The adage that change happens “one funeral at a time” actually has a bit of sociological research to back it up. To get technical for a brief moment, there is a question as to whether cultural change happens by “settled disposition” or “active updating.” In other words whether:

1. After an initial period of young people figuring things out, our attitudes settle down and are relatively stable from adulthood on, which means that change happens as older people die off and are replaced by younger people. 
2.  People significantly change across the lifecourse, so societal cultural shifts happen because people are convinced to change their opinions. 

Of course both #1 and #2 happen, neither are mythological, but the question is which is the primary driving force for cultural change, and the literature has generally landed on #1 having more predictive power (fun fact, the guru of the cohort-driven cultural change literature is Stephen Vaisey, a BYU grad and [I believe] former member at Duke University. I’ve never met him, but when I interviewed for Duke U’s PhD program he was the latest hot young hire coming in the next year from Berkeley). A report I helped the Wheatley Institution with showed that secularization, for example, was driven by cohort replacement much more than by older people becoming less religious as they age. Of course, there are exceptions (Nate Silver estimated that about ½ to 2/3 of the change in gay marriage came from people changing their minds over the issue as opposed to older people dying off) but for most issues and in most contexts that’s not how it works. Sometimes the Overton Window solidifies so much that older people at least publicly don’t identify with a position that it was socially okay to identify with in the past (e.g. being a Klan member), but Overton Window shifts can be finicky, unpredictable things, and as an aside I suspect the latest election results at least in part stem from the left trying to use cultural power to strongarm an Overton Window shift on various issues that just didn’t have a lot of bottom-up, organic support. 

So what are the implications for the Church? Simply put, given our rules for succession and increasing lifespans, there is a 60-year lag between youth attitudes and somebody influenced by those youth attitudes making it to the very top tier position (Church President), which is the only locus where major doctrinal revelations are received (although mid-level administrators sometimes do try to nip at the edges, there is a limit to how much they can do). Generally speaking I think people tend to exaggerate the influence of any single person in the hierarchy (e.g. if you think Elder Gilbert just woke up one day and decided to put more umph into CES mission fit you’re reading the situation wrong), but the one exception is the President of the Church. 

I suspect the Catholic Church is going through a textbook case of this right now. As I and others have found in survey research, Catholic priests nowadays are much, much more conservative, and this is driven by younger cohorts coming up and replacing more liberal priests that were in seminaries in the immediate liberalizing glow of Vatican II. Conversely, as Pope Francis is the first Pope from the Vatican-II-is-exciting generation, it is not surprising that he has a more progressive perspective, but the point is that it took this long for a bright-eyed, newly ordained Catholic high school teacher in the afterglow of Vatican II to become Pope, so too will it take over a half century for whatever the kids these days are into to percolate up to the position of influencing Church policy and practice. If you do the math, assuming our personalities and perspectives are more or less settled by our mid-to-late 20s, it takes a loooong time. Not that Elder Bednar changing his mind and wearing a rainbow lapel pin is out of the realm of possibility, just highly unlikely (same for any of the 15, I suspect there’s less theological space among them than some people posit). 

Of course, even a straight-line, survive-forward trajectory doesn’t take into account “selection effects,” or the fact that 1) the more orthodox will stay in the Church longer to be able to take the time to ascend those positions, and 2) leadership by and large selects for orthodoxy. So a more liberal leader wanting to, say, go full Community of Christ and back away from Book of Mormon historical truth claims would have to stay in the Church their entire life and be quiet enough about their heterodoxies to continue to be selected for increasingly higher tiers of leadership. Very occasionally you’ll get a non-historicist at, say, the bishop level or so (for example,Times and Seasons’ resident chaplain-bishop Stephen Fleming), but I suspect those sorts of beliefs, unless they were duplicitously and consciously trying to hide them, would eventually stymie one’s ascent into the highest echelons of the ranks. Whenever you see the very occasional Area 70 or mission president completely leave belief, they typically leave during or after their Church service, not long before. 

Of course, these trends are general and there may be exceptions with later-life conversions. For example, I can think of two former GA 70s that would probably have pushed for same-sex sealings had they made it into the Quorum of the 12 and eventually the presidency. With Elder Snow’s Salt Lake Tribune interview it’s clear that is the direction he would lean…and I’m not going to name the other one because I’m just going by my gut based on things he’s said and might be wrong. Still, they are very much in the minority. Most retired 70s just retire without having a last word. 

However, while the disposition of the President of the Church is important, so too is the culture of the Church writ large. Ironically, the fertility decline that typically accompanies liberalization leads to a narrower population base, which makes revolutionary agitation less likely. (As an aside, this is one reason why I doubt China will have a man-the-barricaded violent revolution. Old people don’t throw molotov cocktails, as has been well-established in the literature political turbulence often requires huge youth cohorts). 

Now to address the normative question: is this a good thing? As the resident gadfly conservative you can probably guess my response. 

The idea that the young people and intellectuals are always correct is like people who claim that all old movies are great. We only remember the Sound of Musics, we don’t remember all the schlop whose only legacy is a spot on Mystery Science Theater 3000. By the same token, we remember the Civil Rights marches, but not, say, seances and spiritualism, blankslatism, Freudian psychoanalysis, the fact that birth control rights were originally motivated by the desire to have fewer Black people, getting rid of age of consent laws, and a lot of other faddish things the intellectual, self-consciously progressive class was into that haven’t exactly survived the test of time, and for which it was good that the Church did not grab onto it as the latest cool thing, or, as President Hinckley put it, to have “a man of maturity at the head, a man of judgment, who isn’t blown about by every wind of doctrine.”