Obituary: Howard Hunter

Howard William Hunter, church leader: born Boise, Idaho 14 November 1907; President, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints 1994-95; died Salt Lake City 3 March 1995.

Though Howard Hunter held the Presidency of the Mormon Church for less than nine months he will be remembered for injecting a spirit of compassion and generosity into an institution grown brittle through a combination of doctrinal rigidity and an ageing leadership.

Founded in 1830 by Joseph Smith, a young American farmhand who claimed to have "translated" an ancient text relating the history of Israelite tribes in America from tablets given him by an angel using a pair of magic spectacles, Mormonism is one of the world's fastest-growing religions. Since 1959, when Hunter became a member of the church's Council of Twelve Apostles, membership has grown from 1.6 million to its present state of more than 9 million members in 150 countries. Its identification with the classic puritanical American values of thrift, family and hard work have made it particularly attractive to people in Latin America and the Pacific where growth has been most rapid.

In an effort to inject some vitality into the leadership following the senile decline of his predecessor, Ezra Taft Benson, who died last May, aged 94, Hunter subjected himself to a programme of visits. Despite numerous infirmities, including cancer of the prostate which had spread to his bones, necessitating the use of a wheelchair and zimmer-frame, Hunter made visits to Idaho, Illinois, Florida, California, Hawaii, Mexico and Switzerland, giving three or four separate addresses on each occasion. The tone of his message in which he repeatedly urged Mormons to follow Jesus's example by treating one another with "more kindness, more courtesy, more humility and patience and forgiveness", stressing sympathy over duty, being more than doing, was in marked contrast to the rigid authoritarianism of his predecessor.

Benson was a rigid conservative who supported the racist John Birch Society. Like his hero J. Edgar Hoover, Benson saw the civil rights movement as a Communist plot to destroy the United States and regarded Martin Luther King as a "notorious liar" and traitor. Inevitably the all-too-brief Hunter era is being compared to the equally short, but compassionate, reign of Pope John Paul I. It is also seen as harking back to the days of Benson's predecessor Spencer W. Kimball to whom God vouchsafed a "revelation" in 1978, extending the priesthood to blacks. During Hunter's tenure, participation in the Masonic-style Temple rituals in which Mormons perform "sealings" or marriages, as well as baptisms for the dead, increased dramatically. But this may have partly been because of changes in the Temple rituals, reducing male-chauvinist language, though women are still denied the priesthood in which all male adults share.

Hunter's career differed in subtle ways from that of the classic Mormon apparatchik. He never served the almost obligatory two-year mission as a young man, and one of the two women he married in the course of his long life had been divorced. Born in Boise, Idaho, into a family of Mormon pioneers, he worked in a bank before studying law in Los Angeles and becoming a successful corporate attorney with the California State Bar. A keen saxophonist, he organised in l927 a dance band - Hunter's Croonaders - which performed aboard the USS President Jackson, visiting Tokyo, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Manila. Before being called as an apostle, Hunter served for nine years as a Stake President in Southern California - the equivalent to a Catholic diocese. He was a director of several corporations, including the Beneficial Life Insurance Company, the First Security Corporation and the New World Archaeological Foundation.

Mormons are keen supporters of American archaeology and are prone to seize on any evidence linking the ancient Mediterranean with pre-Columbian America. The church displays images of meso-American buildings in its propaganda aimed at persuading people that the Aztec and Mayan civilisations were really founded by people of ancient Hebrew stock. As acting president of the Council of Twelve Apostles, Hunter played a leading part in establishing the highly controversial Brigham Young University Centre for Near Eastern Studies in Jerusalem in 1985. Rumours that the church-owned centre would be used for proselytising Jews as part of the Mormon plan to hasten the millennium led to massive demonstrations by Orthodox Jews and a crisis in relations between the government of Israel and the LDS Church - each of which lays claim to the Hebrew heritage and regards the other as "gentile". The crisis was resolved when Hunter signed a written agreement stating that the centre would be used for exclusively academic purposes and not for proselytising.

Hunter's successor, Gordon Hinckley, has been described as the "quintessential church organisation man" in the classic LDS mould, having served three church presidents as a loyal lieutenant. A former chief of the church's public relations, he can be expected to continue Hunter's work of improving its image after the damage done by the expulsion of leading intellectuals such as the former BYU historian Michael Quinn.

During Benson's dotage, when it became embarrassingly clear through leaks from the family that the ageing Prophet's mental apparatus was in no condition to receive divine communications, Hinckley took effective charge of operations. Though sometimes styled as a moderate he was unable to resist pressure from hard-liners such as the apostle Boyd Packer. Under the gerontocratic system of church government with which the Mormons have landed themselves, Hinckley will have relatively little freedom of manoeuvre to effect changes, even if the Lord grants him time.

The church's growth abroad is matched by restiveness among the natives at home as the better-educated sons and daughters of Zion find the church's secrecy and its manipulative corporate culture increasingly hard to accept.