The Plan of Salvation

Most Christian accounts of a human life begin at conception. The Latter-day Saint account begins earlier. It holds that every person who has lived existed first as a spirit, begotten of Heavenly Parents, in a premortal world where character was already formed and choices were already made. Mortal birth is entry into a second estate, and the veil drawn over memory at birth is deliberate: a probation is not a probation if the candidate can remember the terms.

That premise reorders several familiar problems. Original sin is not inherited, because the second Article of Faith states that people are punished for their own sins and not for Adam's transgression; the Fall is treated as a necessary step rather than a catastrophe, and the Book of Mormon has Lehi say outright that Adam fell that men might be. Suffering in mortality is read as the condition of a test rather than as evidence against God's goodness. Death is a change of state within a continuing existence, not a boundary: the spirit world that follows is a place where the gospel is still taught and where those who never heard it in life can still receive it.

The sequence is set out most fully in the vision recorded as Doctrine and Covenants section 76, received by Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon at Hiram, Ohio, in February 1832, and in the sermons of Alma and Amulek in the Book of Mormon. Nothing in it is a private teaching. It is the framework taught to nine-year-olds in a Sunday class and drawn on a whiteboard by missionaries in the first or second lesson, and it is the reason a Latter-day Saint funeral tends to sound less like a farewell than like an interval.

What makes the Latter-day Saint scheme unusual is not the premortal existence but the ending. Resurrection is universal and unconditional: every person who has lived receives a body again, without exception and without regard to belief. Judgment then assigns the resurrected to one of three kingdoms of glory, and the striking feature is how few people the system leaves out.

The celestial kingdom is the highest, reserved for those who received the ordinances, kept their covenants and were sealed in eternal marriage; its highest degree is exaltation, in which a couple continue as a family and continue to progress. The terrestrial kingdom is for the honourable who did not accept the fullness, and the telestial for those who lived without law and were not redeemed until the end of the millennium, but even the telestial is described in section 76 as surpassing all understanding. Only a very small number, called the sons of perdition, who knew the truth in an unusual and direct way and then denied it, are placed in outer darkness. There is no eternal fire for the ordinary unbeliever, and there is no infant damnation: the Book of Mormon condemns the baptism of children in terms rare for a nineteenth century American text.

The demanding half is at the top rather than at the bottom. Exaltation requires ordinances that most of the human dead never had the opportunity to receive, and it is that gap, rather than any anxiety about hell, that drives the movement's enormous investment in genealogy and in proxy ordinances. The doctrine sets a low floor and a high ceiling, and almost all of the church's ritual effort is directed at the ceiling.