Imagine attending a large corporate shareholder meeting, only to discover that nearly every seat at the executive table is occupied by a member of the same interlocking network of families\u2014fathers, sons, sons-in-law, nephews, and cousins who have married into or been born into the same elite bloodlines stretching back five or six generations. You might reasonably ask: Is this an accident? A coincidence? Or is it a feature of the system itself?<\/p>\n
For observers of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, this is not a hypothetical scenario. It is, according to a growing body of historians, scholars, and internal critics, an accurate description of how leadership advancement has functioned throughout the institution\u2019s nearly two-century history. From Joseph Smith, who appointed his father, two brothers, an uncle, and numerous cousins to Church governance in the earliest years of the Restoration, to the contemporary Quorum of the Twelve Apostles\u2014where every single member is related by blood or marriage to current or former general authorities\u2014the pattern of family-preferential advancement is not incidental. It is structural.<\/p>\n
This essay undertakes a serious, fair-minded historical and theological examination of that pattern. The goal is not to impugn the faith or sincerity of LDS leaders, many of whom are doubtless devoted and capable men. Rather, the goal is to ask a question that the Church\u2019s own doctrine demands we ask: If the calling of apostles and prophets is genuinely directed by God\u2014if the Lord himself orchestrates who rises to the pinnacle of his earthly kingdom\u2014what are we to make of the statistical improbability that, decade after decade, those whom God selects happen overwhelmingly to share bloodlines, business affiliations, and social networks with the men already seated in those sacred quorums?<\/p>\n
The theological stakes of this question are not trivial. The LDS Church makes one of the most audacious claims in contemporary religion: that its president is the sole living prophet on earth, speaking on behalf of God to all of humanity. If that claim is true, then the selection process for Church leadership carries enormous weight. But if family networks and institutional cronyism quietly shape who ascends to prophetic office, then the institution\u2019s founding claim\u2014that its leaders are divinely chosen, not humanly engineered\u2014becomes vulnerable to serious scrutiny.<\/p>\n
We will examine the historical roots of nepotism in the early Church, trace its persistence across the twentieth century, assess its contemporary manifestations in the Nelson administration, explore how these dynamics have extended into the business world and social media ecosystem, and finally engage the theological tension between divine calling and dynastic advancement.<\/p>\n
Defining the Terms: Nepotism, Cronyism, and Institutional Favoritism<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Gemini_Generated_Image_cpto1fcpto1fcpto-300x169.png\")
Nepotism Gauge: LDS Apostolic Succession Pegged at 100%. From Joseph Smith’s 23 relatives to Nelson’s sons-in-law mission presidents, the pattern defies theological claims of transcendence.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\nBefore proceeding, it is important to define our terms with precision. Nepotism refers specifically to the practice of favoring relatives in the conferral of appointments, positions, or privileges\u2014deriving from the Italian nepotismo, itself from nipote (nephew), a reference to the medieval Catholic practice of popes appointing nephews to cardinal positions. Cronyism is a broader term describing the favoritism shown to close friends or associates, regardless of familial ties. Institutional favoritism encompasses both, describing the systemic tendency of organizations to advance individuals who are already well-connected to those in power.<\/p>\n
None of these terms, by themselves, implies malice or conscious corruption. Social science research consistently shows that nepotism and cronyism operate most powerfully below the level of conscious intent. Organizations tend to replicate themselves: decision-makers perceive trustworthiness, competence, and cultural fit in those who share their background, vocabulary, and social networks. In a religious organization that places extraordinary value on familial loyalty, generational faithfulness, and institutional trust, the conditions for nepotism are not merely present\u2014they are cultivated.<\/p>\n
The critical question for the LDS Church is not simply whether individual appointments can be shown to involve nepotism, but whether the pattern of such appointments rises to the level of a structural feature\u2014a gravitational pull within the institution that, however unintentionally, draws leadership authority toward a relatively small network of families and their social affiliates. The evidence, as we shall see, strongly suggests that it does.<\/p>\n
A Dynasty from the Beginning: Nepotism in the Founding Era<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\nThe story of nepotism in the LDS Church begins with its founder. Joseph Smith, Jr.\u2014whom the Church regards as the Prophet of the Restoration\u2014by historian D. Michael Quinn\u2019s count appointed no fewer than twenty-three individuals with family ties to himself to leadership positions in the young Church. These included his father, Joseph Smith, Sr., ordained as the first Church Patriarch; his brother Hyrum, appointed Assistant President of the Church; another brother, William, called as one of the original Twelve Apostles; his uncle John Smith, who rose to high church office; and multiple cousins who received General Authority callings.\u200b<\/p>\n
Historians have noted that in the earliest years of any new religious movement, relying on trusted family members is not only understandable but arguably practical: the pool of qualified, vetted candidates is necessarily small, and family loyalty can provide a measure of institutional stability during precarious formative years. This contextual caveat is fair. Yet even granting this, the scale and pattern of familial appointment under Smith established a template that would persist long after such practical necessity had passed.\u200b<\/p>\n
Brigham Young, Smith\u2019s successor and the architect of the Utah settlement, took the practice further. Young appointed three of his own sons\u2014Brigham Young Jr., John Willard Young, and Joseph Angell Young\u2014as apostles, and at least some of these ordinations were performed privately and only later disclosed more broadly, creating friction within the Quorum. He also elevated ten additional family members to General Authority positions. Historian D. Michael Quinn\u2019s exhaustive genealogical research in The Mormon Hierarchy: Extensions of Power documents the full scope of this pattern:\u200b<\/p>\n
\u201cAt a primary level were kinship ties. No less significant were marriage connections\u2026 Convoluted relationships made the Mormon hierarchy an extended family, and extensive family connections persist among LDS general authorities today.\u201d
\n\u2014 D. Michael Quinn, The Mormon Hierarchy: Extensions of Power, p. 163\u200b<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\nQuinn\u2019s documentation does not stop with the founding generation. He demonstrates that every succeeding president of the Church through the early twentieth century maintained or increased the proportion of General Authority appointments going to men with close kinship ties to existing leadership. Summarizing his findings, Quinn observes:\u200b<\/p>\n
\u201cWhere kinship was involved, Young\u2019s successors appointed only men with close kinship relations to current or former general authorities. Aside from Wilford Woodruff, LDS presidents after Young also doubled his proportion of appointments with close kinship connections. Twentieth-century presidents Joseph F. Smith and Heber J. Grant more than doubled the founding prophet\u2019s proportion of appointments with close kinship to other members of the Mormon hierarchy.\u201d
\n\u2014 D. Michael Quinn, The Mormon Hierarchy: Extensions of Power, pp. 169\u2013170\u200b<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\nJohn Taylor appointed eight relatives, including two sons. Wilford Woodruff appointed three relatives, including one son. Joseph F. Smith, the sixth LDS Prophet, appointed eleven relatives, including three sons\u2014one of whom, Joseph Fielding Smith, eventually became the tenth prophet of the Church. The succession of familial advancement is not occasional or incidental; it is multigenerational and deeply structural.\u200b<\/p>\n
The practice of polygamy, which was official LDS doctrine from approximately the 1840s until Wilford Woodruff\u2019s 1890 Manifesto, dramatically amplified these family network effects. When senior leaders routinely took multiple wives\u2014often from the families of other leaders\u2014the resulting web of kinship became extraordinarily dense, as leadership families intermarried and produced overlapping lines of descent. Even after polygamy was officially abandoned, its legacy in consolidating family networks persisted for generations, helping to entrench what functioned in practice as an ecclesiastical aristocracy of bloodlines.<\/p>\n
