I wanted to wait an appropriate span after the death of President Holland to start speculating about the downstream implications of his passing for the future leadership of the Church, so here it is. Obviously the image is AI generated and I don’t claim any special insight into who would constitute the First Presidency in the event of an Uchtdorf Presidency, but if I had to parlay a guess a Christofferson/Bednar would make the most sense logically for continuity (Christofferson) and training for the presidency (Bednar), but who knows who he’d be inspired to call. 

While they have the worst possible blog name for traffic, Zelophehad’s Daughters always does great actuarial analyses about the probabilities of who will become Church President, and they recently redid their analysis to take into account the passing of President Holland. The analysis puts Uchtdorf’s chances at 59%.

However, “Ziff” recognizes that that’s likely an underestimate. Actuarial tables use averages and don’t take into account signs of aging that we can see with our eyes. I’m not a gerontologist, but the fact is that President Oaks and President Eyring are both clearly starting to show the signs of aging that are often indicative of an increasingly steep downhill slide (the use of wheelchairs, slower speaking, etc.). Although neither of them, as far as I’m aware, have started spending significant time in hospitals, which is usually a sign the end is really, really near. Barring an unexpected Harold B. Lee-type heart attack I have a hard time seeing either Oaks or Eyring outliving Uchtdorf, so my gut would put his chances at 80%+ at this point.

So what does that mean?

I’ve already written about the Uchtdorf-as-liberal hypothesis, and we haven’t really received any additional data points since then. Basically, the liberal European stereotype does a lot of heavy lifting for that idea (because, you know, Germans aren’t ever traditional or conservative).*

I doubt he was ever a fan of, say, Tim Ballard or Donald Trump, but beyond that it’s fairly speculative. At one point he was sort of the great white hope for ProgMos as the one that would usher in an era of female ordination and same-sex sealings, but my vibe is that there’s much less speculation to that effect as it has dawned on everybody just how conservative the top echelons are. The brethren hold their cards pretty close to their chest in terms of public rhetoric, so we have to suss it out from policies, but I suspect that “liberal” for a member of the 12 is probably more on the moderate side for members, it doesn’t mean “liberal” as in Episcopalian. Under an Uchtdorf presidency I doubt we’ll see open attacks against Trump or ICE coming from the pulpit or a special General Conference session on global warming.

So I think he will bring a measure of cosmopolitanism and nuance as somebody born, raised, and developed outside the Mormon Corridor and with his background, but I don’t see any major doctrinal innovations. He is German after all.

*But if we are going to engage in a little harmless psychospeculation; he is a Czech German. The Czech Germans, including his family I believe, were brutally expelled and sometimes massacred after World War II (as in, the President of Czechoslovakia literally called for “final solution of the German question”), but given that their mistreatment by non-Germans was the supposed casus belli for Hitler’s occupation of Czechoslovakia, nobody was in the mood to give the Czech Germans any sympathy while Europe was still smoldering from World War II. So I suspect he’s going to have a very nuanced, non-black-and-white attitude towards complex geographic, cultural, political, and ethnic issues, taking each individual case on its own merits, because his family suffered from emotional, knee-jerk generalizations that led to a whole ethnic group, including anti-Nazis, being expelled for the sins of the Nazis.