Meet the newly promoted LDS apostle and counselor to Dallin Oaks who helped sink Nixon

It was a pick that few suspected but, in hindsight, seemed almost inevitable.

On Oct. 14, President Dallin H. Oaks announced that, as his first act as leader of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the 93-year-old had selected D. Todd Christofferson to join the governing First Presidency alongside him and Henry B. Eyring.

That the 92-year-old Eyring retained his position in the three-man council, having served under the late President Russell M. Nelson with Oaks, surprised few. In choosing Christofferson, however, the new church president skipped over four more senior leaders. These included the widely beloved Jeffrey R. Holland, who now is president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, and the ever-popular Dieter F. Uchtdorf, who served in a previous First Presidency.

Who, then, is this fresh-faced 80-year-old Christofferson? As it happens, someone not all that different from Oaks himself.

Like Oaks, Christofferson is a lawyer by training and a faith leader whose sermons betray careful, logic-based thinking while generally avoiding the personal. Also like Oaks, the new presidency member has spoken on the role of religions in pluralistic societies and emphasized traditional gender roles in his many public appearances.

However, Christofferson has, unlike his older colleague, generally avoided the topic of LGBTQ+ issues.

Here is more about this newly elevated church leader.

Christofferson spent much of his life on the East Coast.

Although born in Utah, Christofferson graduated from high school in New Jersey and from Duke University’s law school before going to work in Washington, D.C., followed by Tennessee and, later, North Carolina, where he served as in-house counsel for what is now Bank of America.

He and his wife, Katherine, have five children.

Christofferson helped uncover the Watergate scandal and President Richard Nixon’s involvement.

The Latter-day Saint leader, then fresh out of Duke University’s law school, served as a clerk to federal Judge John Sirica when the latter was handed the political corruption case of the century.

Despite Christofferson’s inexperience, Sirica wrote in his memoir — “To Set the Record Straight: The Break-In, the Tapes, the Conspirators, the Pardon” — that the young lawyer “was to serve as my right arm throughout the Watergate case.”

The experience changed Christofferson in profound ways.

“The life lesson I took away from [Nixon’s] experience,” the apostle said in a speech decades later, “was that my hope for avoiding the possibility of a similar catastrophe in my own life lay in never making an exception — always and invariably submitting to the dictates of an ethical conscience. ... A weak conscience, and certainly a numbed conscience, opens the door for ‘Watergates,’ be they large or small, collective or personal."

Thomas Griffith, a retired federal judge and fellow Latter-day Saint, toured Sirica’s old chambers with Christofferson years after the case had closed.

“I’ll never forget,” Griffith said, “him taking me to the room where he and Judge Sirica listened to the tapes that showed that President Nixon had been complicit in the cover-up.”

Like Oaks, Christofferson believes even freedom of religion has its limits.

In that same speech, delivered in 2017 to a crowd at the University of Oxford in England, the apostle made clear his belief that religions must be willing to accommodate those of differing views within the communities they find themselves.

No “particular religion or faith tradition should have a right to dictate the moral values and obligations on which a pluralistic society is founded,” he told listeners. “And a person does not have to be religious to be moral.”

Speaking to an audience at the University of Virginia four years later, Oaks expressed a similar sentiment, describing the right of freedom of religion, as defined by the First Amendment, as “not absolute.”

Oaks continued: “As advocates for religious freedom, we must yield to the fact that in a nation with citizens of many different religious beliefs or disbeliefs, the government must sometimes limit the right of some to act upon their beliefs when it is necessary to protect the health, safety and welfare of all.”

Christofferson’s brother, Tom, is an openly gay Latter-day Saint who has written about his experience.

Tom Christofferson tried to follow the steps spelled out for him: mission, temple marriage and then family. But there was a problem. After his marriage, which was quickly annulled, he told his parents he was gay. He left the church, only to be rebaptized later in life. Through it all, he never questioned his parents’ love for him — or their faith.

This embrace of church and child is an example Tom has encouraged other Latter-day Saint parents of LGBTQ+ youths to follow.

“Just as your children will not be in doubt about your personal discipleship,” Tom writes in his 2017 “That We May Be One: A Gay Mormon’s Perspective on Faith and Family,” “neither will they doubt the importance you place on being a lovingly engaged part of their lives.”

D. Todd Christofferson served as the church spokesperson for the controversial November 2015 exclusion policy.

He was far from the most senior apostle at the time of its announcement. Nonetheless, Christofferson was the one church leader tasked with defending the now-rescinded policy that, among other things, labeled same-sex, married Latter-day Saint couples as “apostates” and generally barred their children from baptism.

On the evening of Nov. 6, he gave a hurriedly thrown together interview in which he explained that the change was prompted by the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling legalizing same-sex marriage.

“There was a need for a distinction to be made between what may be legal and what may be the law of the church and the law of the Lord,” Christofferson said. “We regard same-sex marriage as a particularly grievous or significant, serious kind of sin that requires church discipline.”

Shocked, brother Tom still was absorbing the news when he received a message.

“If you feel you need to distance yourself from me, I will understand,” the apostle texted his brother, who replied immediately, “You have never distanced yourself from me, and. ...I am not going to back away from you in any way.”

The ‘God is not a vending machine’ saying? It started with D. Todd Christofferson.

Every so often, an expression enters the Latter-day Saint zeitgeist, plucked, usually, from the stacks of sermons given by the highest leaders of the faith every April and October. “God is not a vending machine” is one of those. The source: a 2022 spring address by Christofferson who, like Oaks, is known for his formal, professorial approach to public speaking.

“We ought not to think of God’s plan as a cosmic vending machine,” Christofferson said, “where we, one, select a desired blessing, two, insert the required sum of good works, and, three, the order is promptly delivered.”

Rather, he taught, “a close and abiding relationship” with deity anchors and supports amid — but does not prevent — hardship.

Such a kinship, he said, “makes all the difference and is everlastingly worth the cost.”

Christofferson has emphasized a traditional, patriarchal approach to gender roles.

In his 2006 sermon “Let Us Be Men,” Christofferson, then a member of the Presidency of the Seventy, broke with his usual style to share a deeply moving memory of his parents.

In it, his mother, sick with cancer, had much of the tissue in her neck and shoulder removed, making it painful for her to use her right arm. Rather than take over ironing duties, Christofferson’s father, according to his son’s telling, sacrificed his lunches for a year to save money for a machine that would make it easier for her to perform the chore.

“I was not aware of my father’s sacrifice and act of love for my mother at the time,” Christofferson said, “but now that I know, I say to myself, ‘There is a man.’”

In 2013, he again spoke of his mother, this time in an address that cast women as the ones primarily responsible for teaching each new generation “the importance of sexual purity.”

“In this way,” he declared, “they have been a civilizing influence in society; they have brought out the best in men; they have perpetuated wholesome environments in which to raise secure and healthy children.”

Whether he resurrects these themes as a member of the First Presidency is anyone’s guess. But this much is certain: Whatever he chooses to focus on will carry even greater weight going forward.