The Church recently announced that children under 18 living with a parent in a same-sex marriage cannot be baptized. One of the apostles of the Church recently explained why the church made this change. Elder Christofferson said:
"This policy...originates from a desire to protect children in their innocence and in their minority years. When, for example, there is the formal blessing and naming of a child in the Church, which happens when a child has parents who are members of the Church, it triggers a lot of things. First, a membership record for them. It triggers the assignment of visiting and home teachers. It triggers an expectation that they will be in Primary and the other Church organizations. And that is likely not going to be an appropriate thing in the home setting, in the family setting where they're living as children where their parents are a same-sex couple. We don't want there to be the conflicts that that would engender. We don't want the child to have to deal with issues that might arise where the parents feel one way and the expectations of the Church are very different. And so with the other ordinances on through baptism and so on, there's time for that if, when a child reaches majority, he or she feels like that's what they want and they can make an informed and conscious decision about that. Nothing is lost to them in the end if that's the direction they want to go. In the meantime, they're not placed in a position where there will be difficulties, challenges, conflicts that can injure their development in very tender years."
His justification implies that children cannot make an informed or conscious decision about whether to be baptized or not. This also implies that the child loses nothing from not being baptized, as long as it happens at eighteen. Does this make sense?
Baptism is sign of a covenant between a person and God. The person covenants to keep God's commandments, and God covenants to bless the person with the influence of the Holy Ghost (Mosiah 18:10). The church will not permit adults to be baptized unless the adult can give appropriate answers to certain questions. Children, however, do not need to answer these questions in order to be baptized, since their baptisms are not considered convert baptisms.
In fact, children under eight years of age cannot fulfill the requirement from D&C 20:37 that they repent of their sins (Moroni 8:8, 10). Thus, a child of eight years of age who is baptized can only repent of his or her sins committed between his or her eighth birthday and the date of baptism. Yet D&C 68:25-27 says that children should be baptized once they reach eight years of age.
So it seems that baptizing children at eight does not make sense. Why is the age of eight special? D&C 29:46-47 says that " little children...cannot sin, for power is not given unto Satan to tempt little children, until they begin to become accountable before me." The statement here is not that children are entirely accountable at eight but only that they begin to be accountable at eight. Then we can also conclude that they begin to be able to sin, they begin to be able to make covenants with God, etc.
How can we reconcile the implications of Elder Christofferson's statement with the Doctrine and Covenants? There are two possible ways. The first is as follows. Children should be baptized at eight, but nothing is lost in the end of the children are baptized at eighteen. This does not make sense, since it there would be no reason for a child to be baptized at eight unless something were lost by the child not being baptized.
The second is as follows. If children are not taught the gospel and baptized at eight, then their sins are attributed to their parents (D&C 68:25). However, this does not work either. D&C 68:25 states only that if the parents do not teach an eight-year old child the gospel, that child's sins will be attributed to the parents. But the parents of a child could do this while the child is living with a same-sex couple, and the Church would prevent the child's baptism. Yet the parents of the child would still escape being blamed for the sins of their child.
So I cannot reconcile what Elder Christofferson's statement implies with what the Doctrine and Covenants says.
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