Zelophehad's Daughters

Dallin H. Oaks selected Clark G. Gilbert to fill the Q12 vacancy left by Jeffrey R. Holland’s passing in December. Needless to say, as a person on the fringe of the Church, I’m not happy with the choice of such a boundary-policing culture warrior. But of course nobody asked me! Elder Gilbert enters the quorum much like President Oaks did in that he’s far younger than any more senior member, so he already looks like a good bet to one day be Church president.

Here’s a look at the Q15 members’ ages. They’re ranked by increasing seniority.

Note that I cut off the zero to fifty years part of the graph at the bottom to better focus on the interesting part. The trend is obvious, and unsurprising, that the more senior members are older. The real outliers are David A. Bendar toward the right side, and then Elder Gilbert all the way to the left. It’s not a surprise that, as the most junior member, he’s the youngest. But he’s the youngest by seven years, an unusually large gap.

Here are monthly predicted probabilities for each Q15 member to be Church president, based on a mortality table from the Society of Actuaries.

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Jeffrey R. Holland passed away over the weekend. As you know if you’ve read ZD for any length of time, one analysis I’ve done repeatedly is looking at who among the Q15 might become Church president. President Holland’s death looks like it really clears the way for Dieter F. Uchtdorf to reach the top spot. I pointed out when I looked at the question about a decade ago that then-Elder Holland was by far the biggest obstacle to him, as they were very close in age (born about a month apart in 1940), but Uchdorf was two spots lower in the line of succession.

To look at the question more systematically, I updated the analysis I’ve done a number of times, using a mortality table from the Society of Actuaries and a bunch of random number draws to simulate possible orders in which the Q15 members die, and as a result who among them becomes Church president and for how long. If you’re interested in a more detailed description of the method, see my 2023 post, although note that I’m now doing the simulation with monthly steps rather than annual steps.

Here are the predicted probabilities by future year. These are actually straight from calculations on the mortality table, and don’t depend on the simulation.

Uchdorf’s curve is still dwarfed by Bednar’s, but for the first time since I started doing this type of analysis, there’s a period of time when he’s the single most likely member to be holding the top spot. Also, this analysis uses the same mortality table for every quorum member, so it doesn’t account for the evident frailty of both Presidents Oaks and Eyring.

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Gérald Caussé was called into the Q12 on Thursday to fill the vacancy left by Russell M. Nelson’s passing. Elder Caussé was born in France, making him the third called Q12 member in a row to have been born outside the US (following Ulisses Soares and Patrick Kearon). The Church has only had one president born outside the US, John Taylor, who was born in England in 1808. With this group of three, especially following after German-born Dieter F. Uchtdorf, the question is how soon we might see another.

To answer this question, I ran a little simulation like I have a bunch of times before (most recently in this post). I performed 10,000 random number draws for each Q15 member, and compared them to survival probabilities for each future month based on a mortality table from the Society of Actuaries to get each man’s 10,000 estimated remaining lifespans. Then, using the established rule that the senior living Q15 member becomes president when the president dies, I found how likely it was (i.e., in how many simulated futures) for each man to become Church president. In this simulation, I added an extra check, which is in how many simulations a non-American-born Q15 member became president, and when in those simulations it happened.

This first graph shows the result for this last question: the probability of at least one non-American-born Q15 member becoming president by each date in the future. (In case it isn’t clear, the dates are in YYYYMM format.) There’s an early probability bump in the 2030s, when Elder Uchtdorf has a good probability (and as I’ve noted before, probably better than this analysis suggests, given Jeffrey R. Holland’s ill health), and then a later increase in the 2040s when the three most recently called members have a good chance, especially as a group and given they’re in seniority order right after each other. As you can see, I’ve noted the month when the probability crosses over 50%, near the end of 2046. Note that the simulation goes out 60 years even though the graph only shows the first 30.

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As you no doubt have heard, Russell M. Nelson passed away over the weekend, at the age of 101. A friend messaged me quickly to ask what this meant for probabilities of reaching the top spot for all the other Q15 members, so I thought I’d update the analysis I’ve done periodically.

This graph shows future probabilities for each Q15 member. As when I’ve done this before, I used a mortality table produced by the Society of Actuaries to create it. For details on the method, see the “Method” section of my 2023 post on this question. One update I continued from my 2024 post is to do the calculations for each month in the future rather than for each year. In addition, I fixed an error that DaveW pointed out last year where I was cutting off the calculations too early for the younger Q15 members by only going out 30 years, so this time I went out 60 years even though the graph only shows 30 because that’s the period where most of the action is.

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