Later Latter-day Saint teaching, developed particularly under Brigham Young and subsequent church leadership, tied the three kingdoms directly to temple ordinances, so that the doctrine functions not only as an account of final judgment but as the theological rationale for temple worship itself. Entry into the celestial kingdom's highest degree, termed exaltation, is understood to require ordinances performed specifically in a temple: baptism, the endowment, and eternal marriage sealing, either received personally or performed by proxy on a deceased person's behalf, which is the doctrinal foundation for the church's practice of baptism and other ordinance work for the dead. Individuals who would have accepted these ordinances but died without the opportunity are taught to receive them in the next life if proxy work is completed for them on earth, which resolves, within the theology, the fate of the billions who lived and died without contact with the restored church.
The doctrine also carries a distinctive view of family and marriage: only those sealed in a valid temple marriage are taught to be eligible for the celestial kingdom's highest degree, exaltation into what the tradition describes as godhood and eternal increase, making eternal marriage doctrinally inseparable from the kingdom of glory doctrine rather than a separate teaching about family values. This structure, near-universal salvation graded into differentiated kingdoms, tied to ordinances rather than belief alone, marks one of the sharpest doctrinal distances between Latter-day Saint eschatology and the eternal conscious punishment or annihilationist views held across most other Christian traditions, and it is frequently the doctrine cited first when other Christian bodies describe Latter-day Saint teaching as outside Nicene Christian consensus.