We thank thee, O God, for a prophet
To guide us in these latter days….
THE WORDS OF WILLIAM FOWLER’S NINETEENTH-CENTURY MORMON hymn reverberated through Madison Square Garden on a Sunday morning in 1998 as 24,000 believers spontaneously broke into song to salute Gordon B. Hinckley. The president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had come to address the first such massive “Fireside” for the New York City area. The gathering place was appropriately Mormon, since at the time the Garden’s president and CEO was the devout church member David Checketts. Thousands waved white handkerchiefs in greeting, and the bespectacled, avuncular Hinckley waved his in response. There was palpable excitement in the air, as there always is during a Mormon president’s visitations out among the flock.
In some ways the church does not create a personality cult around its leaders. Believers are told not to request autographs from the General Authorities. There was no ring-kissing or genuflection when selected believers were given a chance to meet Hinckley at a private reception prior to the rally. But the presidential mystique has been enhanced in recent decades through a renewed emphasis on the church president’s special title as prophet. “President” is a common enough designation for a chief executive, religious or secular. But as Fowler’s hymn signifies, he is also the church’s “Prophet, Seer, and Revelator.” No spiritual leader of a sizeable denomination, not even the pope of Rome, carries such a status as God’s direct spokesman on earth combined with such thoroughgoing control.
Hinckley has proven identical to late Pope John Paul II in one regard. From the start of his reign he notably strengthened his office and the bonds of his church through widespread world travels. In just the first two years after his 1995 ascent to the top job, the globe-trotting prophet visited twenty-two of the United States, twenty-eight other nations, and all continents except Africa, which he reached soon thereafter. Hinckley has personally dedicated three-fourths of the world’s temples, counting those opened before he assumed the presidency. More than any prior prophet, he has been a personal presence for believers worldwide. Despite the importance of Spencer Kimball’s 1978 racial revelation, Hinckley has been the most consequential leader since David O. McKay (1951–1970) and, arguably, since the turbulent nineteenth century.
Born on June 23, 1910, Hinckley bounded into his presidency as an amazingly spry octogenarian. He would arrive at church headquarters around 7:00 a.m. on the typical weekday and leave perhaps eleven hours later, toting a briefcase stuffed with evening homework. He kept fit through a nightly workout on an exercise treadmill, economizing his time by simultaneously watching the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on TV. He jested, “I don’t jog. I speak at funerals of those who do.” He and his wife Marjorie, who died in 2004 after 67 years of marriage, led a picture-book Mormon clan of five children, twenty-five grandchildren, and fifty-two great-grandchildren.
Hinckley received a heart pacemaker in a 2001 outpatient procedure and was diagnosed with diabetes, but in 2005 was still defying longevity with a 25,000-mile tour that spanned Russia, South Korea, China, Taiwan, India, Kenya, and Nigeria. Early in 2006, he underwent his first hospital stay, for colon cancer surgery, but bounced back within two months and flew off to Chile for a temple rededication. Later that year, Hinckley reached the age of ninety-six years and 133 days, passing McKay’s record to become the oldest president to serve. As the Salt Lake Tribune observed, he was also “the healthiest, most vigorous Mormon president to live into his 90s.”
Hinckley has appeared in several annual Gallup Poll listings of the world’s “most admired men” as the first or second choice of at least 1 percent of Americans, presumably thanks to Mormon respondents. In the 2005 survey, he ranked behind two other religious figures, Billy Graham and Pope Benedict, but ahead of Bob Dole, John Edwards, Rudolph Giuliani, Al Gore, Jesse Jackson, Michael Jordan, and John Kerry. On his ninety-fourth birthday, Hinckley was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.
Besides overall vigor, the Hinckley era featured missionary advance, an unprecedented building blitz of temples and meetinghouses, opening of a 21,000-seat Conference Center forty times the size of the venerable Tabernacle nearby, acquisition of a downtown street to create a plaza linking the Salt Lake Temple with church office buildings, tightened administration, and more expansive public relations.
The last item was no surprise, since Hinckley was the godfather of Mormon P.R. In 1935 the University of Utah English major had completed a missionary stint in England and, at age twenty-five, was appointed as the first executive secretary of the Church Radio, Publicity, and Mission Literature Committee. Except for time off helping run railroads during World War II, he was responsible for Mormon media promotions until he became executive secretary of the missionary committee in 1951. As church president, Hinckley held an unprecedented number of open press conferences from New York to Albuquerque to Seoul to Tokyo, and granted interviews to newspapers, magazines, and television. Ever the professional publicist, he conveyed an upbeat philosophy and smoothed over the more controversial LDS teachings.