The Statistical Reality: A Documented Pattern<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\nThe Mormonism Research Ministry Analysis<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\nOne of the most striking empirical claims about contemporary LDS leadership comes from Lane Thuet, writing for the Mormonism Research Ministry. Thuet conducted a detailed analysis of the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and concluded with a finding that is difficult to dismiss as coincidental:<\/p>\n
100% of them are related in some way to current or former general authorities of the LDS Church. In the top 2 leading quorums\u2014consisting of 15 men (The First Presidency and the Quorum of Twelve Apostles)\u2014five of these men are directly related to each other. Four are related to each other by marriage. Four are directly related to former LDS Presidents. Five are directly related to former apostles. Two are married to wives who are direct descendants of former presidents. Five are married to wives who are directly related to former apostles. Seven are married to wives who are relatives of current general authorities or of their wives.<\/i>
\n\u2014 Lane Thuet, Mormonism Research Ministry, mrm.org\/nepotism<\/b><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Thuet noted only one apparent exception: Apostle Richard G. Scott appeared to have no blood ties to any other General Authority. Yet even in Scott\u2019s case, his wife was related to several current General Authorities and descended from a former LDS apostle. The family network appeared inescapable.<\/p>\n
The Mormon Matters Survey (2008\u201310)<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\nBeginning in 2008,\u00a0Jeff Spector<\/span>\u00a0of\u00a0Mormon Matters<\/span><\/strong><\/a>\u00a0undertook a multi\u2011year informal survey of familial connections among LDS General Authorities and other senior leaders, using sources such as the Church Almanac, the Deseret News\/Church News archive, the official LDS website, and Wikipedia. His resulting data table\u2014covering General Authorities, mission and temple presidents, and some auxiliary leaders\u2014documents dozens of close kinship connections across multiple generations.<\/p>\nA brief sample from the relationships he highlighted illustrates the scope (all relationships below are independently documented in church or reference biographies):<\/p>\n
\u2022 Allan Forrest Packer, General Authority Seventy \u2014 <\/strong>Son of Boyd K. Packer, president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.<\/span><\/span>
\n\u2022 Richard G. Hinckley, General Authority Seventy \u2014<\/strong> Son of Gordon B. Hinckley, 15th president of the Church.<\/span><\/span>
\n\u2022 Virginia H. Pearce, First Counselor in the Young Women General Presidency \u2014 <\/strong>Daughter of President Gordon B. Hinckley.<\/span><\/span>
\n\u2022 Henry J. Eyring, later president of BYU\u2013Idaho \u2014 <\/strong>Son of Henry B. Eyring, counselor in the First Presidency.<\/span><\/span>
\n\u2022 Gerrit W. Gong, then a General Authority Seventy \u2014 <\/strong>Son\u2011in\u2011law of Richard P. Lindsay, former member of the Second Quorum of the Seventy.<\/span><\/span>
\n\u2022 Merrill C. Oaks, former member of the Second Quorum of the Seventy \u2014 <\/strong>Brother of Dallin H. Oaks, apostle and later president of the Quorum of the Twelve.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\nIn his 2010 update, Spector noted what he saw as a modest trend away from direct father\u2011child or similarly obvious nepotism in some mission president callings, as the Church increasingly called presidents from the geographic regions where they would serve. At the same time, he observed that \u201cBYU professors, high\u2011ranking Church and CES employees and \u2018well\u2011known\u2019 Church people continue to get calls,\u201d<\/em> suggesting that even if strict blood\u2011line nepotism was tapering at certain levels, advancement through professional and social proximity to Church power\u2014what might be termed institutional cronyism\u2014appeared to be filling some of that space.<\/p>\nTimes & Seasons: The Academic Perspective<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\nWriting in the LDS-aligned academic blog Times & Seasons<\/strong><\/a> in October 2022, scholar Stephen C. offered a measured but pointed assessment of the structural dynamics at play. His analysis is notable precisely because it comes from within a community of faithful Latter-day Saints who are also serious scholars:<\/p>\nNepotism is the most natural of vices and needs to constantly be proactively guarded against, or else it will almost certainly creep into any large institution. In the early Church there just weren\u2019t a lot of options to choose from because it was so small, but as the Church becomes larger and more diverse it becomes increasingly unlikely that the best suited person for a high status calling happens to be the close relative of somebody else in a high status calling.<\/i>
\n\u2014 Stephen C., \u201cNepotism in High Church Offices,\u201d Times & Seasons, October 23, 2022<\/b><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Stephen C. went on to document several specific contemporary examples: President Monson\u2019s daughter serving in the Young Women\u2019s General Presidency; President Eyring\u2019s son serving as President of BYU-Idaho; President Hinckley\u2019s son called as a General Authority Seventy; and Elder Jeffrey Holland\u2019s son being appointed President of Utah Valley University despite having no educational administration experience. He also noted a telling observation from a BYU-Idaho professor who quipped that the institution \u201ctakes nepotism very seriously\u2026except at the top.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\nThe Times & Seasons author was careful to note that any individual appointment might be genuinely meritorious, while still arguing that the pattern as a whole creates a legitimacy problem:<\/p>\n
I suspect that, since only a fraction of sons of apostles are general authorities, there is an anti-nepotism norm operating at the highest level of the Church, but those guardrails need to be constantly refurbished since violating them is the most natural thing in the world, and within-family appointments, no matter how sincere, start to poke holes in that dam.<\/i>
\n\u2014 Stephen C., Times & Seasons, October 23, 2022<\/b><\/p><\/blockquote>\nThe Nelson Administration: A Case Study<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\nThe administration of\u00a0Russell M. Nelson, sustained as the seventeenth president of\u00a0The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints\u00a0in January 2018, offers a particularly clear contemporary case study in LDS leadership nepotism and networked advancement. Much of the documentation comes not from hostile critics but from observers who collate publicly available sources\u2014mission president announcements in Church News, biographical notes on the Church\u2019s official site, LinkedIn profiles, and reference works such as Wikipedia.<\/p>\n
In January 2018, the\u00a0Mormon Eye\u00a0blog<\/strong><\/a> published an analysis of President Nelson\u2019s extended family that highlighted a striking cluster of high\u2011level callings among his sons\u2011in\u2011law and their professional associates. The post notes:\u200b<\/p>\n\u201cFour of Russell M. Nelson\u2019s sons\u2011in\u2011law have been called as mission presidents (one was additionally called as a temple president), potentially saving his family thousands of dollars in tuition money if his grandchildren chose to attend a church school.\u201d\u200b<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The same analysis traced notable overlaps between Nelson\u2019s family network and the corporate careers of those connected to him. One son\u2011in\u2011law,\u00a0Bradley E. Wittwer\u00a0(widower of Nelson\u2019s daughter Emily, who died in 1995), served as a senior vice president at the health\u2011data company Ingenix in 2004\u20132005. During roughly the same period,\u00a0Kevin W. Pearson, later a General Authority Seventy, was CEO of Ingenix (1998\u20132005) and soon afterward was called as mission president in Tacoma, Washington (2005\u20132008), during which mission he was named a General Authority. Another son\u2011in\u2011law,\u00a0Michael T. Ringwood\u00a0(husband of Nelson\u2019s daughter Rosalie), worked as a vice president at\u00a0Huntsman Corporation\u00a0while\u00a0Ronald A. Rasband\u00a0served as Huntsman\u2019s president and COO; Rasband was later called as a mission president in New York City, then as a General Authority, and in 2015 was sustained to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.\u200b<\/p>\n
These connections, by themselves, do not prove that Nelson’s family relationships were the decisive cause of any particular calling; Church leaders would emphasize prayerful discernment and individual qualifications. Yet the extraordinary density of these ties\u2014multiple sons-in-law called as mission presidents, their former corporate superiors elevated to General Authority and even apostolic rank\u2014begs the deeper theological question: Does God Himself exercise a divine prerogative to favor familial and professional networks above all else in selecting His leaders? If so, this would mark a stark departure from the biblical God who bypassed bloodlines for herdsmen and outcasts; if not, the persistence of such clustering indicts the discernment process as insufficiently heavenly to overcome earthly gravitational pull.<\/p>\n
