New LDS Church prophet, First Presidency to be named today

Dallin Harris Oaks, a staunch defender of religious liberty and a devoted advocate of man-woman marriage, was announced Tuesday afternoon in a worldwide broadcast as the 18th president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The 93-year-old former Utah Supreme Court justice said that, after an “extended process of fasting and prayer,” he had selected apostles Henry B. Eyring, 92, as his first counselor and D. Todd Christofferson, 80, as his second counselor in a newly formed First Presidency, the faith’s highest-governing body.

“I accept with humility the responsibility that God has placed upon me and commit my whole heart and soul to the service to which I’ve been called,” Oaks said Tuesday in the 13-minute broadcast. “I’m grateful to President Eyring and to President Christofferson for accepting their responsibilities, and I’m grateful to the Quorum of the Twelve [Apostles], whom I esteem and love, also as apostles of the Lord Jesus Christ, for their commitment to follow the Lord’s will.”

For his part, Christofferson said he was surprised by his elevation.

“I confess that this is not what I expected when I woke up this morning, but I am deeply honored by this calling and the trust that it carries,” said Christofferson, who, like Oaks, worked as an attorney in his professional career. “At the same time, I recognize that I’m not called to be honored but called to serve.”

Eyring, who had served as a counselor in the past three First Presidencies, said he was honored to be chosen as Oaks’ counselor and grateful for the “trust” from God and the new president.

“I love him, and I’ve always felt that he was urging me to be better,” Eyring said, “and that I was never quite doing it.”

In his brief remarks, Oaks said he was grateful for and had “felt the effects” of prayers by “so many members of the church,” and the new prophet-president pledged that, with his counselors, he will “press forward this great work.”

Their mission “is a ministry of all the children of God on the face of the Earth. We pray for all. We seek to serve all, and we invoke the blessings of the Lord Jesus Christ upon all who seek to serve him … in worthiness and commitment and optimism,” Oaks said. “We do not have the answers to all of the world’s problems. They’ve not been revealed. But what we do know is that we are all children of Heavenly Parents and that we are called to serve all of the children of God in this wonderful restored Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.”

Oaks succeeds Russell M. Nelson, who died Sept. 27 at age 101 after leading the 17.5 million-member church for nearly eight years.

Apostle Jeffrey Holland is the new president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. The 84-year-old apostle, next in line to lead the church, had previously been serving as acting president of that body.

“We’ve watched [Oaks] be prepared and have had the confirmation that that is the Lord’s will this day,” Holland said. “And that has been a unanimous and a very, very moving experience to see that mantle come fully and completely on President Oaks. We stand ready to serve him — out to the newest convert and the most recently called missionary.”

Tuesday’s leadership announcement from the Conference Center in downtown Salt Lake City came without a news conference, which had been standard protocol for seven decades when a new prophet-president took over.

Apostle Gary E. Stevenson, who conducted the announcement before a small audience of the faith’s top male and female leaders, said Oaks was set apart by his fellow apostles Tuesday morning as the new church president.

There remains an opening in the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. That vacancy presumably will be filled later.

Oaks, LGBTQ+ and the MAGA movement

In sermon after sermon, Oaks has used his turn at the pulpit to reinforce the church’s belief that only marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God.

Christofferson, on the other hand, has generally avoided the topic — despite his brother Tom’s outspoken calls for a more loving posture toward the faith’s LGBTQ+ members.

Upon learning that Oaks had elevated his family member, Tom Christofferson, who is openly gay, said he was “grateful” the new president “will have my brother’s close support.”

Oaks’ emphasis on the heterosexual nuclear family through the years has rankled outsiders and even many progressive members. But it is among supporters of President Donald Trump and his Make America Great Again movement that Oaks, an institutionalist, could find some of his deepest pockets of resistance and criticism.

Sociologist Jana Riess, a Religion News Service columnist, believes the man whose name was once floated for the U.S. Supreme Court is “deeply concerned” about support for Trump among many Latter-day Saints living in the United States.

Oaks “is especially troubled,” Riess said, “by the willingness to embrace violence to achieve political ends.”

Neither is this concern new for Oaks, who taught law at the University of Chicago before becoming president of church-owned Brigham Young University in 1971.

According to religious studies scholar Taylor Petrey, “he has long been an active opponent of the far right, from his time at BYU opposing the John Birch Society there, to his temperate approach relative to some of his earlier apostolic colleagues.”

Petrey suspected that the more emboldened current anti-institutionalist voices grow, be it in or out of the church, the more tempted the new president may become to flex “those anti-extremism muscles once more.”

Any efforts to do so, however, will likely be somewhat tempered by that same belief in civility and the preservation of norms, mused Latter-day Saint historian Benjamin Park.

“As someone who sees himself as a moderate,” Park said, “Oaks may try to strike a balance that is becoming impossible in our partisan society.”

In an Easter Day General Conference sermon in 2021, Oaks saluted the nation’s “divinely inspired Constitution,” reminding members that no political party, platform or individual candidate can represent all the church’s positions.

“Members should seek inspiration on how to exercise their influence according to their individual priorities,” he advised. “This process will not be easy. It may require changing party support or candidate choices, even from election to election.”

Oaks has repeatedly called for civil discourse and legislative compromise.

Loyalty should be “to the Constitution and its principles and processes, not to any officeholder,” he said. “… On contested issues, we should seek to moderate and unify.”

An anti-assimilation prophet

At times, the church has been led by figures who, as in the cases of former Presidents David O. McKay and Gordon B. Hinckley, faced outward in their attempts to modernize and assimilate the membership into wider American culture.

Not Oaks, predicts cultural anthropologist Janan Graham-Russell.

A scholar of Mormonism, Graham-Russell views Oaks as someone more inclined to emphasize “theological boundaries” among members.

“These will be practices and beliefs that are not just Christian,” she said, “but decidedly LDS.”

Jasmin Rappleye believes she might have a sense of what those might be. The Latter-day Saint co-host of the “Informed Saints” podcast has spent the weeks since Nelson’s death reading through Oaks’ sermons going back decades. What she observed surprised her.

“Even more than the doctrine of the family,” Rappleye said, “his most dominant theme is actually … how [covenants] fit into the plan of salvation.”

In recent years, church leaders have stressed that these promises — made at baptism, in temples and each week during the sacrament, or Communion — are the source of salvation, as long as they are performed by the right authority. Because that power, according to Latter-day Saint belief, exists only in the church, these covenants are also the faith’s greatest differentiator from other Christian denominations.

In short, members are probably about to hear a whole lot more about the “covenant path.”

Leading a global religion

Although still widely viewed as an American church, the faith has seen spectacular growth outside of the United States in recent years. This has been especially true in Africa — the Democratic Republic of Congo, for instance — where the new president’s social conservatism may not be the speed bump it is for some U.S. members.

“Oaks’ … historic emphasis on religious freedom and family,” said cultural anthropologist and ethnographer Brittany Romanello, “may feel affirming to international LDS members.”

However, Romanello, whose research has focused on Latino and Latina Latter-day Saints, was quick to add a caveat.

“If international growth is truly a priority, then lived experience, particularly of those at the margins,” Romanello said, “must matter as much as the orthodoxy I’ve seen Oaks and his counselors prioritize in my lifetime.”

In other words, she warned, when it comes to the church’s stances on immigration, including actions perceived as being in response to the Trump administration’s sweeping crackdown, members around the world are watching.