People think of revelations to the Mormon president and hierarchy in terms of blockbusters such as the cessation of polygamy and the opening all lay offices to males of African descent. But in LDS belief, the hierarchy is divinely directed in more mundane matters as well. In an interview, Hinckley emphasized that the leadership seeks such guidance collectively: “Now and again a serious problem arises on which we do need direction and understanding. What do we do? We counsel together as brethren. We pray. We even fast. It’s a very sacred thing. An answer comes; I’m satisfied of that. And the results that are achieved from what comes bear out the fact that it was done under inspiration, under revelation. It works. Now, it isn’t a constant everyday thing. No. It comes as needed, according to need and opportunity.” He added that such occurrences “are very sacred and they’re personal, and I don’t like to talk about them very much, but they’re very real.”
Hinckley cited as examples a decision on building a temple or selecting a General Authority or regional leader. He revealed that special divine guidance was also sought when the hierarchy discussed the idea of centralizing at headquarters all spending for construction and the other special needs of meetinghouses and cessation of local fund-raising drives. “We considered it. We prayed about it. We fasted about it. And the answer came that we should do it. No, we didn’t hear a voice, but we received a perception, strong and clear.”
Looked at in the less spiritual terms, Hinckley and his colleagues instituted a new managerial strategy at a time when growth was already putting severe strains on the church and planning for ever greater expansion was essential. With some 27,000 congregations spread across 155 nations and territories, the top executives decided to end the previous role of local believers in participating in some financial matters, centralizing all strategy, funding, and construction planning at church headquarters. With every penny of members’ offerings accounted for in Salt Lake City, a smaller group of managers would be able to plan global expansion more efficiently.
But the Hinckley strategy simultaneously moved in the opposite direction, too, pushing more ecclesiastical authority out into the field. Observers considered this to be Hinckley’s most significant administrative tactic. Formerly, regional presidents overseas had to, in effect, “call in” to Salt Lake. But the Hinckley-era hierarchy took the unprecedented step of adding the new office Area Authority, with such powers as creating new regional stakes and appointing their leaders. For the first time some key decisions were made in foreign countries, and occasionally by foreign nationals, always subject to review from Salt Lake as necessary.
Tony Burns, a Mormon and former chairman of Ryder Systems, Inc., said he patterned some of his own corporate reorganization on the Hinckley design. “I learned from what the church did, and that helped me set up our new consumer business units,” commented Burns, whose firm employs 45,000. “I think it is truly inspired as a model for growth.” Joseph Cannon, CEO of Utah’s Geneva Steel before its bankruptcy and then editor of the Deseret Morning News, was another managerial admirer. “What’s fascinating about Hinckley is his sense of history. He’s a huge history buff. He’s got one foot in the nineteenth century and one foot in the twenty-first.”
When an LDS president takes office, he chooses seasoned churchmen to be his first counselor and second counselor, and these three men then operate as a collective trio known as the First Presidency. The president sometimes acts on his own but almost always in the collective name of the First Presidency, and often the First Presidency takes a step together with the Quorum of Twelve Apostles as the “Council.” At meetings in the paneled boardroom at church headquarters, the presidential troika is placed at a shorter head table while the Twelve, placed by seniority, are seated along a longer table to create a “T” formation. (The fifteen men also meet weekly in the temple nearby.) In the inner sanctum the power dynamics between the First Presidency and the Quorum have shifted over the decades. But as far as outsiders are concerned, these fifteen men atop the Mormon hierarchy are a unitary force that rules with unchallenged authority.
The collective First Presidency has come in handy. Like the popes, LDS presidents serve until they die; there is no tradition of resignation or removal of a president for cause. Unlike Catholic cardinals, who lose papal voting power at age eighty, life tenure holds for the Twelve Apostles. The first three times the LDS presidency fell vacant, there were politically convoluted gaps of two to three years before the next president took office. To avoid confusion and delay, a curiously rigid succession system then took hold that could be altered in theory but never has been. The Quorum of Twelve always chooses as new president the apostle who has served the longest, regardless of circumstances. Thus the church president is old, often very old, not infrequently infirm even when chosen, and sometimes non compos mentis during his tenure.
It was an open secret that owing to this system Hinckley often served as the de facto leader or co-leader of his church, filling in for ailing superiors, long before he became the president in name. Thus, he came into the presidency well prepared for the task and doubtless determined to revitalize the top office.