Mormon Eye also underscored the material dimension of such callings. Drawing on leaked mission president benefit information and secondary summaries, the blog noted that mission presidents receive housing, transportation, health insurance, and other substantial support, and that their dependent children are eligible for significant tuition assistance or waivers up to the level of BYU tuition at Church\u2011owned schools such as\u00a0BYU,\u00a0BYU\u2013Idaho, and\u00a0BYU\u2013Hawaii. When four sons\u2011in\u2011law of a sitting prophet serve as mission presidents (with one also becoming a temple president), the cumulative financial and educational advantages accruing to the extended family, while not the only issue at stake, are substantial rather than trivial.<\/p>\n
\u200bThe M. Russell Ballard Lineage<\/b><\/span><\/p>\nThe Ballard lineage provides another instructive example. Elder M. Russell Ballard<\/strong><\/a>, who served as Acting President and then President of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles before his death in November 2023, was the grandson of two apostles, Melvin J. Ballard and Hyrum Mack Smith, and thus a great\u2011grandson of Hyrum Smith, brother of Church founder Joseph Smith Jr. A direct family connection to the founding Smith generation therefore extended into the twenty\u2011first\u2011century executive leadership of the Church. Similarly, Henry B. Eyring (First Counselor in the First Presidency under President Nelson) is the nephew\u2014through his aunt Camilla Eyring Kimball\u2014of former Church President Spencer W. Kimball. And M. Russell Ballard\u2019s son\u2011in\u2011law, Bradford James Brower, was called in 2010 to preside over the Canada Toronto West Mission, adding yet another link in the interlocking chain of familial advancement.<\/p>\nNepotism Extended: The Business World and the LDS Network<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\nThe scope of this analysis would be incomplete if it remained confined to strictly ecclesiastical callings. The LDS Church is also a major institutional economic actor, with business holdings and investments concentrated under\u00a0Deseret Management Corporation\u00a0and related entities, including Beneficial Life Insurance,\u00a0Deseret Book, the Deseret News, and KSL media outlets, and agricultural subsidiaries operating large tracts of land. In addition, its investment arm, Ensign Peak Advisors, has been reported by the Wall Street Journal and other outlets as managing a portfolio that reached on the order of 100 billion dollars by the late 2010s, highlighting the scale at which LDS institutional wealth intersects with global capital markets.<\/p>\n
Several General Authorities come from business careers that, by the nature of the LDS social ecosystem, intersect closely with their ecclesiastical networks.\u00a0Gary E. Stevenson, sustained as an apostle in October 2015, is a representative figure. Before his call as a General Authority, he served as chief operating officer of ICON Health & Fitness (now iFIT), a leading fitness\u2011equipment manufacturer with significant national and international reach. Biographical notes state that he sat on the Marriott School of Management National Advisory Council at BYU and on the Utah State University Foundation Board, and he is a graduate of what is now the\u00a0Jon M. Huntsman School of Business\u00a0at Utah State University\u2014an institution named after one of the Church\u2019s most prominent business families.<\/p>\n
The Huntsman family connection is particularly illustrative of how LDS business and ecclesiastical networks overlap. Industrialist and philanthropist\u00a0Jon Huntsman Sr.\u00a0served as an Area Authority Seventy and was the son\u2011in\u2011law of apostle\u00a0David B. Haight, making him part of an apostolic family network as well as the founder of a global chemical empire. His son,\u00a0Jon Huntsman Jr., went on to become governor of Utah and U.S. ambassador to China and Russia, further embedding the family at the intersection of LDS, business, and political elites. Within Huntsman Corporation itself,\u00a0Ronald A. Rasband\u2014now a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles\u2014served as president and chief operating officer of Huntsman Chemical, while President Nelson\u2019s son\u2011in\u2011law, Michael T. Ringwood,\u00a0spent roughly 14 years as a vice president in various Huntsman units before later being called as a General Authority. The Church hierarchy, the Huntsman business empire, and the apostolic quorums thus form a triangle of interlocking relationships that is neither purely religious nor purely commercial.<\/p>\n
Beyond the Huntsman nexus, LDS business influence and networked leadership extend into real estate, media, healthcare, and finance. The Deseret News and KSL television and radio stations, owned through Deseret Management, function as prominent media platforms that amplify LDS perspectives and whose leadership sits squarely within the Church\u2019s institutional orbit. In healthcare, the nonprofit system now known as\u00a0Intermountain Health\u00a0was created in 1975 when the Church transferred ownership of 15 church\u2011run hospitals (including LDS Hospital and Primary Children\u2019s) to a new independent foundation, leaving a legacy in which a major regional health network still bears the imprint of LDS institutional origins and ongoing social and leadership ties in a heavily Latter\u2011day Saint region.VII. The Theological Contradiction: Divine Calling and Human Networks<\/b><\/span><\/p>\nWe have now assembled sufficient historical and contemporary evidence to pose the central theological question: Does the documented pattern of nepotism and cronyism in LDS leadership advancement conflict with the Church\u2019s foundational claim that its leaders are divinely called rather than humanly selected?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\nOfficial Latter\u2011day Saint teaching is clear. The calling of apostles and prophets is framed as a matter of divine revelation, not human ambition or institutional maneuvering. Doctrine and Covenants 121, a key text on priesthood leadership, insists that \u201cno power or influence can or ought to be maintained by virtue of the priesthood, only by persuasion, by long\u2011suffering, by gentleness and meekness, and by love unfeigned; by kindness, and pure knowledge\u2026\u201d<\/em> and warns that many are \u201cnot chosen\u201d<\/em> because \u201ctheir hearts are set so much upon the things of this world, and aspire to the honors of men.\u201d<\/em> Drawing on this passage, Jacob Tubbs and Brianna Holmes argue in Public Square Magazine that LDS governance is rooted in \u201cdivine calling and service,\u201d<\/em> fundamentally different from corporate hierarchies and oriented toward \u201cservice over self, duty over dominion, and faithfulness over personal advancement,\u201d<\/em> concluding that \u201cit is not men who decide who should be called to lead and who should not. It is Jesus Christ.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\nTaken on its own terms, this seems a sincere and theologically coherent defense. In LDS ideology, men do not campaign for apostolic office, do not openly lobby for advancement, and are repeatedly told that leadership is a burden, not a prize. There is apparent faith and real sacrifice among many who occupy these roles. Yet this very claim\u2014that God alone controls who rises\u2014creates a theological problem when juxtaposed with the empirical record. If God is truly the primary determiner of who becomes an apostle or prophet, and if, across generations, those callings statistically cluster around a relatively small set of interrelated families and business elites, then one of two conclusions seems inescapable. Either God has a marked preference for men from LDS apostolic bloodlines and established networks <\/strong>(a claim that sits uneasily with the Church\u2019s rhetoric about the universality and impartiality of the gospel)<\/span>, or human social structures are exerting far more influence on the selection process than the official theology is willing to concede.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\nThis tension is sharpened by LDS teaching on prophetic succession. Spencer W. Kimball, in reflections often quoted in Church literature, emphasized God\u2019s control over life and death and suggested that the Lord could prevent tragedies but often does not, because there is \u201ca time to die\u201d<\/em> and God\u2019s purposes ultimately prevail. Within LDS discourse, this has undergirded a common assumption: because the next prophet is always the longest\u2011serving apostle, and because God ultimately oversees the timing of apostolic deaths, it is the Lord who decides which senior apostle lives to become president. Mormonism Research Ministry presses the logic: if succession is by seniority in a quorum whose membership has historically been shaped by kinship and elite networks, then \u201cthe answer\u2026 to the question, \u2018how does one get to be the prophet of the LDS Church?