The institution
The Second Anointing
An ordinance guaranteeing exaltation, practiced from 1843 to now, that most members have never heard of.
The point in one sentence
Beyond the endowment there is a further ordinance, the second anointing, in which a couple's exaltation is sealed rather than promised conditionally, administered by invitation only, and almost entirely unknown to the general membership whose theology it completes.
What is documented
The scholarly record is David Buerger's study in Dialogue, still the standard source. From it: "This special priesthood ordinance was first administered on 28 September 1843 to Joseph and Emma Smith." In the months that followed, at least twenty men and sixteen of their wives received it, and by the time the Nauvoo Temple closed in February 1846, "just under six hundred persons had received the fulness of the priesthood." Buerger, Dialogue, 1983
The Church's own Joseph Smith Papers confirms the founding event: Joseph and Emma were "anointed & ordd. to the highest and holiest order of the priesthood" in September 1843, and notes that Wilford Woodruff's journal "often referred to" this ordinance as a "second anointing," eventually extended to the Twelve and their wives. JSP, Introduction to Journals, Volume 3
Concede these first
- Nothing about the ordinance is sinister. It is, within the theology, a blessing. "Undisclosed" here means undertaught, not criminal.
- Claims about modern practice must stay modest. The Church says nothing official about current frequency or criteria; contemporary accounts are secondhand. Attribute modern claims to the scholarly and journalistic record, never state them as established fact.
- Rarity is not hypocrisy by itself. A church may reasonably not teach eight-year-olds about ordinances they are decades from.
What survives the concessions
The theological weight is the issue. This is not a minor rite; within the system it is the culmination, the difference between having blessings promised conditionally and having your calling and election made sure. An ordinary member can attend for eighty years, hold every calling, and never learn it exists, while it is quietly administered to others by invitation. Whatever else that is, it is a two-tier structure inside a church whose missionaries teach that the full plan of salvation is on the table in the first discussion.
It also bears on a pattern documented elsewhere on this site: the distance between the religion as taught and the religion as practiced at the top, a distance members discover by accident, usually online, usually with the vertigo this site exists to catch.
Why this should make you question
Ask the missionary question in reverse: if the plan of salvation is the message, why is its final ordinance a thing most members will learn about from historians? An institution decides what its members need to know. What it decided here tells you something.