Oh, I've been tempted, mind you.
With the recent spate of stories about the Mormon Church proxy-baptising in everyone from Ann Frank to Ghandi, I've been sorely tempted to respond in kind. Hold a special ritual just for a proxy-initiation of the Salt Lake City founder and "Mormon Moses". Give him the Craft-name "Scruffy".
George Romney. Mitt Romney. The Osmonds. Joseph Smith himself. I can load up with Mormons just as fast as they can load up with everyone else.
But I won't, and I'll tell you why below the curli-kos.
Read on . . .
First and most importantly, it would just be wrong. As a Pagan, my respect for other religions is not, has never been and, frankly, could never be contingent on their respect for mine. Brigham Young, however I see him and his history, is revered by legions of genuinely good and decent people, and I don't have any right or reason to try and claim him for a faith neither he nor his Church holds.
Second, my Circle is close and sacred, precisely because the handful inside it are there by their hearts' deepest choice. Headhunting people outside the faith, packing my coven with people like trophies, living and dead, just diminishes that. Mormons at least are proxy-baptising out of a genuine belief that it in some way "helps" the Dead, opens a door that would otherwise be closed to them. My faith has no such exclusionary rule for the Afterlife. Initiating people by proxy would in my case just be a stunt - and my religion is too meaningful to be reduced to stunts.
And lastly, because I don't actually care. Ghandi and Anne Frank and whoever else the Mormon church has on its celestial wish list have crossed over to whatever waits for us all. I don't know if we all go to the same place, or how exactly we get there, or what we see when we do. I don't know how the rules of the Other Side work - but once you're there, I'm pretty sure sure getting typed into a church's genealogical database post-mortem doesn't even come up on your radar.
I know the Departed pass beyond the Veil. I've spoken with the Dead at Samhain. And while a lot of their side of the fence is and always will be a mystery to me (well, at least for another three to five decades, hopefully), I'm pretty solid on the idea that the divisions and delusions of this world don't touch them over there.
So I don't care about religions stealing each other's dead people. I care far, far more about how the Mormon church has treated millions of living, breathing gays and lesbians. How the Catholic Church has treated victims of sexual abuse, including its own. How the followers of the more stringent variants of Islam have treated their wives and daughters, and the followers of the more stringent variants of Judaism have treated their Semitic brethren, Jew and non-Jew alike. How some strains of Heathenism have been corrupted by racism, and some strains of Paganism corrupted by the confusion of freedom and license, and a reactionary disdain for Christianity.
Proxy-baptising Anne Frank changes nothing about Anne Frank, or the various monuments and memorials of her. It doesn't rob her of Judaism, or vice-versa. Religion cannot change the dead.
I want to find out how it can help change the living.