\u2019 seems to be by having the right family ties, coupled with longevity.\u201d<\/em> In other words, structural and familial factors heavily condition who can ever plausibly be in the \u201cspiritual line of fire\u201d<\/em> for the top office.<\/p>\nWhen placed alongside the New Testament witness, the LDS model diverges even more starkly. In Acts 1:21\u201322, Peter stipulates that Judas\u2019s replacement must be a man who \u201ccompanied with us all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us\u2026 unto that same day that he was taken up from us,\u201d<\/em> so that he might be \u201ca witness with us of his resurrection.\u201d<\/em> Historic Christian interpretation has seen here not only the specific choice of Matthias, but also a pattern: the apostolic office is tied to firsthand eyewitness of the risen Christ and functions as a foundational, not perpetually recurring, role in the Church\u2019s life. Critics such as Life After Ministry and others therefore argue that \u201cnot one of the Mormon apostles\u201d<\/em> meets the Acts\u20111 standard, since LDS apostles neither claim to have walked with the mortal Jesus nor to have seen the resurrected Christ in the public, evidential way Peter describes. Whatever one thinks of modern LDS apostleship, the biblical text nowhere lists dynastic lineage or institutional family connection among the qualifications Peter enumerates.<\/p>\nThus, the theological difficulty is not merely sociological but doctrinal. LDS scripture insists that priesthood leadership must eschew the \u201chonors of men\u201d<\/em> and cannot be maintained by worldly power; LDS apologists insist that Christ, not human preference, selects leaders; yet the actual distribution of high office is heavily skewed toward certain families and networks in ways that are difficult to attribute to divine impartiality. If leadership elevation were random with respect to kinship and social capital, the official story would fit more comfortably. Instead, the Church\u2019s own history and contemporary patterns suggest that, whatever role personal revelation may play, human social structures, kinship loyalties, and institutional cronyism are doing significant, perhaps decisive, work in determining who rises\u2014a reality that sits in deep tension with the Church\u2019s foundational narrative of divinely orchestrated, universally accessible calling.<\/p>\nFor a rigorous examination of both biblical texts and LDS historical records, this extensively researched essay<\/strong><\/a> dives into another view of the LDS prophet question: It examines whether the prophetic and apostolic offices as currently constituted in the LDS Church bear genuine resemblance to their New Testament antecedents, or whether they represent a fundamental departure from the biblical pattern.<\/p>\nThe Prophetic Office and Family Dynasties: A Biblical Perspective<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\nThe biblical record is instructive on the question of nepotism and divine calling. Again and again, the Hebrew Scriptures depict God raising prophets and leaders in ways that cut across, or even directly confront, existing religious and social power structures. Amos, for example, insists that he was not part of any prophetic dynasty or guild: \u201cI was no prophet, nor a prophet\u2019s son, but I was a herdsman and a dresser of sycamore figs\u201d<\/em> (Amos 7:14). Jeremiah, though from a priestly town (\u201cthe priests who were in Anathoth,\u201d<\/em> Jeremiah 1:1), is called by God over his own protest and quickly finds his ministry in collision with the religious and political establishment, including death threats from men in his own priestly community who want to silence his message. Isaiah\u2019s commissioning comes through a direct vision of the Lord in the temple\u2014\u201cI saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up\u201d<\/em> (Isaiah 6:1)\u2014not by inheritance of an office or election by an institutional council. When God chooses David, he explicitly passes over Jesse\u2019s older sons, whom Samuel initially assumes are the likely candidates; only after the youngest son is summoned from the sheepfold does the Lord declare, \u201cArise, anoint him, for this is he.\u201d<\/em> (1 Samuel 16:6\u201313).<\/p>\nThis pattern is theologically significant. In story after story, Scripture portrays God\u2019s choice as subverting human expectations about status and lineage rather than ratifying them. Paul generalizes this principle when addressing factionalism in the Corinthian church: \u201cFor consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth.\u201d<\/em>\u00a0(1 Corinthians 1:26). As commentators note, Paul\u2019s point is not that God never calls the educated or well born, but that the divine pattern normally runs against conventional hierarchies, so that \u201cnot many\u201d<\/em> of the wise, mighty, and noble make up the core of the called community. God chooses what is weak and low in the world precisely to undermine boasting in human networks and prestige.<\/p>\nViewed from this biblical\u2011theological vantage point, the question surrounding LDS leadership is not merely sociological but genuinely prophetic. An institution that claims to be led by the same God who bypassed Eliab for David, took a herdsman like Amos from his flocks, and set Jeremiah in opposition to his own priestly milieu ought, over time, to display a leadership pattern that breaks rather than reproduces entrenched family and status hierarchies. When the opposite pattern emerges\u2014when high leadership is repeatedly concentrated within overlapping family and social networks, generation after generation\u2014the claim that such appointments are direct continuations of the biblical calling pattern invites careful and sober re\u2011examination.<\/p>\n
The Church\u2019s Response: Divine Calling and the Problem of Opacity<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\nIt is important to note that the LDS Church has not been entirely unaware of concerns about nepotism. When Richard G. Hinckley\u2014son of President Gordon B. Hinckley\u2014was called to the First Quorum of the Seventy in April 2005, President Hinckley publicly disavowed any role in initiating his son\u2019s call and even joked about issuing a disclaimer before the sustainings. Commentators at Times & Seasons and Mormon Matters have pointed to this moment as evidence that an anti\u2011nepotism norm at least exists in the Church\u2019s self\u2011consciousness, even if that norm has not been strong enough to prevent a broader pattern of familial clustering in leadership.<\/p>\n
The institutional defense of this pattern typically rests on two pillars. First is the claim that Church callings\u2014especially to high office\u2014are made through prayerful, revelatory processes and are therefore categorically different from corporate promotions based on lobbying or self-advocacy. Official materials emphasize that leaders are \u201ccalled by proper authority\u201d<\/em> and that \u201cno prophet or any other leader in this Church\u2026 has ever called himself;\u201d<\/em>\u00a0the President of the Church seeks inspiration and may solicit recommended names, but the final choice is described as the Lord\u2019s.<\/p>\nSecond is the observation that growing up in a General Authority household\u2014often as so-called “cradle Mormons”<\/em> immersed from birth in Church doctrine, culture, and expectations without meaningful exposure to opposing viewpoints or critical perspectives\u2014can plausibly foster the qualities the Church values in leaders: deep doctrinal familiarity, unshakeable institutional loyalty, polished public speaking and administrative skills honed through lifelong service, and a cultural fluency that feels tailor-made for high office. On this view, the correlation between family connection and leadership is not favoritism but the natural fruit of environments that systematically nurture these traits from infancy, insulating cradle Mormons from the intellectual and spiritual friction that might challenge orthodoxy or broaden their worldview.<\/p>\nBoth arguments have real force and should be fairly acknowledged. The difficulty, however, lies in structural opacity. The LDS Church does not disclose how candidates for the Quorum of the Twelve or First Presidency are identified, evaluated, or eliminated. Public explanations from leaders like Elder D. Todd Christofferson acknowledge that the President of the Church may ask other apostles for suggested names, then privately seek confirmation and bring one or more \u201cinspired\u201d<\/em> names back to the council, but they explicitly state that \u201cwhat process he goes through exactly\u2026 is something private he pursues.\u201d<\/em> The General Handbook describes calling processes in general terms\u2014recommendations, confidential discussion, and prayer\u2014but provides no detailed, auditable criteria for top\u2011level selections. There are no public minutes, no independent oversight, and no way for members or observers to see how heavily informal networks, prior working relationships, or family connections weigh in the discernment process.<\/p>\nBecause the entire mechanism is presented as an act of divine revelation shielded from external scrutiny, it becomes impossible in practice to distinguish between two very different possibilities: a genuinely revelation\u2011driven selection that happens, in a given case, to favor a family\u2011connected candidate, or a socially driven selection shaped by kinship and professional networks that is subsequently narrated as revelation. The same opaque process can generate both outcomes, and from the outside, they are indistinguishable.<\/p>\n
