The Mormon Church has been in a bit of trouble lately. First, they got a bad rap for siccing Mitt Romney on our poor, unsuspecting country. More recently, legions of supporters of gay marriage have been protesting outside Latter Day Saints churches across the nation after Mormon support for California's Proposition 8 played a significant role in its passage. There are even people trying to get the church stripped of its tax-exempt status because of its involvement in political issues.
But the Mormon Church isn't just in hot water with the gays. Rather, it is in trouble with the other group that controls Hollywood: the Jews. The trouble stems from the Mormon predilection for giving posthumous baptisms by proxy to victims of the Holocaust.
Mormon baptism by proxy? It sounds like something parents tell their unruly children to get them to go to bed. It's not too much of a stretch to picture parents sitting at their child's bedside warning, "If you don't quiet down and go to sleep they'll turn you into a Mormon when you're not looking."
Because the church is less than two centuries old, however, they have a little eschatological problem: Do people unlucky enough to have died before Joseph Smith established the church go to Hell just because of their unfortunate timing? The solution lies in baptism by proxy. To ensure that good believers will be reunited with their entire ancestral trees in Heaven, the church basically reserves the right to turn anyone of any religion into a Mormon, anytime, anywhere.
Forced baptism isn't exclusively Mormon territory. In medieval Spain during the Reconquista, for instance, Christian officials would gather large crowds of Jews and Muslims in public squares before hosing them all down with gallons of holy water. Unlike the Mormon practice in question, however, this at least required the victims to be present (not to mention alive).
The American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors, though, thinks this is pretty offensive. I guess that there's something unforgivable about declaring that someone murdered for being a Jewish is no longer a Jewish after all. Consequently, the Holocaust group reached a deal with the Mormon Church in 1995 to restrict baptisms by proxy to only those victims directly related to current Mormons and to remove all other names of Holocaust victims from their baptism database.
Unfortunately, those in charge of the database don't appear to have much of a problem with giving false oaths. An independent monitoring group in Salt Lake City, Utah, has noted the recent re-addition of old names of victims plus new names of Jews killed in the Holocaust to the list of those to be baptized. The church said that the additions were the work of a rogue few acting outside official LDS policy, but that doesn't negate the fact that Holocaust victims were baptized as recently as July.
Jewish leaders have met with members of the Church recently to address the problem, but to no avail. While the Jewish leaders hoped that the baptisms could be undone, the Mormons must have taken a policy along the lines of no takesies backsies.
What, then, is there to be done? Someone needs to show Mormon leaders what it feels like to be forcibly inducted into a religion they don't want to be a part of. If I know the Religious Right (and, coming from Kansas, I think I do), I can safely say that the one religion they are least interested in joining would be Islam.
In order for non-Muslims to become Muslims, they must recite the shahada in public. The shahada is an oath affirming that there is no god but God and that Muhammad is his prophet. The fun part of this little exercise is finding ways to trick Mormons into taking said oath. The oath could be inserted into the lyrics during a Gladys Knight karaoke sing-along, or we could tell Mitt Romney that it's a magical incantation that guarantees him the presidency in 2012.
Ultimately, the mechanism isn't important. Although the Mormons probably mean well and just want to make sure that the streets of Heaven are too crowded with angels, they need to understand that there are some boundaries you just don't cross. As Ernest Michel, honorary chairman of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors, so eloquently put it, "They suffered enough."
Adam Cambier '09 would like to invite you to his un-baptism.
