship with her Savior. Performing a vicarious baptism on her behalf says, in effect: the peace you made with God wasn’t good enough. And that’s just really, really rude, however well-meaning it is.

It also offers a deeply unsatisfying picture of God—as if God is a customs agent, who won’t let you in unless you can show that all your paperwork is in order. Baptismal record from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints? Check. The Spirit tells me that’s not a true picture. A truer picture is the one Jesus gives us in the parable of the prodigal son—the picture of a father who goes running out to meet his child. The God I worship didn’t make my grandmother stand in line to see if her papers had been properly stamped. He received her with open arms. The same way he received my mother.

Having said that: If my mother never had herself vicariously sealed to her parents, I'd like to see that done.