A Marriage That Does Not End at Death

Almost every Christian marriage rite contains the phrase until death do us part, and Latter-day Saint teaching treats that phrase as a defect to be remedied rather than a solemn truth. A marriage performed by priesthood authority in a temple is said to be sealed for time and for all eternity, and children born to a sealed couple are held to belong to that family permanently, without any further act. Children born before a sealing are sealed to their parents afterward.

The doctrine rests on Doctrine and Covenants section 132, recorded in July 1843, and on the sealing authority that Latter-day Saints say Elijah conferred in the Kirtland Temple in 1836. It is the reason the temple has the place it does in the movement's life. A meetinghouse is for Sunday worship and is open to anyone; a temple is for ordinances and is not, and the sealing is the ordinance that gives the building its purpose. It is also why the movement's conception of heaven is domestic rather than monastic: the highest degree of the celestial kingdom is described in terms of a continuing family rather than a continuing choir, and a Latter-day Saint who has lost a spouse will speak with some confidence about the arrangement resuming.

Widowers and widows may be sealed again, and the question of what happens to a woman sealed to more than one husband is one the church has historically handled by policy adjustments rather than by doctrine, a point on which its own members ask questions that have not been fully answered.