There was serious presidential incapacity from 1942 until 1945, when Heber J. Grant died at age eighty-eight, in 1965–70 during McKay’s final years and much of the reign of Joseph Fielding Smith, who became president in 1970 at the age of ninety-three and died in 1972.
Hinckley himself, an Apostle since 1961, was named an extra counselor to President Spencer W. Kimball in 1981 because the first and second counselors were incapacitated. When Kimball became seriously disabled following a third brain operation, Hinckley (by then second counselor) effectively ran the church for four years until Kimball died in 1985. Kimball’s successor, Ezra Taft Benson, took office at eighty-six with signs of memory loss and physical frailty, and by 1989 was so handicapped that First Counselor Hinckley and Second Counselor Thomas S. Monson were the de facto leaders. In 1993 grandson Steve Benson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist with the Arizona Republic (who soon left the church for other reasons) said his grandfather had long struggled with increasing senility. “I believe the church strives mightily to perpetuate the myth, the fable, the fantasy that President Benson, if not operating on all cylinders” was still to be regarded as the “living, functioning prophet.” Benson was succeeded by Howard W. Hunter, eighty-six, frail, and only able to function during the first six of his nine months as president.
When Hunter died in March of 1995, the shadow president became the actual president, and the Hinckley era began in earnest. Like all incoming presidents, Hinckley was “sustained” in office by vote of the members attending the next church General Conference in Salt Lake City. But these are ritual occasions, not elections. God has already extended the call through his anointed leaders, and it is the duty of the membership to recognize this. The conferences have no elective or legislative role whatsoever. Some other hierarchical church bodies reserve doctrinal matters to the leadership and allow delegated assemblies to supervise temporal aspects, but not Mormonism. The conference does not even function in an advisory role or as an open forum. Nor does the hierarchy decide on certain policies through public discussion at national meetings, as the U.S. Catholic bishops do. The information that an LDS conference receives or does not receive—for instance, on finances—is totally the prerogative of the top leadership.
In the tightly managed Mormon kingdom, information, policy, planning, the appointments and removals of all regional and local officials, organizational minutiae—everything flows from the top down.
The inner workings of Mormonism appear to follow closely the structure and outlook of the modern American corporation, with thoroughgoing commitment to obedience and secrecy regarding internal operations, and an external strategy that combines well-calibrated public relations and commitment to sales (that is, conversions). The top of the hierarchy functions under a myth of unanimity. By policy, all disagreements must be hammered out in private and then presented with a united front. The unanimity is also chronological. When current leaders abrogate the policies and teachings of predecessor prophets, the change must not be admitted lest the church’s infallibility appears to be in question. Some of these tendencies appear in other denominations, but rarely in such exaggerated form.
Like some Protestant groups, notably the Churches of Christ, the LDS Church takes pride in the fact that it has no “clergy class.” LDS lay officers fill the same sort of role that clergy do and are ceremonially installed in office. What is largely unique to the Mormon way is the degree to which the clergy-type tasks are filled by appointees who work part-time and without pay. Leaders of regional and local units are volunteers who hold down secular jobs and squeeze in their demanding church workloads in off hours. They lack the formal schooling for the pastoral vocation that most denominations require.
Even at the highest levels of doctrinal authority, oversight is the responsibility of leaders who are often former business executives and rarely have academic training in religion, philosophy, or ancient languages. It is hard to imagine Catholic cardinals, Eastern Orthodox metropolitans, Episcopal bishops, or Lutheran district presidents—or even most ordinary parish clergy in those groups—holding office without graduate-level theological training.
Along with the unpaid part-timers, the LDS hierarchy is assisted by a large, salaried headquarters bureaucracy in Salt Lake City. These employees administer all programs under the direction of their superiors, but anonymously. Their names and their functions are largely unknown to the wider church membership. The level of their practical influence in shaping the church can only be guessed at.
At the top of the pyramid of officialdom known as the General Authorities stand the First Presidency and the Twelve, who all receive the same living allowance, never revealed but said to be modest. These fifteen men supervise their appointees at all lower levels. The presiding bishop and his first and second counselors, who together form the Presiding Bishopric, manage the church’s temporal matters. The “Seventies” oversee geographic regions and handle administrative tasks assigned by their superiors. (This term stems from Moses’ call to seventy elders and Jesus’ commissioning of seventy itinerant disciples.) The seven-man Presidency of the Seventy supervises all Quorums of the Seventy (which do not actually number seventy, though they may someday). The First Quorum of the Seventy includes full-time executives who receive a living allowance if needed and retire at age seventy. The Second Quorum’s members serve indeterminate terms and as volunteers.
