What does “pray in” to church mean here?

manpreet Best Answer 2 years ago

I'm back again with a new Hitchens question.

First of all, I couldn't decide whether I should post the question here or to the Christianity site. But it seemed like a grammatical question to me. So here it is.

Every week, at special ceremonies in Mormon temples, the congregations meet and are given a certain quota of names of the departed to “pray in” to their church. This retrospective baptism of the dead seems harmless enough to me, but the American Jewish Committee became incensed when it was discovered that the Mormons had acquired the records of the Nazi “final solution,” and were industriously baptizing what for once could truly be called a “lost tribe”: the murdered Jews of Europe.

Hitchens talks about what Mormons do for the ones who lived before them to help them find salvation. They basically baptize them retrospectively.

First of all, I'm confused by the preposition to in this part of speech. If it wasn't there, it would make perfect sense to me (Mormons are given a list of name to pray for in their churches.) Moreover, pray in is given in quotation marks which suggests to me that there is something special about it.

I've looked up "to pray in" and found to pray in aid which means (according to Wiktionary),

1. (intransitive, now rare) To resort to the help (of); to call on the support (of), especially to help prove an argument.
2. (transitive, chiefly law) To ask for the help of (someone or something) in pleading a case; to make use of, adduce (something) in defence of a case, argument etc.

I'm not sure if this phrase has anything to do with my question but it's the closest thing I could find. Now I'm more confused.

manpreet 2 years ago