As top LDS Church leaders age, they move closer to ‘the zone of dementia’

Of the major Western religious traditions in the United States, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the only one that continues a service-until-death policy for its top leader — which means having aging authorities is almost inescapable.

Last week, Dallin H. Oaks, at age 93, became the 18th prophet-president of the Utah-based faith, succeeding Russell M. Nelson, who died Sept. 27 at 101. Oaks will be expected to serve until the end of his life — as Nelson and 16 others did before him.

Oaks’ first counselor in the governing First Presidency, Henry B. Eyring, is 92. D. Todd Christofferson, his second counselor, is 80, one of four apostles in their 80s.

Does this collective “gerontocracy” give rise to a stagnant, intractable, out-of-touch leadership? Would switching to a system that brings younger blood into the leadership invigorate the global faith of 17.5 million?

Historian Gregory Prince, who has studied and written about these issues, discusses these, frankly, age-old questions — including how leadership succession has evolved throughout Latter-day Saint history, the advantages and disadvantages of having aging church leaders, and the prospect of apostles and First Presidency members someday being granted emeritus status rather than serving until they die.

Here are lightly edited excerpts from this week’s episode of The Salt Lake Tribune’s “Mormon Land” podcast.

When you wrote about this topic for Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, how did you measure the effects of aging on the church hierarchy?

[My co-author] Lester Bush was a physician who was working for the CIA and one of his assignments was to monitor the health and longevity of world leaders. It was an easy shift to do that for LDS leaders. The first thing we looked at was General Conference reports starting in 1897 and at every member of the top 15 leaders, and whether or not they had spoken at the twice-yearly meeting. Before 1960, they wouldn’t miss any. That changed quite dramatically by the mid-1960s and that was most evident in the ministry of David O. McKay as church president, who went for several years, generally being present at the General Conference but not able to deliver his talk. One or more of his sons would stand up in his stead and read the talk in place of his father. So that’s when we started to see that medicine had made a difference. Imagine a straight line and beginning at about age 85 is what I would call “the zone of dementia,” which means that by the time you reach that age, your probability of showing signs of dementia almost becomes 50/50, and it keeps increasing the longer that you live.

How has it affected the church?

The dilemma [of leaders’ diminished capacity] that started to appear in the mid-1960s, has become more of an issue. If you look at average ages, the Q15 [members of the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles] are older than their predecessors were, and that includes the church president, and they will live to an older age than their predecessors did. As an aggregate, more of them are moving into that zone than at any time in the past. Two recent presidents, Gordon B Hinckley and Russell Nelson, were outliers in that they lived to extraordinarily old ages. President Hinckley was 97 and President Nelson 101. They still were functioning, really, with their fastballs intellectually. I don’t think that they had lost a stride there. We’ve had others who have undergone periods as long as four to five years where they were not able to function at all.

Some Latter-day Saints have argued having elderly authorities in the presidency and among the Twelve, brings wisdom and extra benefits to the church. What do you think about that?

There’s something to be said about that. I haven’t tried to calculate the average. My recollection is that by the time a man becomes the church president, he’s likely to have been in the Quorum of the Twelve or the First Presidency for about 40 years. That’s a lot of experience, and certainly there are advantages to bringing that experience in, but it’s a balance. On the other side is the capability to serve at a high-functioning level. Where the one increases, the other decreases, and at what point does that scale tip? That’s the essential question.

What are the drawbacks of having these older leaders?

If you take four ailing presidents — McKay, Spencer W. Kimball, Ezra Taft Benson and Thomas S. Monson — in each case, there was what I consider to have been a major crisis that arguably would not have occurred if you either had a fully competent president or the next in line in the First Presidency so there was not the possibility of a power vacuum.

What were those crises?

With President McKay, it was that the [priesthood/temple ban on Black members]. Toward the end of 1969, Hugh Brown [his counselor] made the assumption that the policy banning ordination of Black men could be changed administratively, and he tried to do it. That created a real clash of the titans. [It didn’t happen] and it was the reason that Brown was released from the First Presidency when McKay died. When Spencer Kimball, was ailing in the early 1980s, two senior apostles, Ezra Taft Benson and Mark Petersen, and one then-junior apostle, Boyd Packer, set about to dismantle the [church’s] history division and they were successful in doing that. That had a really chilling effect on the writing of church history that lasted for years and years. Benson, when he was out of function, you had the unfortunate, catastrophic [disciplining] of [intellectuals] that became known as the September Six, which had even a greater and longer-lasting, devastating effect on the writing of church history. And then, finally, with President Monson, you had the infamous 2015 LGBTQ policy [later dropped]. All four of those, arguably, were catastrophic events … that wouldn’t have existed otherwise.

Few apostles in recent decades have succumbed to cancer or other diseases. Is that from healthy lifestyles or genes?

If you start the clock when the men are called into the Quorum of the Twelve, not when they’re born, they already have outlived many of the odds. But they do not outlive their age peers. And they are not spared from the infirmities of age. Certainly the lifestyle, particularly the Word of Wisdom, is to their advantage, but it’s the advantage of anybody in the church who follows those same rules. If that’s the cohort that you’re measuring against, it doesn’t give them any significant advantage to be in the Quorum of the Twelve.

Is the practice of apostles serving for life a church doctrine, or is it just a precedent or tradition?

Door number two. Why do we do it the way that we do it now? The best answer is because that’s the way we do it now. There was an important transformation that took place shortly after David O. McKay died. It was engineered by Harold B Lee. He always was upset that the power went into the First Presidency and not the Quorum of the Twelve. We essentially had a monarchy, meaning that the president of the church was head of state and head of government. What President Lee did was to begin to shift things. Up until that time, no church department reported to the Twelve. They all went directly to the First Presidency. That’s what Lee corrected. With a couple of exceptions, everything else now reports to and is governed by the quorum. So we moved to a constitutional monarchy, with the president of the church remaining head of state, but the president of the quorum being prime minister.

Choosing youngish apostles doesn’t always guarantee that the church will get a youngish president? Thomas Monson was 36 when he became an apostle. Still, he didn’t become church president until he was 80.

That’s right. I remember when President Hinckley was asked: How do you become church president? And he kind of chuckled. And he said, you outlive the 11 guys ahead of you. And that’s 11 long life expectancies that you’re looking at before you get there. A logical way to remedy that is what they did with the Seventies already. That you would say, “OK, we will establish an age of emeritus status” of 75 or 80, along with a medical emeritus exception.

If the church wanted to change the system, what would it take? Bold action by a bold president?

Yes. The way it would have to be done is something we don’t talk about, and that is the sitting president in full command of his faculties, would get up and say, “Brothers and sisters, this is the will of the Lord. Next General Conference, or whatever the timing is, I will step down. I will lead by example, and from that point forward, this is what we will do.”

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