Mormon History
Sixty Minutes Interview with Gordon Hinckley - 1996
Feb. 3, 2008
(CBS) The
original segment aired on April 7, 1996.
The president and prophet of the Mormon church, Gordon B. Hinckley, died last
Sunday at age 97. He was buried Saturday in Salt Lake City. The church broadcast
his memorial service around the world in 69 languages.
President Hinckley presided over the global expansion of the Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-day Saints, which is one of the fastest growing religions in
the world, and the fourth largest religion in the United States. Republican
presidential candidate Mitt Romney is a Mormon.
The church used to be known for polygamy, but it gave up the practice more than
100 years ago when Utah became a state. Faithful Mormons don't have premarital
sex, and they don't smoke or drink-even coffee is prohibited. And heads of the
church did not give interviews, until Hinckley decided to sit down with Mike Wallace
11 years ago. Their conversation began with the beginning of the church: Mormons
believe that God and Jesus appeared one day in New York state, before a
14-year-old farm boy.
"Your church says God and Jesus spoke with your founder, Joseph Smith, back in
1820 and told him to start this church. You believe that?" Wallace asked.
"Yes, sir," Hinckley replied.
"He was 14 years old... a backwoods farm boy...in New York state?" Wallace
asked.
"That's the miracle of it," Hinckley told Wallace.
You'd expect the head of the church to believe it, but so does Bill Marriott,
chief of the Marriott hotel chain, a hard-headed businessman, and he's a Mormon.
"Fourteen years old and God and Jesus come to see him? You believe that?"
Wallace asked Marriott.
"Yes, I do. We believe that the early church of Jesus Christ faded away, and
that it came back to Joseph Smith," Marriott explained.
And the senior U.S. senator from Utah, Orrin Hatch, a Mormon, believes it, too.
"We believe that we know that this happened," the senator said.
What began with God, Jesus and a single farm boy has now become a worldwide
religion with more than nine million members. But more than a religion,
Mormonism is a lifestyle, an island of morality, they believe, in a time of
moral decay. Hinckley acknowledged it is not easy to follow the Mormon faith,
and called it the most demanding religion in America.
"It is demanding, and that's one of the things that attracts people to this
church. It stands as an anchor in a world of shifting values," he told Wallace.
For example, Mormons adhere to a very strict health code: no alcohol, no
tobacco, no coffee, no tea, not even caffeinated soft drinks. They’re supposed
to eat meat sparingly, exercise, and get plenty of sleep.
And the result? Mormons live several years longer than most other Americans.
Another reason they live longer, Mormons say, is that they suffer less from
stress because they have strong, supportive families. Many Mormons marry early
and have lots of children.
Premarital sex, as we said, is forbidden among Mormons; so is adultery. Mormons
don't even go to R-rated movies. But students at Brigham Young University
insisted that having high moral standards did not prevent them from having a
good time.
"We like to have fun. We like to go on dates. So we like to do just normal
things," one student told Wallace.
"But you don't fool around?" he asked.
"No," the student said. "It's not something that I think is fun. A guy I
remember, he told me, 'You know, you'd be so much fun if you'd drink. You would
have, you know, you'd be looser and everything.' And I'm like, 'You know, I like
to have fun knowing what I'm doing, being completely in control and just having
fun with life.'"
And while these young Mormons stressed self-control, they themselves are
controlled, to a remarkable degree, by the church. In fact, Mormons who break
the rules of morality or health are not allowed to enter sacred Mormon temples.
Living as a devout Mormon is not easy. In addition to what you cannot do,
there's a lot you are supposed to do. You're expected to read scripture daily
and to read scripture together as a family at least one night a week; students
attend daily religious courses.
Sunday services last three hours. But beyond that, church activities take
several more hours each week. All of those hours and all of those rules are too
much for some Mormons, who fall away.
Steve
Benson left the church to become one of its most outspoken critics, even though
his late grandfather, Ezra Taft Benson, President Eisenhower's Secretary of
Agriculture, had been a church president.
Benson complains that by enforcing conformity, the church stifles independent
thought. "The cultural mind-set in the church is when the prophet has spoken,
the debate is over," he said.
"And the prophet is?" Wallace asked.
"Gordon B. Hinckley would be the prophet. When he has pronounced the church's
position on any issue, it is incumbent upon the members of the church to pray,
pay and obey," Benson claimed.
Hinckley's reaction? "Well, that's a clever statement from Steve, whom I know.
Now, look, our people have tremendous liberty. They're free to live their lives
as they please," he said.
"Are they? Really?" Wallace asked.
"Oh, absolutely. Surely. They have to make choices. It's the old eternal battle:
the forces of evil against the forces of good," Hinckley replied.
The critics acknowledge they represent a tiny minority of Mormons. Still, they
say that too many Mormons look and act like they came off an assembly line. But
the young Mormon missionaries look that way on purpose.
"You all look alike, white shirts, some a little wrinkled; ties. I look at you,
I look at your faces and think of your age and I'm inclined to say, 'Well,
you're not much to look at, but you're all the Lord has,'" Hinckley said.
Many young Mormons leave college for two years, at their own expense, to be
missionaries. Every day, 50,000 of them go door to door in America and 150 other
countries.
The missionaries have helped Mormonism achieve its phenomenal growth: half its
members are now from outside the United States. But until its expansion into
Latin America and Africa, church membership had been overwhelmingly white.
"From 1830 to 1978... blacks could not become priests in the Mormon Church,
right?" Wallace asked.
"That's correct," Hinckley acknowledged.
Why?
"Because the leaders of the church at that time interpreted that doctrine that
way," Hinckley said.
"Church policy had it that blacks had the mark of Cain. Brigham Young said,
'Cain slew his brother and the Lord put a mark upon him, which is the flat nose
and black skin,'" Wallace remarked.
