Gordon Bitner Hinckley (1910–2008) was an American religious leader who served as the fifteenth President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 1995 until his death in 2008. Born in Salt Lake City, Utah, Hinckley graduated from the University of Utah in 1932 with a degree in English and a deep interest in classical languages and ancient history. After serving a mission to Great Britain during the difficult years of the early 1930s, he returned to a career in Church communications, helping pioneer the use of radio, film, and later television to extend the reach of the Latter-day Saint message.
Hinckley spent more than six decades in full-time Church service, rising from secretary to the Radio, Publicity, and Mission Literature Committee in 1935 to apostle in 1961, counselor in the First Presidency, and ultimately Church president. His tenure as president was marked by an unprecedented expansion of temple building—nearly doubling the number of operating temples worldwide—and by a confident, public-facing engagement with media that brought him into wide-ranging interviews with journalists across the globe. He oversaw the construction of the Conference Center in Salt Lake City, issued The Family: A Proclamation to the World with his counselors and the Quorum of the Twelve, and traveled more extensively than any of his predecessors, meeting members in scores of nations.
Hinckley was notable for his unguarded optimism about the modern world and the fruits of human inquiry. He spoke of the twentieth century as “the best of all centuries,” celebrating extended lifespans, expanded knowledge, and the miracles of modern medicine, travel, and communication as gifts to be “grasped and used for the advancement of the Lord’s work.” He encouraged members to leave biology, archaeology, and anthropology to scientific research, and recalled his own study of geology and anthropology with characteristic equanimity: it had not worried him then, and it did not worry him as prophet.
His vision of revelation was likewise generous and practical—a still small voice consulted in council, a relationship sustained by daily prayer, a sacred but ordinary feature of working through hard problems together. And his teaching on temple work cast every disciple as a participant in something larger than personal salvation: literally, in his words, “saviors on Mount Zion,” laboring on behalf of those who have gone before. Taken together, these emphases—on the dignity of science, the reality of ongoing revelation, the obligation of vicarious love across the veil, and the open horizon of human progress—mark a legacy that resonates deeply with the Mormon transhumanist conviction that faith, intelligence, and consecrated work belong together in the long project of becoming.