To accommodate global expansion, Hinckley established further bodies of part-time regional overseers, not considered among the General Authorities, who live in their home areas and retain secular employment. They are grouped into the Third Quorum of the Seventy (Africa, Europe), Fourth Quorum (Mexico, Central America, northern South America), Fifth Quorum (western North America), Sixth Quorum (central and eastern North America, the Caribbean), Seventh Quorum (southern South America), and Eighth Quorum (Asia, Oceania).
The ritual of members sustaining their assigned leaders, the top-down control, and the three-in-one leadership structure continue down to the regional and local levels and even to the auxiliary organizations for women and youth.
The church’s regional unit is called the “stake” (similar to a Catholic diocese), and the local congregation is the “ward” (similar to a Catholic parish). “Stake” referred to the poles that held up the sacred tabernacle in which biblical Israel worshiped. By the Book of Mormon account, Jesus used the term when he preached in the Western Hemisphere. An LDS stake includes roughly 3,000 or more members in perhaps five to a dozen geographic wards. “Ward” was a common term for the subdivisions of a municipality when Joseph Smith organized his city of Nauvoo, where secular and religious government were combined, and Brigham Young continued the system in pioneer Utah. Where the Mormon population is thin and not yet strong enough to produce its own leaders, the church is organized into geographical missions (with districts parallel to stakes) and “branches” (parallel to wards and led by a “president.”). In the United States the stake and mission regions often overlap.
A stake president is chosen and approved by a regional Seventy, as assigned by headquarters. The stake president then chooses his two counselors, also subject to approval from a Seventy. The head of a local ward is called a “bishop,” who is recommended by the stake president and then approved directly by the First Presidency and Quorum of Twelve in Salt Lake. The bishop chooses two counselors to form a three-man “bishopric,” subject to approval by his stake presidency and stake high council. Within the ward, the auxiliary organizations (the women’s Relief Society, Young Women, Young Men, Primary, Sunday School) do not function independently or choose their own leaders as in most denominations. Rather, the bishopric appoints the heads and then approves the leaders’ choices for counselors who form the usual LDS leadership trio. The bishop controls even routine congregational appointments (assistant librarian, choir president, church magazine representative). All very controlled, all top-down.
Except in special cases (young singles, foreign languages, students), the members are assigned to wards and bishops strictly on the basis of residence. With typical Mormon thrift, two or three wards often share the same meetinghouse with staggered Sunday schedules. Bishops hold considerable discretionary power over the members, especially the granting or withholding of temple recommends and other disciplinary actions. For instance, a bishop could bar a father from the privilege of baptizing his own son. And through the close-knit hierarchical system, the top leadership can keep close tabs on troublesome free spirits at the local level. (For more on this, see Chapter 21.) To reinforce this culture of control and personal fealty, the church requires the leader of the local congregation to interview each member annually regarding his loyalty to church leaders. Without approval and a resulting “recommend” (good for two years), a Latter-day Saint is considered a second-class citizen and cannot enter church temples to perform the central rituals of the faith.
Mormon micromanagement extends into all sorts of ward business that even hierarchical churches customarily leave up to the local clergy and laity. Wards are required to fill out and send in a blizzard of reports. The General Authorities control not only the spending and fund-raising within a ward but the ward’s choice of name and the design of its building. Headquarters controls ward Internet sites, and specifies that videos may not be shown during the Sunday sacrament meeting. Wards need permission to switch TV satellite transponders or to record non-LDS television shows on church equipment. Ward premises are off-limits to political meetings, athletic events not sponsored by the church and weekday schooling or day care. The church recently forbade ward open houses for missionaries and urged briefer testimonies during worship so more members can speak. A particularly interesting 2004 First Presidency edict said notes taken on talks by church officers are only for members’ personal use and cannot be distributed without the speaker’s consent, because such materials could “distort current church teachings and are often based on rumors and innuendos.”
Further, the hierarchy sets strict guidelines for the music and musical texts used in local worship. There is no LDS equivalent of the “contemporary Christian music” craze. Murals and mosaics are not allowed, and flowers are the only decoration permitted in the chapel. Lighted candles are forbidden in the ward building. And within the ward the bishop must endorse each guest speaker for any of the auxiliaries.