This opacity is not incidental to the problem; it is constitutive of it. In any institution where selection procedures are confidential and their results repeatedly favor individuals tied to existing power networks, the burden of proof on claims of meritocracy\u2014or, in this case, of divine direction\u2014is substantial. For a church that asserts prophetic guidance and insists that God himself chooses its highest officers, the bar is higher still: it must not only be fair by human standards, but must credibly demonstrate that its leadership patterns reflect a guidance that transcends, rather than simply reproduces, the kinship and social structures in which its leaders are embedded.<\/p>\n
The Rank-and-File Perception<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\nWhatever the institutional reality, how ordinary Latter\u2011day Saints perceive these patterns matters both theologically and sociologically. As one author at Times & Seasons notes, awareness of nepotism is not confined to critics: \u201cpeople notice, even the orthodox who only speak about this in whispers to certain people.\u201d<\/em> In the same reflection, he recounts a comment from a BYU\u2013Idaho professor who joked that the university \u201ctakes nepotism very seriously\u2026except at the top,\u201d<\/em> a quip offered not by an outside opponent but by an insider who recognized and named the tension between stated principles and visible practice.<\/p>\nFor many current and former Latter\u2011day Saints, the perception that leadership advancement is shaped by family and insider networks becomes more than a sociological observation; it can precipitate a spiritual crisis. When the calling of a mission president, a Seventy, or an apostle is presented to the membership as the result of divine revelation\u2014as the Lord\u2019s own selection of \u201cthe right man in the right place\u201d<\/em>\u2014evidence that such callings cluster disproportionately within the extended families and close associates of existing leaders produces a deep dissonance. Either the Lord\u2019s guidance systematically favors those already connected to institutional power, which raises difficult questions about divine impartiality, or the language of revelation is at least partly overlaying and sanctifying choices significantly shaped by human relationships and structures.<\/p>\nFor the institution, this tension is not merely a public\u2011relations concern; it becomes a question of prophetic credibility.<\/strong> <\/span>The Church\u2019s ability to command the trust and spiritual loyalty of a global membership depends heavily on the plausibility of its claim that God directly guides its leadership choices. In such a context, every well\u2011documented instance where advancement tracks closely with family or social networks\u2014and where the opaque process offers no clear way to distinguish it from ordinary institutional nepotism\u2014incrementally erodes that plausibility for those who are paying attention.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\nA Sociological Framework: Why This Is Predictable<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\nLest this analysis appear to single out the LDS Church unfairly, it is important to place these findings in a broader sociological frame. Research on organizations and social networks has long shown that nepotism and insider preference are not aberrations caused by unusually bad actors; they are predictable outcomes of how trust, familiarity, and perceived competence function in human groups. Studies of \u201csimilarity\u2011attraction bias\u201d<\/em> and homophily\u2014the tendency to prefer people who resemble us in background, values, or status\u2014demonstrate that decision\u2011makers consistently evaluate candidates more favorably when they share demographic traits, institutional pedigrees, or social ties, because similarity feels like a cue of safety and reliability.<\/p>\nIn high\u2011stakes appointments, where failure is costly, and performance is hard to measure in advance, leaders tend to fall back on proxies for trustworthiness: shared history, overlapping networks, and family connections. Organizational behavior literature notes that kinship and prior relational ties offer especially strong \u201ctrust shortcuts,\u201d<\/em> because family members are assumed to be loyal and more predictable, even when objective competence signals are ambiguous. In that sense, institutional nepotism is simply the most concentrated form of a more general pattern: when in doubt, people choose those who feel familiar and \u201cknown quantities\u201d<\/em> to them.<\/p>\nIn a setting like the LDS Church, where trust is framed in explicitly theological categories\u2014worthiness, faithfulness, covenant loyalty\u2014the proxies for trustworthiness are densely cultural as well as relational. A man raised in a General Authority’s home offers decades of observable evidence of loyalty, doctrinal conformity, and institutional fluency, vouched for personally by those at the center. By contrast, a spiritually gifted convert from rural Brazil or West Africa remains largely “unknown”<\/em> beyond mediated reports. This stark asymmetry tilts decisions toward the familiar\u2014but why would divine leadership systematically exclude the global outsider in favor of the American insider? If God truly directs, the pattern indicts not His exclusionary preference, but the discernment process’s failure to transcend earthly familiarity.<\/p>\nCrucially, this dynamic does not require anyone to sit in a room and deliberately conspire to advance their relatives. It operates automatically, through well\u2011documented mechanisms of homophily and similarity\u2011based attraction, in which leaders sincerely experience those within their own networks as more trustworthy, more \u201cready,\u201d<\/em> and more obviously suited to leadership. In religious contexts, theological language\u2014\u201cwe felt a confirming impression,\u201d<\/em> \u201cthe Spirit confirmed this brother is the right man\u201d<\/em>\u2014can function as a sincere but incomplete account of a process that is also being powerfully shaped by these implicit sociological forces.<\/p>\nRecognizing this broader sociological reality should neither excuse LDS leaders’ sincerity nor foster complacency about the structural issues. What it exposes instead is a profound irony: leaders who claim direct, ongoing divine guidance appear unable to perceive\u2014or overcome\u2014the predictable human pressures that propel their decisions. Sociological patterns like similarity-attraction bias and homophily, well-documented across organizations, exert a gravitational pull toward family ties and insider networks that is automatic and subconscious, yet the LDS hierarchy has produced no discernible counterforce despite nearly two centuries of dominance by the same dynastic clusters.<\/p>\n
Secular and religious bodies routinely mitigate such biases through transparent criteria, diverse nominating pools, and accountability checks\u2014steps that demand no supernatural intervention, merely deliberate design. For men professing prophetic revelation, however, the failure to transcend these forces is theologically damning. If God truly directs the Quorum of the Twelve, why has the pattern of apostolic bloodlines and BYU-CES pipelines persisted so stubbornly, untouched by heavenly correction? The persistent replication of elite networks, generation after generation, suggests not divine transcendence but human unawareness: leaders mistaking sociological inertia for spiritual confirmation, their claims of heaven’s hand unwittingly masking earth’s.<\/p>\n
The Question of Declining Nepotism and the Rise of International Leadership<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\nIt is fair and important to acknowledge the genuine diversification that has occurred in LDS leadership in recent decades. Dieter F. Uchtdorf\u2014a German Latter-day Saint whose family joined the Church in postwar Europe and who became the first apostle from Germany and the first non\u2013U.S.-born apostle in over 50 years\u2014was called to the Quorum of the Twelve in 2004 and to the First Presidency in 2008, marking a significant departure from the nearly uninterrupted run of U.S.-born apostles with deep pioneer ancestry. Likewise, Patrick Kearon, a British convert with no pioneer Utah lineage, was called to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in December 2023 and ordained that same day, after serving as Senior President of the Seventy and as a General Authority based in Europe and the Middle East. As of 2026, he is a member of the Twelve; he has not been publicly announced as \u201cPresident of the Quorum\u201d<\/em> in the same formal sense as long-serving senior apostles who preside when the First Presidency is organized, so it is more precise simply to identify him as an apostle rather than as President of the Quorum.<\/p>\nThe quorums of Seventy have clearly become more international. Area and General Authority Seventies now routinely come from Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Europe, and Church Newsroom announcements explicitly describe the organization of Area Seventy quorums along global regional lines (Africa, Asia, Brazil, the Caribbean and Central America, Europe, Pacific, etc.), underscoring an intentional effort to have regional leaders from the areas they serve. This represents a real shift away from an earlier era when North Americans dominated nearly every quorum.<\/p>\n
