The leader of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has died.
Russell M. Nelson was 101 years old — the oldest person to have ever led the Salt Lake City-based faith. Nelson was born Sept. 9, 1924 in Salt Lake City and died at his home there Sept. 27.
The former heart surgeon led the 17 million-member church through a global pandemic, political upheaval and an increased focus on temples worldwide.
A self-described man of science and a man of faith, Nelson will also be remembered as a leader who reshaped the church’s image of itself and held a conservative line on issues like gender and sexuality. But he also had an eye on the future — looking ahead at church growth and tackling modern issues, like vaccines.
“All of us who have worked with Russell M. Nelson, and the many he has taught and associated with, have marveled at his extraordinary modesty for a man of his great accomplishments,” said Nelson’s First Counselor and President Dallin H. Oaks in Nelson’s church obituary.
Church succession is based on seniority in order of ordination as a member of the church’s second-highest governing body, the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.. That person is 93-year-old Oaks, who was called to serve as an apostle on the same day as Nelson.
Utah Sen. Mike Lee posted on social media to remember Nelson, sharing how he performed open-heart surgery on both of Lee’s maternal grandparents on the same day. Lee said they both lived another 25 years.
“To the day he died, he remained a healer — of hearts and of souls,” wrote Lee.
In his last speech to the whole faith, Nelson renewed the call for peaceful dialogue.
“The present hostility in public dialogue and on social media is alarming. Hateful words are deadly weapons. Contention prevents the Holy Ghost from being our constant companion,” he said.
Not a Mormon, but a Latter-day Saint
Commonly known as the Mormon church, past leaders embraced the nickname for outreach. The “I’m a Mormon” media campaign launched in 2010 highlighted the stories of members. And after the Broadway musical “The Book of Mormon” captured popular attention, the church bought ads in playbills beginning with the 2012 production in Los Angeles. Lines like, “The book is always better” and “You’ve seen the play, now read the book” tried to steer people to the church.
But in 2018, Nelson gave a General Conference address to church membership called, “The Correct Name of the Church.” It was part of an effort to rebrand and refocus on the full name: “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.”
“It is the command of the Lord. Joseph Smith did not name the church restored through him; neither did Mormon. It was the Savior Himself who said, ‘For thus shall my church be called in the last days, even The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” Nelson said.
He was referring to a Book of Mormon prophet named Mormon and quoting from the church text Doctrine and Covenants. Nelson wanted to put the focus on “Jesus Christ,” said historian Benjamin Park of Sam Houston State University in Texas.
“His emphasis to not use the Mormon nickname reflects this long, this deep-seated anxiety that Mormons be accepted as Christians,” Park said.
Nelson was trying to present Mormonism as a “modern Christian movement,” Park said, while at the same time preserving what was unique and exceptional in the religion's emphasis on prophetic authority and the Book of Mormon.
Temples and a growing global church
Even as the name of the church grew longer, Sunday worship got shorter. Church members used to attend meetings for three hours each Sunday. Nelson trimmed that down to two. One goal was to better balance home-based instruction with time spent at church.
Patrick Mason, a Mormon studies professor at Utah State University, said this was a move with a worldwide membership in mind.
The church reported 2024 convert baptisms were at the highest level in a quarter century. Matt Martinich is an independent researcher who monitors church growth and retention rates. His website ldschurchgrowth.blogspot.com shows four of the top five countries seeing growth are in Africa.
Three hours of church might work in Utah, where the faith has more than 2 million members, but it’s not as easy in areas with smaller congregations and less leadership.
“This was a case of actually the global church dictating what was going to happen in Utah rather than the other way around,” Mason said.
To fill that extra hour, the church adopted a home-based curriculum called “Come Follow Me” in 2018. It encouraged the regular study of the church’s scriptures — including the Bible and the Book of Mormon – at home and in family settings. And during the pandemic, it allowed members to continue to have religious lessons and worship when churches weren’t holding public services.
Nelson put a high priority on temple building and temple attendance, saying temples are a place where people can be spiritually refined. He said the church was working to make them more accessible to membership worldwide at an accelerating pace. By the time of his death, he had announced 200 new temples.
A man of medicine
Nelson completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Utah and earned his medical degree there, too.
He helped lead research during his residency in Minnesota that developed the heart-lung machine, making the first-ever human open heart surgery possible. Nelson later performed the first surgery of that kind in Utah in 1955. Throughout his 30-year career, he performed nearly 7,000 surgeries.
