With his buoyant personality and affinity for public relations, Mr. Hinckley made Mormonism more familiar to the public and more accepted in the Christian fold. He gave news conferences and was the first church president to sit for interviews on “60 Minutes” and “Larry King Live.” When the Winter Olympics went to Salt Lake City in 2002, the church’s home base, he guided the church outreach campaign.
To emphasize its commonality with other churches, he changed the church’s logo, making the words “Jesus Christ” in the church’s name much larger than “Latter-day Saints.” He arranged to make the church’s huge library of genealogical records publicly available on the Internet.
I was truly sad to read of Mr. Hinckley's passing. That man was a genius. During his time as the head of the Church (and before - because he served as defacto head of the Church when earlier Church prophets were incapacitated for one reason or another), he did more to organize and streamline - and dare I say - mainstream - the Church than anyone ever.
I'm not a Mormon, but I admire this guy. He was brilliant.
© 2008 Stephen Clarke-Willson, Ph.D. - All Rights Reserved.
Thanks for your kind words regarding President Hinckley. I am a Mormon and I appreciate the work he did for our church.
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely, Doc!
ReplyDeleteI too am a goy-infidel-skeptic occasional armchair scholar of the Mormons ('though with you, you bring your own splinter sect background--Christian Science or SDA?--mine was kind of non-footwashing or snake handling mainstream Baptist ...
I think we turned each other onto various mostly scholarly or obscure works...but most memorable, was your finding the Gutenberg text file of "Wife No. 19."
But this is all digressing...as you say about The Prophet, he was a masterful and brilliant promulgator of his church and philosophy. He did more than anyone to "mainstream" his church. Maybe it's working...I don't agree with several key tenets, but that goes for most every other church as well. I really don't regard them as anything other than mainstream, other than a certain tendency to "stick to their own kind," which is a little disturbing, but ultimately understandable in light of their strict moral code, which basically limits most of us from achieving the "circle of trust."