(RNS) The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is investigating how President Obama’s late mother was baptized by proxy into the church last June at a Utah temple.
Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, who died in 1995, was an agnostic and “a lonely witness for secular humanism,” Obama wrote in his memoir “Dreams from My Father.”
But Dunham was baptized by proxy at a Mormon temple in Provo, Utah on June 4, and another rite, called an “endowment” was performed on June 11, according to published reports.
The proxy baptism was first reported on the blog, Americablog.
“The offering of baptism to our deceased ancestors is a sacred practice to us and it is counter to church policy for a church member to submit names for persons to whom they are not related,” said LDS spokeswoman Kim Farah.
“The church is looking into the circumstances of how this happened and does not yet have all the facts. However, this is a serious matter and we are treating it as such,” she said.
The White House has declined to comment.
Mormons have performed proxy baptisms on behalf of deceased relatives for almost 200 years, the church explained, because they believe baptism is required to enter heaven.
Though the church preaches against “coerced conversion” after death, it is “extremely difficult to prevent” proxy baptisms “because the temple baptism process depends on voluntary compliance by millions of church members around the world,” the church said.
In the 1990s, Jewish groups protested that Holocaust victims had been baptized by proxy, after which the church removed more than 250,000 names from its International Genealogical Index, according to the Salt Lake Tribune.
