The Objection, and What Came of It

The practice has drawn one serious and sustained objection, and the church has had to answer it more than once. Because proxy ordinances are performed for the dead without any consent from the dead or their descendants, names have been submitted for people whose families regard the act as an intrusion, and the sharpest case has been the posthumous baptism of Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

The issue became public in the early 1990s when researchers found hundreds of thousands of Holocaust victims in the church's ordinance records. In 1995 the church reached an agreement with Jewish organisations to remove those names and to restrict submissions to a member's own direct ancestors or to people for whom the closest living relative had given permission. The agreement was breached repeatedly in the years that followed, by individual members rather than by policy, and further undertakings were given in 2010 after the names of Simon Wiesenthal's parents and others appeared. The church has since built technical restrictions into its submission system, and its published policy is now explicit: submit only your own family.

The problem is structural rather than accidental. A church that teaches proxy ordinance for the dead and that has assembled the world's largest index of the dead has, by construction, both the motive and the means, and the restraint has to be imposed by rule. That the church has repeatedly had to reimpose it says something about how strong the underlying religious motive is among its members.