Jeff Spector\u2019s multi\u2011year analysis at Mormon Matters also documents a modest trend away from direct bloodline nepotism in some mission president callings by around 2010. In his 2010 update, he notes that \u201cthe trend away from nepotism continues with a lot of leaders called from the areas they will serve in,\u201d<\/em> even as he observes that \u201cBYU professors, high-ranking Church and CES employees and \u2018well known\u2019 Church people continue to get calls.\u201d<\/em> Concrete examples include mission presidents without General Authority ancestry called from Latin America and other non\u2011U.S. regions, indicating that at least at this level, converts and non\u2011elite members have more pathways into leadership than in the 19th and early 20th centuries.<\/p>\nSeveral caveats remain important, however. First, the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles\u2014the body from which the next President of the Church is chosen by seniority\u2014has historically been the most resistant to outsiders and remains heavily drawn from established North American leadership networks, despite the notable exceptions of men like Uchtdorf and Kearon. The multigenerational family-network concentration at this level has been the most persistent and theologically consequential. Second, while the internationalization of the Seventies and Area Seventies is real and welcome, it has not yet translated into broad diversification at the very top of the hierarchy, where presidents and apostles are still overwhelmingly from a relatively narrow band of cultural, educational, and economic backgrounds. Third, as Spector and others have pointed out, professional proximity to Church power continues to function as a powerful alternative pipeline: BYU and Church Educational System employment, Deseret Book authorship, service in key Church departments, and senior roles in Church\u2011adjacent corporations (like Huntsman or other major Utah firms) repeatedly show up in the biographies of those called as General Authorities and mission presidents.<\/p>\n
Because the Church does not publish detailed criteria or procedures for selecting apostles, Seventies, or mission presidents, it is difficult to say definitively whether the observed diversification reflects a big structural change or a more superficial broadening at lower levels combined with continued concentration at the top. What can be said is that any shift away from kinship\u2011based selection has been gradual and incomplete, and that the theological rationale for more thoroughgoing reform\u2014the Church\u2019s own insistence that leadership is governed by divine direction rather than human preference\u2014remains as strong as ever.<\/p>\n
The Gospel Imperative<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\nFrom an evangelical Christian perspective, the LDS pattern of leadership nepotism strikes at the heart of biblical theology. The New Testament deliberately upends human hierarchies at every turn: Galilean fishermen like Peter, Andrew, James, and John\u2014unlettered laborers from a despised region (John 1:46; Acts 4:13)\u2014are elevated as the apostolic foundation (Ephesians 2:20). A Roman-collaborating tax collector, Matthew (Matthew 9:9), joins them. Women like Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Susanna\u2014whose legal testimony was routinely dismissed in first-century courts (Luke 8:1-3; John 20:1-18)\u2014become the first resurrection witnesses commissioned by the risen Christ Himself.<\/p>\n
Jesus reinforces this reversal: He calls the Twelve from obscurity, declares the “last will be first”<\/em> (Matthew 20:16), and praises childlike faith over elite status (Matthew 18:3-4). Paul crystallizes the principle: “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise\u2026 what is weak in the world to shame the strong\u2026 what is low and despised in the world\u2026 so that no human being might boast in the presence of God”<\/em> (1 Corinthians 1:27-29). James echoes it, warning against favoritism toward the rich while scorning the poor (James 2:1-7).<\/p>\nThis is no incidental quirk but God’s deliberate design: divine calling dismantles human prestige, nullifies network leverage, and glorifies the unlikely precisely to eliminate boasting in pedigree or power (1 Corinthians 1:31; Jeremiah 9:23-24). An ecclesiastical aristocracy where sacred office clusters in multigenerational bloodlines and institutional orbits does not merely deviate from this pattern\u2014it inverts it, sanctifying the very dynamics Scripture condemns.<\/p>\n
Conclusion: A Family Portrait of the Kingdom<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\nThe image with which the Life After Ministry<\/strong><\/em><\/a> analysis opens is starkly simple: \u201cIt\u2019s been said that looking at pictures of the General Authorities in Mormonism is like looking at family reunion photos\u2014not your family, mind you, but of a family you probably don\u2019t belong to.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\nThat image cuts to the core. Over nearly two centuries, the leadership of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has been molded by family and professional networks so concentrated, so enduring, and so exhaustively documented that their reality is beyond reasonable dispute. From Joseph Smith\u2019s documented appointment of 23 relatives to high office, through Brigham Young\u2019s private ordinations of his sons as apostles, through D. Michael Quinn\u2019s mapping of multigenerational dynasties, to the contemporary tangle of Nelson\u2019s sons-in-law as mission presidents, corporate executives rising to apostleship, and persistent clustering among BYU faculty and Church-adjacent elites, the pattern holds firm.<\/p>\n
Nothing here should impute bad faith to individual leaders; the evidence permits no such judgment. What it demands is unflinching clarity about the structural truth: an institution that asserts divine oversight of its leadership has, from inception to present, produced selections that track ordinary human networking with striking fidelity. The statistical weight of family-linked advancement\u2014persistent across generations, resistant to diversification at the apex, and amplified by polygamous intermarriage and professional proximity\u2014is too pronounced to dismiss as coincidence or mere happenstance.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\nFor the evangelical observer, this discrepancy strikes at a foundational test of prophetic legitimacy. Scripture portrays God routinely upending human hierarchies: herdsmen over priests, youngest sons over firstborns, fishermen over scholars. Institutions claiming that same divine hand should, over time, yield leaders whose origins defy social predictability, not replicate an ecclesiastical aristocracy. The LDS record, by contrast, aligns too closely with what sociology anticipates from closed elite networks, challenging the claim of transcendent selection.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\nFor the committed Latter-day Saint, this evidence demands a far more troubling question than defensiveness or rationalization can evade: If the Church\u2019s doctrine holds that God Himself selects leaders through direct revelation\u2014unbound by worldly ties or human preference\u2014why has the pattern of kinship dominance persisted so relentlessly, untouched by any divine intervention? No sociological explanation, however robust, can neutralize the dissonance. A leadership that consistently reproduces itself through bloodlines and insider networks is not merely culturally predictable; it flatly contradicts the claim that heaven overrides earthly dynamics.<\/p>\n
The absence of structural change\u2014transparent vetting, expanded pools beyond elite orbits, accountability beyond apostolic fiat\u2014is not incidental. It undermines the very foundation of LDS authority. If God directs the Quorum of the Twelve, why has He permitted nepotism’s gravitational pull to define His prophets for two centuries? A faith staked on heavenly selection cannot indefinitely abide earthly dynasties without calling its own prophetic claims into serious question. The evidence compels every faithful LDS member to confront whether what is claimed as God’s voice is, in reality, the echo of human networks wearing divine robes.<\/p>\n
Primary Sources and References<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n\u2022 Quinn, D. Michael. The Mormon Hierarchy: Extensions of Power. Signature Books, 1997, pp. 163\u2013170.
