Dallin Harris Oaks (born 1932) is an American religious leader, author, and former jurist who currently serves as the 18th president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He was called into the holy apostleship in 1984. Prior to his call as Church President, he served as First Counselor in the Church’s First Presidency from 2018 to 2025.
Born in Provo, Utah, Oaks graduated from Brigham Young University and earned his law degree from the University of Chicago Law School. He clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, practiced law in Chicago, and served as a professor and then president of Brigham Young University (1971–1980). He was appointed to the Utah Supreme Court in 1980 before being called as a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in 1984, a position he held until being called to the First Presidency in 2018.
Oaks brought to religious leadership a trained legal and analytical mind—the habits of careful definition, reasoned argument, and institutional stewardship. His scholarship on constitutional law, religious freedom, and the relationship between civic and ecclesiastical authority reflects a conviction that rigorous intelligence and faithful discipleship are not merely compatible but mutually reinforcing. His teaching on the integration of medical science and priesthood faith exemplifies this disposition: drawing on Brigham Young’s own pragmatic theology, he argued that applying “every remedy that comes within the range of my knowledge” and then seeking divine blessing is not a compromise of faith but its fullest expression. In that vision, human knowledge and divine power are partners in healing—a sensibility that resonates with the Mormon transhumanist intuition that developing our God-given capacities is itself an act of worship and a step toward theosis.
Oaks’s legacy is that of a rigorous institutional mind in service of a faith that takes human intelligence seriously. His life’s work suggests that the pursuit of knowledge—legal, medical, scientific—is not a concession to the secular but a fulfillment of the sacred charge to grow in wisdom and stature, after the pattern of the God we are, in Mormon understanding, becoming.