Richard G. Scott Biography Quotes 23 Report mistakes

Early Life and Background

Richard Gordon Scott was born on November 7, 1928, in Pocatello, Idaho, and grew up in a family that moved within the American West during an era marked by Depression austerity, wartime discipline, and postwar technical optimism. Those settings mattered. He belonged to the generation that learned to prize order, competence, and self-mastery, and those traits never left him. Unlike many later Latter-day Saint leaders whose authority rested visibly on a long ecclesiastical apprenticeship from youth, Scott's early identity was also shaped by the practical world of engineering, precision, and measurable results. That combination - devotional seriousness joined to analytical habits - became one of the signatures of his public life.

His adult emotional world was profoundly marked by marriage and loss. He married Jeanene Watkins in 1953, and by all accounts the marriage formed the center of his personal affections and spiritual vocabulary; he often spoke of companionship, memory, and eternal relationships with unusual tenderness for a senior church administrator. The deaths of their children in infancy and later of Jeanene herself in 1995 deepened rather than flattened his religious language. Suffering did not make him abstract. It made him insistent that divine help was intimate, recoverable, and often mediated through quiet obedience. In that sense, the biographical core of Scott's life was not only ascent within church leadership but the repeated effort to interpret grief through covenant.

Education and Formative Influences

Scott studied engineering at Utah State Agricultural College, graduating in mechanical engineering, and entered a mid-century American culture that revered technical expertise. He worked in the emerging nuclear naval field and served under Admiral Hyman G. Rickover's demanding orbit, an experience that sharpened his lifelong habits of discipline, brevity, and exactness. Before his full-time ecclesiastical service, he was a successful engineer and executive, including work connected to the nuclear submarine program. The professional world taught him systems thinking; the church taught him moral ends. He was also shaped by missionary service in Uruguay in the late 1940s, where he learned Spanish and encountered faith in conditions far from the cultural security of the Intermountain West. Latin America never became a mere assignment for him - it became part of his spiritual imagination, later reinforced when he presided over the church's mission work in Argentina.

Career, Major Works, and Turning Points

Scott became a stake president in his thirties, then served as a mission president in Argentina from 1965 to 1970, where he gained a reputation for exacting standards joined to pastoral warmth. In 1977 he was called to the First Quorum of the Seventy, and in 1988 he was ordained an apostle of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, filling the vacancy left by Marion G. Romney's death. As a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles until his death on September 22, 2015, he became one of the church's most recognizable general conference voices on revelation, repentance, moral purity, and healing from abuse. His major "works" were sermons rather than books: addresses on receiving spiritual guidance, strengthening marriage, using agency wisely, and surviving trauma. A crucial turning point was his emergence in the 1990s and 2000s as a counselor to the wounded - especially victims of abuse - where he tried to distinguish guilt from pain and to frame Christ's Atonement as a source of repair, not merely judgment.

Philosophy, Style, and Themes

Scott's philosophy fused administrative clarity with mystical inwardness. He distrusted spiritual noise and moral improvisation. Again and again he taught that the deepest guidance came not in spectacle but in disciplined receptivity: “A quiet impression could be a personal instruction from the Lord. It is personal and private. It comes from the Lord. Why is it important to keep sacred writings private? Because then He will give us more”. That sentence reveals much about him. He saw revelation as cumulative, conditional, and easily dissipated by vanity. His frequent counsel to write impressions down, guard them, and act on them reflected a man who believed that heaven honored method. Yet his method was never merely procedural. It was built on the conviction that God trusted the inward life enough to speak there first.

At the same time, Scott's theology was relentlessly future-oriented and therapeutic without becoming sentimental. “Think of the long view of life, not just what's going to happen today or tomorrow. Don't give up what you most want in life for something you think you want now”. That counsel distilled his moral psychology: appetite is urgent, but covenant is intelligent desire stretched across eternity. His teaching on repentance carried the same structure of firmness and consolation - “Lay the burden at the feet of the Savior”. - a line that helps explain why so many listeners experienced him as both exacting and gentle. He expected self-command, sexual restraint, reverence in marriage, and loyalty to priesthood order, but he also spoke as someone convinced that damaged souls could be repaired. His style in the pulpit mirrored this interior ethic: deliberate cadence, sparse ornament, and moments of surprising emotional vulnerability.

Legacy and Influence

Richard G. Scott's legacy rests on the unusual breadth of his authority within modern Latter-day Saint culture. He was at once engineer, Latin American mission leader, apostle, and spiritual diagnostician of private pain. For many church members, he became the voice that explained how revelation feels, how repentance unfolds, and how suffering can be carried without surrendering agency. His addresses continue to circulate widely in lessons, missionary training, and family religious practice because they offer a recognizable Scott formula: be exact, be pure, write down impressions, trust priesthood channels, and let Christ transform what discipline alone cannot. Critics could find in him the church's characteristic blend of hierarchy and inward piety; admirers found a man who made obedience feel deeply personal rather than merely institutional. In the memory of his faith community, he endures as a teacher of sacred privacy, patient endurance, and the long view.