\n\u2022 Thuet, Lane. \u201cNepotism and Church Leadership \u2013 It\u2019s All In The Family<\/strong><\/em><\/a>.\u201d Mormonism Research Ministry, February 6, 2007.
\n\u2022 Spector, Jeff. \u201cNepotism in the Church<\/strong><\/em><\/a>.\u201d Mormon Matters, April 14, 2008.
\n\u2022 Spector, Jeff. \u201cNepotism in the Church \u2013 2010 Update<\/strong><\/em><\/a>.\u201d Mormon Matters, May 7, 2010.
\n\u2022 Stephen C. \u201cNepotism in High Church Offices<\/strong><\/em><\/a>.\u201d Times & Seasons, October 23, 2022.
\n\u2022 \u201cNepotism in the Russell M. Nelson Administration?<\/strong><\/a>\u201d Mormon Eye, January 20, 2018.
\n\u2022 \u201cNepotism in the Mormon Church<\/em><\/a><\/strong>.\u201d Life After Ministry, January 13, 2016.
\n\u2022 Tubbs, Jacob, and Brianna Holmes. \u201cAmbition and Faith in The Church of Jesus Christ.<\/strong><\/em><\/a>\u201d Public Square Magazine, July 22, 2024.
\n\u2022 \u201cGary E. Stevenson<\/strong><\/em><\/a>.\u201d Wikipedia.
\n\u2022 Kimball, Spencer W. \u201cWe Thank Thee O God for a Prophet<\/em><\/strong><\/a>.\u201d Ensign, January 1973, p. 34.
\n\u2022 Doctrine and Covenants, Section 121.
\n\u2022 The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. 1 Corinthians 1:26; Acts 1:12\u201326; Isaiah 6; Amos 7:14; 1 Samuel 16:6\u201313.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nepotism, Family Networks, and the Question of Divine Calling in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints A Theological and Historical Analysis Introduction: The Family at the Top of the Kingdom Imagine attending a large corporate shareholder meeting, only to discover that nearly every seat at the executive table is occupied by a member…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7133,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[44,45,57],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latter-day-saints","category-mormonism","category-religion"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Gemini_Generated_Image_cpto1fcpto1fcpto.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7132"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7132\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7135,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7132\/revisions\/7135"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7133"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Before proceeding, it is important to define our terms with precision. Nepotism refers specifically to the practice of favoring relatives in the conferral of appointments, positions, or privileges\u2014deriving from the Italian nepotismo, itself from nipote (nephew), a reference to the medieval Catholic practice of popes appointing nephews to cardinal positions. Cronyism is a broader term describing the favoritism shown to close friends or associates, regardless of familial ties. Institutional favoritism encompasses both, describing the systemic tendency of organizations to advance individuals who are already well-connected to those in power.<\/p>\n
None of these terms, by themselves, implies malice or conscious corruption. Social science research consistently shows that nepotism and cronyism operate most powerfully below the level of conscious intent. Organizations tend to replicate themselves: decision-makers perceive trustworthiness, competence, and cultural fit in those who share their background, vocabulary, and social networks. In a religious organization that places extraordinary value on familial loyalty, generational faithfulness, and institutional trust, the conditions for nepotism are not merely present\u2014they are cultivated.<\/p>\n
The critical question for the LDS Church is not simply whether individual appointments can be shown to involve nepotism, but whether the pattern of such appointments rises to the level of a structural feature\u2014a gravitational pull within the institution that, however unintentionally, draws leadership authority toward a relatively small network of families and their social affiliates. The evidence, as we shall see, strongly suggests that it does.<\/p>\n
A Dynasty from the Beginning: Nepotism in the Founding Era<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\nThe story of nepotism in the LDS Church begins with its founder. Joseph Smith, Jr.\u2014whom the Church regards as the Prophet of the Restoration\u2014by historian D. Michael Quinn\u2019s count appointed no fewer than twenty-three individuals with family ties to himself to leadership positions in the young Church. These included his father, Joseph Smith, Sr., ordained as the first Church Patriarch; his brother Hyrum, appointed Assistant President of the Church; another brother, William, called as one of the original Twelve Apostles; his uncle John Smith, who rose to high church office; and multiple cousins who received General Authority callings.\u200b<\/p>\n
Historians have noted that in the earliest years of any new religious movement, relying on trusted family members is not only understandable but arguably practical: the pool of qualified, vetted candidates is necessarily small, and family loyalty can provide a measure of institutional stability during precarious formative years. This contextual caveat is fair. Yet even granting this, the scale and pattern of familial appointment under Smith established a template that would persist long after such practical necessity had passed.\u200b<\/p>\n
Brigham Young, Smith\u2019s successor and the architect of the Utah settlement, took the practice further. Young appointed three of his own sons\u2014Brigham Young Jr., John Willard Young, and Joseph Angell Young\u2014as apostles, and at least some of these ordinations were performed privately and only later disclosed more broadly, creating friction within the Quorum. He also elevated ten additional family members to General Authority positions. Historian D. Michael Quinn\u2019s exhaustive genealogical research in The Mormon Hierarchy: Extensions of Power documents the full scope of this pattern:\u200b<\/p>\n
\u201cAt a primary level were kinship ties. No less significant were marriage connections\u2026 Convoluted relationships made the Mormon hierarchy an extended family, and extensive family connections persist among LDS general authorities today.\u201d
\n\u2014 D. Michael Quinn, The Mormon Hierarchy: Extensions of Power, p. 163\u200b<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\nQuinn\u2019s documentation does not stop with the founding generation. He demonstrates that every succeeding president of the Church through the early twentieth century maintained or increased the proportion of General Authority appointments going to men with close kinship ties to existing leadership. Summarizing his findings, Quinn observes:\u200b<\/p>\n
\u201cWhere kinship was involved, Young\u2019s successors appointed only men with close kinship relations to current or former general authorities. Aside from Wilford Woodruff, LDS presidents after Young also doubled his proportion of appointments with close kinship connections. Twentieth-century presidents Joseph F. Smith and Heber J. Grant more than doubled the founding prophet\u2019s proportion of appointments with close kinship to other members of the Mormon hierarchy.\u201d
\n\u2014 D. Michael Quinn, The Mormon Hierarchy: Extensions of Power, pp. 169\u2013170\u200b<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\nJohn Taylor appointed eight relatives, including two sons. Wilford Woodruff appointed three relatives, including one son. Joseph F. Smith, the sixth LDS Prophet, appointed eleven relatives, including three sons\u2014one of whom, Joseph Fielding Smith, eventually became the tenth prophet of the Church. The succession of familial advancement is not occasional or incidental; it is multigenerational and deeply structural.\u200b<\/p>\n
The practice of polygamy, which was official LDS doctrine from approximately the 1840s until Wilford Woodruff\u2019s 1890 Manifesto, dramatically amplified these family network effects. When senior leaders routinely took multiple wives\u2014often from the families of other leaders\u2014the resulting web of kinship became extraordinarily dense, as leadership families intermarried and produced overlapping lines of descent. Even after polygamy was officially abandoned, its legacy in consolidating family networks persisted for generations, helping to entrench what functioned in practice as an ecclesiastical aristocracy of bloodlines.<\/p>\n