In 1984, he accepted a full-time call to the church’s governing body, the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. But ever the physician, in 2018 Nelson told members looking to the future of the church, “Eat your vitamin pills. Get your rest. It’s going to be exciting.”
He later leaned on his medical career during the pandemic, when he advised church membership to get vaccinated and wear masks when they did attend meetings. He emphasized that vaccines are safe and effective, urging people to do all they could to limit the spread of the COVID-19 virus.
Jana Riess, historian and columnist for Religion News Service, said Nelson was confident at a time when many were fearful, especially during those early months.
“He came forward as someone who was realistic about the dangers but also optimistic about our ability to come through it, not just individually, but culturally and globally as well,” Riess said.
Social issues
During his time as president Nelson made calls for civility and decency. In a 2023 General Conference address, he told membership that vulgarity and fault-finding have become common.
“Too many pundits, politicians, entertainers, and other influencers throw insults constantly,” Nelson said. “I am greatly concerned that so many people seem to believe that it is completely acceptable to condemn, malign, and vilify anyone who does not agree with them.”
And while he worked to create feelings of unity — activist, theologian and Black Latter-day Saint James Jones calls Nelson’s legacy “complicated.”
The church withheld priesthood ordination for Black men from the mid-1800s until 1978. In Nelson’s outreach to the community, he worked with the NAACP and others to fund scholarships for Black students and provide humanitarian aid for communities in the United States. Morehouse College, a historically Black school, gave its first Gandhi-King-Mandela Peace Prize to Nelson in 2023.
In 2020, the murder of George Floyd, a Black man, prompted protests against police violence across the world. Days later, Nelson said on social media, “We join with many throughout this nation and around the world who are deeply saddened at recent evidences of racism and a blatant disregard for human life. We abhor the reality that some would deny others respect and the most basic of freedoms because of the color of his or her skin.”
But Jones said it wasn’t enough.
“Even though President Nelson … spoke some stronger words on racism than any president of the church had before him back in 2020, there's still no protracted curriculum, strategy or plan of any kind to unlearn or fully address racism in or out of the church,” he said.
Ultimately, Jones said, rooting out racism seems to fall to minority members.
“Because people like me are still the primary ones doing the work, and people like me are still getting punished for doing what needs to be done in terms of calling out racism or calling out any kind of bigotry that we see in or out of the church,” Jones said.
Nelson also put the spotlight on women in the church.
Riess said Nelson made women more visible by giving them more prominence in meetings — although she acknowledged some would say he didn’t go far enough on this issue either. Women still don’t hold the priesthood or many leadership roles, like bishop — a lay leader of a local congregation.
But Riess said Nelson mostly showed a benevolent attitude toward women, even as he seemed to define them by their relationship to men.
“Women are wives, women are mothers, women are lovely. You know, women are daughters. And that response — which is not unusual in the church, particularly with people of a different generation — it's really inadequate,” Riess said.
Riess noted that the role of Eve in the temple ceremony has been significantly expanded. Beginning in 2018, female missionaries could wear pants instead of only dresses and skirts.
“That seems like something that ought to have happened a long, long time ago, but I'm grateful that it happened when it finally did,” she said.
And in 2019, women were allowed for the first time to be witnesses for baptisms and temple sealings.
Nelson’s conservatism was also reflected in the direction of the church’s education system. Its top school, Brigham Young University, now holds professors to higher spiritual standards, and its commissioner of education is working to make the campus culture more orthodox.
Riess said some of the faith’s young adults see church leadership as less relevant when it comes to modern issues, though she said that is difficult to quantify. The Public Religion Research Institute found that support for same-sex marriage was nearly 50 percent among Latter-day Saints in 2021. It was about 25 percent in 2014.
The institute also found support within the church for same-sex marriage is on a steady rise. In 2014, only about a quarter of Latter-day Saints supported it. That jumped to about 35 percent just two years later.
At the same time, Riess said there’s not been an “overt rebellion” against senior leadership or Nelson.
“What I hear on the ground and certainly in oral history interviews, is a respect and a love for him in that avuncular way, or that sort of grandfatherly way, in which they are seeing him as someone representing a different time, but who has acquired wisdom over many years.”
Nelson married a fellow University of Utah classmate, Dantzel White, in 1945 at the Salt Lake Temple. They had 10 children together. White died unexpectedly at home in 2005 at the age of 78. A year later, Nelson married Wendy Watson, a professor of marriage and family therapy at Brigham Young University, who retired shortly after their wedding.
According to the church, Nelson is survived by Wendy, eight of his 10 children, 57 grandchildren and more than 167 great-grandchildren.
Details for his funeral are still pending.
