Eternal Marriage

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.

Entry to a temple requires a recommend, a card issued after two interviews, one with a member of the bishopric and one with a stake president, covering belief, honesty, chastity, the Word of Wisdom, tithing and support of church leaders. It is renewed every two years. The requirement is what gives the practice its social weight: a temple wedding is not a grander version of a chapel wedding but a room from which anyone without a current recommend is excluded, including a parent who has left the church, a sibling who has not paid tithing, and any friend who is not a member at all.

The church is aware of the cost. In many countries a civil marriage had to be performed first for legal reasons, and until 2019 the church's own policy imposed a one-year wait between a civil marriage and a sealing in countries where a temple marriage was legally recognised, which meant that couples in the United States often faced a straight choice between a sealing and their families. That waiting period was removed in May 2019, and couples may now marry civilly with everyone present and be sealed the same day. The change was widely reported inside the movement as one of the more humane adjustments of recent years, which indicates how much the earlier arrangement had cost.

The other consequence of the doctrine is genealogical. A couple who died without the ordinance can be sealed by proxy once their names and dates are established, which converts family history research from a hobby into a religious obligation and explains the scale of the archive the church has built.