Baby Blessing

The baby blessings performed by Mormon church elders were among the very first rituals adopted by the church. While Joseph Smith revealed no explicit details of this ritual beyond its necessity, church members began to perform it on the eighth day of the child’s life and in many cases associated it with naming the child. Baby blessings functioned in the early Zion period to delineate citizenship in the salvific community. After the fall of the temporal Zion and the rise of the Nauvoo Temple cosmology, baby blessings functioned to annunciate the sealed position of the child in the priesthood of heaven. After the arrival in the Great Basin, two concurrent practices emerged: the blessing of children at home by family members and the blessing at church by ecclesiastical leaders. In the twentieth century, church leaders focused exclusively on blessings at church, recasting them as the solemn duty of priesthood-holding fathers.