How can I set the site root page to a landing page instead of user login? I'm using a custom bootstrap 3 theme as my default theme which sets the user_login page. When I go to the root of my site, this is the page that appears. How do I change the root of my site to display a page other than user_login? 

Specifically, we are trying to add a landing page and we would like https://oursite.com/ to display the landing page instead of the login page (which is also accessible thru https://oursite.com/user/login)

All the suggestions I've seen so far just say to create a node and redirect to something like https://oursite.com/landing, but we would like http://oursite.com/ to be the landing page instead of having to redirect to another page.
Under /admin/config/system/site-information simply set a default front page which can be a node /node/123 a Views page /my-view or any other custom page /foobar/landing-page.

If you leave this empty it falls back to /user/login (which when you are logged in redirects to your user page).

To have the "Promoted to front page" setting in nodes respected set the default front page under /admin/config/system/site-information to /node. This is the path to the front page View you can edit yourself. This view by default displays node teasers and respects the "Promoted to front page" and "Sticky at top of lists" flags. You can have multiple nodes at the same time to be promoted and/or sticky.