The Death of LDS Church President Gordon B. Hinckley

Gordon B. Hinckley, the 15th President/Prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day, died on Sunday, January 27, 2008. He was 97 years old. For 73 of those years he worked full-time for the church over which he would come to preside in 1995. Although he only served as church president for a dozen […]

Gordon B. Hinckley, the 15th President/Prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day, died on Sunday, January 27, 2008. He was 97 years old. For 73 of those years he worked full-time for the church over which he would come to preside in 1995. Although he only served as church president for a dozen years, from the time he was called into the church’s “First Presidency” in 1981 forward, Hinckley was the principal LDS administrative figure, the face Mormonism presented to the world.


Even during the presidential terms of Prophet/Presidents Spencer W. Kimball, Ezra Taft Benson, and Howard W. Hunter, Hinckley’s influence was incalculable. In part this was due to the fact that both Kimball and Benson became incapacitated in the final years of their administrations while Hunter lived less than a year after he was ordained and set apart as church president. This left the day to day operation of the church as well as key administrative decisions to President Hinckley who served as Counselor to all three of his predecessors in the presidential office.
Hinckley went to work for the church full-time immediately after his return from serving a mission to the British Isles in 1935. He worked in many different posts, but nearly all of them dealt with public affairs and/or the preparation of materials for church members as well as materials for non-Mormons. In his various posts, Hinckley developed an extraordinary ability to deal with the media in such a way that he could stay “on message” even as he was being interviewed by skilled investigative reporters. Nearly always he was warm and charming, but journalists of every stripe emerged from their interrogations of Hinckley very much aware that the president/prophet never lost control of the trajectory and content of their interviews.
His public relations skill stood President Hinckley in particularly good stead at two points in his ecclesiastical career. One occurred during the great brouhaha that accompanied the so-called “Mormon Murders” when document-dealer Mark Hofmann killed two people in an unsuccessful attempt to hide his forgery of historical documents that purported to damage the LDS Church, documents he was attempting to sell for tens of thousands of dollars. The other episode that hurt public perceptions of Mormonism came in connection with the church’s effort to shed light on the horrendous massacre at Mountain Meadows in which LDS church members slaughtered virtually the entire population of a wagon train that was attempting to cross Mormonland in 1857. Both these instances generated extraordinary media attention to the Latter-day Saints, including several different book-length treatments. But in neither instance were journalists able to gain control of an interview with President Hinckley about these potentially devastating stories, They were not permitted to know any more about these situations than what President intended for them to know.
During his long career as church leader, Hinckley saw exponential church growth in terms of numbers of church members and in terms of geographical expansion. He watched and presided over growth that moved upward from a little more than a million members mainly concentrated in the intermountain west at the end of World War II to more than thirteen million members spread throughout the United States and all across the globe today.
In dealing with this extraordinary growth, Hinckley supervised implementation of a standardized program known as correlation. While critics sometimes complain that this program turns Mormonism into “franchized religion,” its purpose is guarding against the creation of many different forms of Mormonism as well as guaranteeing that Mormonism will be the same wherever it is found.
President Hinckley was also primarily responsible for the move away from the monographic narrative history of Mormonism to what is often called the public history dimension of the LDS past. He was church president when many historic sites were built or cleaned up, refurbished, and reopened to the public. These sites are important as a means of permitting non-Mormons to comprehend Mormonism’s fundamental story. But they have also become crucially important pilgrimage places where converts and young Mormons may go to enter experientially into the Mormon past.
President Hinckley also supported the expansion of the Museum of Church History and Art and the building up of the Family History Library and its enormous genealogical collection which is open to the public not simply in Salt Lake City, but in electronic format all across the world.
Hinckley was also principally responsible for the construction of LDS temples all across the world.
Much beloved by LDS Church members and respected by non-Mormons, Hinckley will be followed in office by Thomas S. Monson who, for many years, was the general manager of the church’s official ppress, the Deseret Press. His choice as the next president is determined by his longevity on the church’s “Council of the Twelve.” An Apostle, Monson has been a member of the Twelve longer than any of the other apostles who sit on the Council.
Plans for President Hinckley’s funeral are still pending. Whether presidential candidate Mitt Romney will interrupt his political campaign to fly to Salt Lake City for the funeral remains to be seen.

Donate to Support Independent Journalism!

Donate Now!