Gordon B. Hinckley

I used to live a few blocks away from the Salt Lake City Cemetery. Over the years, I made special visits to the graves of a number of prominent Mormons buried there: John Taylor, Elijah Abel, Evan Stephens, Emmeline B. Wells, James E. Talmage, George Albert Smith, David O. McKay, Spencer W. Kimball, Howard W. Hunter. I’d sit near the grave, talk to the person for a while, then finish with a prayer in which I talked to God about that person. I’ve made similar “visits” to Eliza R. Snow’s grave near Temple Square, B. H. Roberts’s grave in Centerville, and the Wilson Library here at Chapel Hill, where as a grad student, Leonard Arrington had the spiritual experience that convinced him God wanted him to work in Mormon history.

I don’t expect to be back in Salt Lake for a while. But if I were able to visit Gordon B. Hinckley (who I assume will be buried in the Salt Lake City Cemetery next to Marjorie), my talk with him would go something like this.

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I was a big admirer of yours when I was a missionary. Watching you presiding at General Conference in Benson’s absence, I was impressed by your calm self-assurance, how naturally you took the helm. Even then, I didn’t understand why you and other Church leaders stuck as long as you did to the implausible claim that Benson was still directing the Church through your visits with him at his home, instead of just invoking—as you finally did—the idea of the backup system. It was clear that you were perfectly capable of filling Benson’s shoes. I remember in particular being impressed by the way you had the entire viewing audience at General Conference participate in the Hosanna Anthem on the occasion of the Salt Lake Temple centennial. You had a gift for using ritual and symbol to create a sense of collective experience. You showed that gift later in the televised Hosanna Shout at the Conference Center dedication, or in the story about using your walnut tree for the Conference Center pulpit. In an age of mass media, the ability to use symbols that way is indispensable, and you knew how to do it.

I was a lot less impressed with the way you joked about the September Six at a BYU fireside I attended after my mission—you compared the excommunication of five intellectuals to 500 convert baptisms in Utah alone during the same month, and then said something about 5 versus 500 sounded pretty good to you. I felt like I was the only person in the Marriott Center who didn’t find that funny. Why worry about the one in the wilderness when you’ve still got 99 in the fold, huh?

The real turning point for me, though, was the Mike Wallace interview. Because I’d been so impressed with how you handled yourself on camera during General Conference, I expected to see a similarly impressive performance on 60 Minutes. But that serene confidence evaporated when you had Mike Wallace in front of you instead of a Tabernacle full of admiring faces. When he asked you hard questions (which weren’t all that hard, frankly), you were evasive, defensive, dismissive of issues about which you should have known to at least fake sensitivity: sex abuse, the black priesthood ban. “A blip here, a blip there.” “That’s past, put it behind us, stop talking about it.” I was appalled. I had a similar reaction to the Larry King Christmas show where you shared the time with Desmond Tutu. I’m sorry, I don’t cared how charming Larry King found your grandfatherly folksiness—you were not remotely in the same league with a man who faced down apartheid. And speaking of media appearances: your fudging about the little couplet wasn’t exactly your finest hour. What I’m saying is, you didn’t do media as well as you seemed to think you did, or as well as your adoring faithful thought you did. It was embarrassing--and disillusioning.

I want to try to be fair here. You gave your entire adult life to serving this church. You’re responsible for the creation of the filmed endowment, which attests to your ability to be innovative and creative when it came to using modern media. Then there’s the mini-temples—I’m not sure if they were your idea, but at the very least you promoted them, and that’s been, again, a very important innovation that helps make temple worship more accessible to Latter-day Saints outside the major Mormon population centers. The worldwide training sessions via satellite are another example of how media was used in new ways under your presidency to help foster a sense of community among the Saints. The Conference Center has a similar effect (though I can’t help but see it at some level as a colossal monument to yourself. I’m predicting, actually, that they’ll name it for you now). The Perpetual Education Fund—again, an innovative adaptation of a Mormon tradition, one that represents an attempt to provide material aid to Latter-day Saints in the Third World.

On the other hand, you’re responsible for the Proclamation on the Family, which is going to be a dead weight around the Church’s neck, dragging it down, holding it back, for years to come. I should be grateful that at least you didn’t canonize it. On gay issues: you did finally tell bishops to stop recommending marriage as a solution, which was helpful, albeit a generation late. We could have done without the “so-called gays and lesbians” business, though. It’s an improvement over what others have called us. But how would you feel about being routinely referred to as a “so-called Christian”?

I have to say something about the Iraq war. The talk you gave about that during General Conference was, to your credit, measured in the sense that you tried to avoid people attaching prophetic authority to your pro-war stance (as if that were really possible, though, in that setting). And you said that dissent was permissible, and you acknowledged that Saints in different parts of the world would see this differently. But that speech was a huge problem for those of us who had been speaking out against the war in the name of our Mormon faith. And your faith in George W. Bush was deeply, deeply troubling. Did you remain loyal to that man to the end? Even after they didn’t find the WMDs, even after Abu Ghraib, even after the revelations about how intelligence was manipulated? Do you still think that the U.S. military is in Iraq waging a war of good against evil? The Medal of Freedom Bush gave you is not something of which you should be proud. And the moral support you pledged to him in the name of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is also not something of which you should be proud. I hope that at some point in the future you come to see that.

I guess the last thing I should say to your credit, to try to end on a more positive note, is that your message of optimism is certainly an improvement over the siege mentality that possesses certain of your colleagues (including the man I’d hoped you'd manage to outlive. Oh well. You tried).

Ah—I almost forgot. In several accounts I’ve read about conflicts between intellectuals and the hierarchy, you come off pretty well. Thank you for that. On the other hand, you also seem to have been the mastermind behind the Church’s strategies for campaigning against the ERA, which are now being used to try to make sure that people like my partner and I will never be able to marry in this country. That’s something else I hope you come to regret at some point in the future.

All right, let me say this, too. It’s not the kind of thing I’m naturally inclined to say, but I think the Spirit’s nudging me to be less self-involved here. I’m glad for your sake that you were able to be active to the end. I imagine it would have been unbearably frustrating for you to be invalid. And I hope that you weren’t in pain.

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Heavenly Father, Heavenly Mother—

Your son Gordon has returned home to you.
I give thanks that he seems to have had a reasonably good death, a reasonably quick and pain-free death.
I give thanks that he can be with Marjorie again. It was obvious that they loved each other.
I give thanks for the good that he did during his years of church service.
You know better than I what that good was.
You know better than I how the initiatives he promoted do or don’t fit into your own plans for the future of the LDS Church.
And you know better than I how he touched other people’s lives.

I pray for the LDS Church as a new president comes to the helm.
I pray that the good Gordon B. Hinckley accomplished during his time on earth will continue to bear fruit.
I pray that those who come after him in Church leadership will not undo the good that he did.
At the same time, I pray that the Church will grow beyond the limitations of Gordon B. Hinckley’s presidency.

In Christ’s name, amen.