In the early twenty-first century, church leaders began employing satellite TV in earnest to strengthen their personal contact with the ever-expanding global church. The first important test was transmission of the 2000 Palmyra, New York, temple dedication to sites across North America. By 2003, area authorities no longer traveled to Salt Lake for training but received instruction via satellite from Hinckley and the apostles, translated into 56 languages. Increasingly, the General Authorities maintain direct contact with stake meetings worldwide through this technology. Satellite transmissions also enable Saints worldwide to observe General Conferences.
The most distinctive aspect of the Mormon system is found at the most basic levels. All children are baptized at age eight, and at twelve each boy assumes personal church responsibility by joining the “priesthood.” The similar Jewish rite of passage, the bar mitzvah, tends to be a graduation from synagogue schooling, but for the Mormon boy it is the beginning of serious church involvement. This is a holy moment, since Mormons believe that John the Baptist appeared in upstate New York in 1829 to restore priesthood authority directly through Joseph Smith and his followers. Holders of the priesthood have weekly ward meetings and form small “quorums” of a dozen or more, each with its own leaders.
The universal lay priesthood, including the emphasis on two-year missionary assignments, is no doubt a major reason why LDS children remain loyal and involved through adolescence and young adulthood. Every boy from age twelve is incorporated into the system with special status. And priesthood carries with it eternal consequences. The centrality of the priesthood vexes the small band of LDS feminists who would like the same status rather than being channeled into female auxiliaries. It also explains why it was a severe deprivation for Mormons of African descent to be denied the priesthood before 1978.
The priesthood process is accelerated for adult converts, but works as follows for the typical boy raised in the church. A boy is ordained into the lower of two priesthood levels, the Aaronic priesthood, at age twelve and progresses through three subcategories. As a deacon, he distributes the sacrament, collects fast offerings, cares for the building and grounds, and helps out otherwise by assisting the elderly, acting as a messenger, and so forth. The major program for deacons consists of church-sponsored Boy Scout troops. Between the ages of fourteen and sixteen he becomes a teacher. He can now perform all deacon functions but also prepares the sacrament, ushers, is allowed to speak at church meetings, and participates in “home teaching” (the monthly visit to each ward household for spiritual strengthening.). Finally, he becomes a priest between the ages of sixteen and eighteen and can teach and exhort during home teaching sessions, baptize, administer the sacrament, and ordain teachers and deacons to the priesthood.
The higher level, the Melchizedek priesthood, also has three categories and is entered at age eighteen or older. As an elder, the entry-level member of the Melchizedek priesthood has the power to perform any Aaronic priesthood function, to lay on hands to pronounce blessings or pray for healings, and to confer the Melchizedek or Aaronic priesthood upon others. One must be an elder to receive a call as a church missionary or to hold many ward and stake leadership positions. High priest is the rank reached by a ward bishop, stake president, or higher church authority. The rank of Seventy or Apostle is reached by men who hold those respective titles among the General Authorities.
Quinn’s meticulous history of the LDS hierarchy showed that during the church’s first century family relationships and connections through marriage played a major part in the choice of leaders, making the LDS hierarchy almost “an extended family.” Of the 123 General Authorities from the church’s founding through 1932, half were relatives of one or more of the existing General Authorities. However, the so-called Mormon dynasticism did not limit church control to any one family and did not stand in the way of appointees lacking kinship ties.
The church has been led by fifteen presidents, among whom only Englishman John Taylor (1880–1887) was not a native-born American. All presidents since 1918 were born in Utah or Idaho. As of the early twenty-first century, that was also the case with the nine apostles next in line to succeed to the presidency, though as of 2004 Germany’s Dieter Uchtdorf was added to the apostles. The Utah-Idaho pattern held for five of the seven men in the Presidency of the Seventy and for all three members of the Presiding Bishopric. However, representation among the General Authorities was beginning to broaden at the level of the First Quorum of the Seventy. Of the forty-seven men filling this rank, twelve were foreign-born (eight of them Latin Americans) and twelve of the thirty-five Americans were born in states other than Utah and Idaho.
And yet, this emerging worldwide faith was still being led mostly by men from a very narrow geographic and cultural background. It will be intriguing to see whether the Mormon hierarchy is able to broaden itself in the same way that the Italian-dominated College of Cardinals became a truly international body in recent decades. And if non-Italian popes, why not a non-American Mormon prophet someday?