Boyd K. Packer, the leader of the second-highest governing body
of the Mormon Church and a vigorous advocate for a highly conservative strain of
Mormonism, died on Friday at his home in Salt Lake City. He was 90.
The church announced his death on its website.
Mr. Packer had been a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, which serves
under the church president and his two counselors (known as the First
Presidency), since 1970. As president of the Quorum, a post he had held since
2008, he was next in line to become church president. The current president is
Thomas S. Monson, who is 87.
Mr. Packer was revered by tradition-minded members of the Church of Jesus Christ
of Latter-day Saints. To judge by his words, he was untroubled by doubt and sure
of his place in the world.
“After all the years that I have lived and taught and served, after the millions
of miles I have traveled around the world, with all that I have experienced,
there is one great truth that I would share,” he said at the church’s general
conference in 2014. “That is my witness of the Savior Jesus Christ.”
M. Russell Ballard, an elder of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, said of Mr.
Packer on the church website, “From the crown of his head to the soles of his
feet, he represented the Savior of the world.”
For decades, Mr. Packer, an educator by training, spoke for those in the church
who resisted social change — a traditionalist call that carried influence in the
church’s governance and teaching mission.
In a speech in 1993, he warned that three groups — feminists, homosexuals and
intellectuals — posed the greatest threat to the church. In 2010, he condemned
same-sex attraction as unnatural and immoral, making him a prominent target of
gay rights advocates in Utah and elsewhere.
The church continues to reject homosexuality, a stance reaffirmed in a letter
from its president and the Quorum that was read in many Mormon churches on June
28 in opposition to the recent Supreme Court decision recognizing a right to
same-sex marriage. “Sexual relations outside” a marriage between a man and a
woman “are contrary to the laws of God pertaining to morality,” the letter said.
Mr. Packer also warned against “the disease of profanity,” “bad music” and
substances that “interfere with the delicate feelings of spiritual
communication,” namely coffee, tobacco, liquor and drugs.
However unyielding he could sound, Mr. Packer had a gentle side. In 2003, after
devastating wildfires in Southern California, he traveled to the region and
personally comforted Mormon families that had lost a home, praying “that you’ll
be steadied and you won’t be unhappy, that you can have a peace and serenity
which passeth understanding.”
He loved birds from early childhood, and on at least one occasion, birds seemed
to reciprocate: He once coaxed several into his motel room in Hawaii, as he
happily recalled for KSL-TV of Salt Lake City.
“There was a redheaded cardinal, a dove, a sparrow and a finch, all in the room
on the floor,” he said.
Mr. Packer was a painter, sculptor and woodcarver, especially of birds. The
church said his love of art had been nurtured by his mother, especially after he
contracted polio when he was 5 and was bedridden for weeks. Much of his artwork
is in a museum at Brigham Young University.
Boyd Kenneth Packer was born on Sept. 10, 1924, in Brigham City, Utah, the
second-youngest of 11 children of Ira Packer, a service station operator, and
the former Emma Jensen. “Sometimes in my growing years, I thought we were poor,”
he wrote in a personal history. “I later learned that was not true. We just
didn’t have any money.”
He enlisted in the Army Air Corps in 1942, served as a bomber pilot in the
Pacific near the end of World War II and returned home to enroll at what is now
Weber State University in Ogden, Utah. In 1947, he married Donna Edith Smith,
who survives him along with 10 children, 60 grandchildren and 103
great-grandchildren.
Mr. Packer graduated from Utah State University in 1949, began seminary teaching
and earned a master’s degree from Utah State in 1953. He rose rapidly in the
church’s teaching and missionary system and received a doctorate in education
from Brigham Young University in 1962.
Mr. Packer will be remembered “for an unyielding resistance to the secular,
social world, especially as that world evolved during his lifetime,” Armand L.
Mauss, a Mormon scholar and retired professor of sociology and religious studies
at Washington State University, told The Associated Press.
If that is true, and if some people viewed Mr. Packer as trapped in amber, he
seemed not to care. “We may one day stand alone,” he said in a speech at Brigham
Young in 2004, “but we will not change or lower our standards or change our
course.”
Correction: July 7, 2015
An obituary in some copies on Sunday about Boyd K. Packer, a Mormon Church
leader, referred incorrectly to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, of which Mr.
Packer was the president. It is the second-highest government body of the Mormon
Church, not the highest. (The church’s pre-eminent governing body is the First
Presidency, which consists of the church’s president and his two counselors.)
Reprinted from Sunday’s late editions.
A version of this article appears in print on July 6, 2015, on page B8 of the
New York edition with the headline: Boyd K. Packer, 90, No. 2 Mormon Leader.
