The practice of baptism-in-absentia has been going on almost since the Mormon Church’s inception. Essentially the idea is this: a devoted Mormon stands in for one of their ancestors and undergoes the baptism ritual on their behalf.
That ancestor will then be saved from damnation and given the option to make an afterlife conversion to Mormonism. Nothing particularly odd about that, at least not as far as religious rites go.
Muslims make pilgrimage, Catholics believe in transubstantiation — every faith has its thing, and that’s alright. People’s religious practices ought to be tolerated, if not respected, as long as they don’t overtly step on anyone’s toes.
And there’s nothing particularly offensive about afterlife baptism either — well, nothing except for the fact that tens of thousands of Jewish Holocaust victims have turned up in the Mormon’s “to-be-converted” database.
And yes, that exists.
But these dead Jews aren’t alone. Members of the Mormon Church have been baptizing dead folks far and wide and from every different background.
During Barack Obama’s campaign in 2008, it was leaked that the Church had baptized his deceased mother.
They didn’t stop there.
Adolf Hitler, Eva Braun and other prominent Nazis have been given the baptismal treatment, which has stoked the flames of an already incensed Jewish community.
And despite the fact that I can’t quite connect the dots on that particular nuance of this
issue, there is something decidedly un-kosher about the whole affair, or un-halal. Take your pick.
So when Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor and award-winning author, found out he was in the Mormon’s database — and he wasn’t even dead yet — he went straight to the top. The discerning reader will probably have already put this together.
He went to Mitt Romney.
And by “went” I mean he called the candidate out on national television and essentially demanded Romney tell his church to back off — a demand I can understand in sentiment, though not necessarily in form.
Wiesel has all due right to be outraged at this particularly unsavory practice, but the church has publicly stated they are doing their best to remove all of the Holocaust victims from their rosters and are actively discouraging the practice as it applies to Jews and Holocaust victims in particular.
But the controversy persists.
Wiesel and the others who have raised this issue are now grabbing at the limelight surrounding Romney as a candidate. If they wanted to redress their grievances with a prominent Mormon in the public sector, they could have directed their protest at someone like Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader.
But they chose Romney.
It seems what was an issue of maintaining peace between two religious communities is rapidly becoming the attempted indictment of a politician’s character based solely on his religious affiliation.
People should not be guilty by association or affiliation, they should be judged by their actions, and there are plenty of reasons to judge Romney.
This just isn’t one of them.
As weird as this entire dispute may be, there has been progress made between Jewish leaders and Mormon officials over the last several years. Agreements and joint efforts made in 1995 and 2010 have seen the practice of “baptism for the dead” greatly reduced in the cases of families who would be sensitive to this sort of thing.
The fact that Wiesel has chosen to bring this issue up now suggests some people may be more concerned about stepping on political toes than protecting religious ones – and when faith becomes a “legitimate” weapon in political discord, nobody wins.
Nicholas Pierce is a 22-year-old history junior from Baton Rouge. Follow him on twitter @TDR_nabdulpierc.
 
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Contact Nicholas Pierce at [email protected]