"It's behind us. Look, that's behind us. Don't worry about those little flicks
of history," Hinckley said.
"Skeptics will suggest, 'Well, look, if we're going to expand, we can't keep the
blacks out,'" Wallace said.
But Hinckley called that "pure speculation."
Now that blacks can be priests, the current issue is whether Mormon women will
ever be priests.
Asked why men hold the priesthood, Hinckley told Wallace, "Because God stated
that it should be so. That was the revelation of the church. That was the way it
was set forth."
Fact is,
most Mormon women don't want to be priests. They accept that men control the
church and dominate Mormon society. And this has triggered complaints about how
the church handles child sexual abuse. Child abuse among Mormons is surely no
greater than among non-Mormons, but a study has found that many Mormon women who
went to their clergymen for help believe the clergy were just not sympathetic.
"A sociologist tells us that the root of the problem is the fact that men, in
effect, in your church have authority over women so that your clergymen tend to
sympathize with the men, the abusers, instead of the abused," Wallace told
Hinckley.
"That's one person's opinion. I don't think there's any substance to it. Now
there'll be a blip here, a blip there, a mistake here, a mistake there. But, by
and large, the welfare of women and children is as seriously considered as is
the welfare of the men in this church, if not more so," he replied.
Hinckley said the church had been teaching its clergy how to handle abuse more
effectively. "We're working very hard at it. There are cases. They're
everywhere. They're all over this world. It is a disease. It's an illness. It's
a sickness. It's a reprehensible and evil thing. We recognize it as such," he
told Wallace.
Mormon clergy are not professionals. They are not paid; their church work is in
addition to their regular jobs outside the church.
Whatever their jobs, just being a Mormon is expensive: Mormons are expected to
give 10 percent of their salary to the church.
The church reportedly takes in several billion dollars a year and has never had
a major financial scandal. Most of the money, they say, is spent building 375
chapels a year all around the world.
"We're reaching out across the world. We're not a weird people," Hinckley told
Wallace.
"A weird people?" Wallace asked.
"Yes," Hinckley said.
Mormons know that some outsiders think they are weird. Why? Well, for one thing,
devout Mormons wear sacred undergarments for protection from harm, cotton
undershirts with undershorts that reach to their knees.
Bill Marriott also said he wears the sacred undergarments. "And I can tell you,
they do protect you from harm," he told Wallace.
"I was in a very serious boat accident, fire. The boat was on fire. I was on
fire," Marriott explained. "I was burned. My pants were burned right off me. I
was not burned above my knee. Where the garment was, I was not burned."
"And you believe it was the sacred undergarments?" Wallace asked.
"Yeah, I do, particularly on my legs because my pants were gone. My
undergarments were not singed," he said.
Steve Young, the star quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers is also the
great-great-great-grandson of Brigham Young, one of the Mormons' early leaders.
"And do you think that the sacred undergarments have kept you from harm on the
football field?" Wallace asked Young.
"I actually take them off to play football. The sacred nature of them, I find
that the nature of football and the sweating and so forth, I actually take them
off. And I think that's probably prevalent with athletics in the church," Young
said.
"But my teammates have enjoyed it," he admitted. "When, you know, you're getting
dressed and you're putting your garments on, they think they're pretty cool, a
lot of them. 'Hey, where'd you get those?' And I'd always tell them they're way
too expensive."
Another
curiosity: the church owns more than 3,000 acres in northwest Missouri, where
Mormons believe that Jesus will return for his Second Coming. Hinckley preferred
not to talk about Jesus returning to Missouri or about sacred undergarments. He
said that those points miss the point. He wanted to portray Mormons as
mainstream, not extreme, and for that Hinckley had hired a Jewish-owned public
relations firm. Mormons hiring Jews to help spread the Word?
Makes sense to Senator Orrin Hatch, but then he wears a mezuzah on a chain
around his neck. A mezuzah is often put at the entrance to a Jewish home as a
reminder of their faith.
"It's typical of Mormon people to love all people, but especially Jewish people.
I wear a mezuzah just to remind me, to make sure that there is never another
Holocaust anywhere. You see, the Mormon Church is the only church in the history
of this country that had an extermination order out against it by Governor
Lilburn Boggs of Missouri. We went through untold persecutions," Sen. Hatch
said.
To escape the persecutions, Mormons moved west. And when they reached Salt Lake,
their leader, Brigham Young, pointed and declared it their promised land. And
now Temple Square is their Vatican.
In Salt Lake City, the church owns a TV station, a radio station, a newspaper, a
department store and a lot of the land downtown. Utah is 75 percent Mormon, and
the church could wield political power if it wanted to, but President Hinckley
told Wallace, "Unlike the religious right, the Mormon church does not have a
political agenda."
"We urge our people to exercise their franchise as citizens of this nation, but
we do not tell them how to vote and we do not tell the government how it should
be run," Hinckley said.
Gordon Hinckley said he never intended to become president of the church, but
that, one by one, all the other church leaders with more seniority died.
"There are those who say, 'This is a gerontocracy. This is a church run by old
men,'" Wallace remarked.
"Isn't it wonderful to have a man of maturity at the head, a man of judgment who
isn't blown about by every wind of doctrine?" Hinckley replied.
"Absolutely, as long as he's not dotty," Wallace said.
"Thank you for the compliment," Hinckley said.
Mormons believe that after they die, their families will be reunited and will
live together forever in heaven. "We know it's there. We have an assurance of
that," Hinckley told Wallace.
"There's a lot of us that don't," Wallace replied.
"Yeah, I know that," Hinckley said. "But you could."
"I've thought about it. I've not been able to persuade myself," Wallace said.
Hinckley's reply? "Well, you haven't thought about it long enough."