The Statistical Reality: A Documented Pattern<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\nThe Mormonism Research Ministry Analysis<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\nOne of the most striking empirical claims about contemporary LDS leadership comes from Lane Thuet, writing for the Mormonism Research Ministry. Thuet conducted a detailed analysis of the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and concluded with a finding that is difficult to dismiss as coincidental:<\/p>\n
100% of them are related in some way to current or former general authorities of the LDS Church. In the top 2 leading quorums\u2014consisting of 15 men (The First Presidency and the Quorum of Twelve Apostles)\u2014five of these men are directly related to each other. Four are related to each other by marriage. Four are directly related to former LDS Presidents. Five are directly related to former apostles. Two are married to wives who are direct descendants of former presidents. Five are married to wives who are directly related to former apostles. Seven are married to wives who are relatives of current general authorities or of their wives.<\/i>
\n\u2014 Lane Thuet, Mormonism Research Ministry, mrm.org\/nepotism<\/b><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Thuet noted only one apparent exception: Apostle Richard G. Scott appeared to have no blood ties to any other General Authority. Yet even in Scott\u2019s case, his wife was related to several current General Authorities and descended from a former LDS apostle. The family network appeared inescapable.<\/p>\n
The Mormon Matters Survey (2008\u201310)<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\nBeginning in 2008,\u00a0Jeff Spector<\/span>\u00a0of\u00a0Mormon Matters<\/span><\/strong><\/a>\u00a0undertook a multi\u2011year informal survey of familial connections among LDS General Authorities and other senior leaders, using sources such as the Church Almanac, the Deseret News\/Church News archive, the official LDS website, and Wikipedia. His resulting data table\u2014covering General Authorities, mission and temple presidents, and some auxiliary leaders\u2014documents dozens of close kinship connections across multiple generations.<\/p>\nA brief sample from the relationships he highlighted illustrates the scope (all relationships below are independently documented in church or reference biographies):<\/p>\n
\u2022 Allan Forrest Packer, General Authority Seventy \u2014 <\/strong>Son of Boyd K. Packer, president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.<\/span><\/span>
\n\u2022 Richard G. Hinckley, General Authority Seventy \u2014<\/strong> Son of Gordon B. Hinckley, 15th president of the Church.<\/span><\/span>
\n\u2022 Virginia H. Pearce, First Counselor in the Young Women General Presidency \u2014 <\/strong>Daughter of President Gordon B. Hinckley.<\/span><\/span>
\n\u2022 Henry J. Eyring, later president of BYU\u2013Idaho \u2014 <\/strong>Son of Henry B. Eyring, counselor in the First Presidency.<\/span><\/span>
\n\u2022 Gerrit W. Gong, then a General Authority Seventy \u2014 <\/strong>Son\u2011in\u2011law of Richard P. Lindsay, former member of the Second Quorum of the Seventy.<\/span><\/span>
\n\u2022 Merrill C. Oaks, former member of the Second Quorum of the Seventy \u2014 <\/strong>Brother of Dallin H. Oaks, apostle and later president of the Quorum of the Twelve.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\nIn his 2010 update, Spector noted what he saw as a modest trend away from direct father\u2011child or similarly obvious nepotism in some mission president callings, as the Church increasingly called presidents from the geographic regions where they would serve. At the same time, he observed that \u201cBYU professors, high\u2011ranking Church and CES employees and \u2018well\u2011known\u2019 Church people continue to get calls,\u201d<\/em> suggesting that even if strict blood\u2011line nepotism was tapering at certain levels, advancement through professional and social proximity to Church power\u2014what might be termed institutional cronyism\u2014appeared to be filling some of that space.<\/p>\nTimes & Seasons: The Academic Perspective<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\nWriting in the LDS-aligned academic blog Times & Seasons<\/strong><\/a> in October 2022, scholar Stephen C. offered a measured but pointed assessment of the structural dynamics at play. His analysis is notable precisely because it comes from within a community of faithful Latter-day Saints who are also serious scholars:<\/p>\nNepotism is the most natural of vices and needs to constantly be proactively guarded against, or else it will almost certainly creep into any large institution. In the early Church there just weren\u2019t a lot of options to choose from because it was so small, but as the Church becomes larger and more diverse it becomes increasingly unlikely that the best suited person for a high status calling happens to be the close relative of somebody else in a high status calling.<\/i>
\n\u2014 Stephen C., \u201cNepotism in High Church Offices,\u201d Times & Seasons, October 23, 2022<\/b><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Stephen C. went on to document several specific contemporary examples: President Monson\u2019s daughter serving in the Young Women\u2019s General Presidency; President Eyring\u2019s son serving as President of BYU-Idaho; President Hinckley\u2019s son called as a General Authority Seventy; and Elder Jeffrey Holland\u2019s son being appointed President of Utah Valley University despite having no educational administration experience. He also noted a telling observation from a BYU-Idaho professor who quipped that the institution \u201ctakes nepotism very seriously\u2026except at the top.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\nThe Times & Seasons author was careful to note that any individual appointment might be genuinely meritorious, while still arguing that the pattern as a whole creates a legitimacy problem:<\/p>\n
I suspect that, since only a fraction of sons of apostles are general authorities, there is an anti-nepotism norm operating at the highest level of the Church, but those guardrails need to be constantly refurbished since violating them is the most natural thing in the world, and within-family appointments, no matter how sincere, start to poke holes in that dam.<\/i>
\n\u2014 Stephen C., Times & Seasons, October 23, 2022<\/b><\/p><\/blockquote>\nThe Nelson Administration: A Case Study<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\nThe administration of\u00a0Russell M. Nelson, sustained as the seventeenth president of\u00a0The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints\u00a0in January 2018, offers a particularly clear contemporary case study in LDS leadership nepotism and networked advancement. Much of the documentation comes not from hostile critics but from observers who collate publicly available sources\u2014mission president announcements in Church News, biographical notes on the Church\u2019s official site, LinkedIn profiles, and reference works such as Wikipedia.<\/p>\n
In January 2018, the\u00a0Mormon Eye\u00a0blog<\/strong><\/a> published an analysis of President Nelson\u2019s extended family that highlighted a striking cluster of high\u2011level callings among his sons\u2011in\u2011law and their professional associates. The post notes:\u200b<\/p>\n\u201cFour of Russell M. Nelson\u2019s sons\u2011in\u2011law have been called as mission presidents (one was additionally called as a temple president), potentially saving his family thousands of dollars in tuition money if his grandchildren chose to attend a church school.\u201d\u200b<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The same analysis traced notable overlaps between Nelson\u2019s family network and the corporate careers of those connected to him. One son\u2011in\u2011law,\u00a0Bradley E. Wittwer\u00a0(widower of Nelson\u2019s daughter Emily, who died in 1995), served as a senior vice president at the health\u2011data company Ingenix in 2004\u20132005. During roughly the same period,\u00a0Kevin W. Pearson, later a General Authority Seventy, was CEO of Ingenix (1998\u20132005) and soon afterward was called as mission president in Tacoma, Washington (2005\u20132008), during which mission he was named a General Authority. Another son\u2011in\u2011law,\u00a0Michael T. Ringwood\u00a0(husband of Nelson\u2019s daughter Rosalie), worked as a vice president at\u00a0Huntsman Corporation\u00a0while\u00a0Ronald A. Rasband\u00a0served as Huntsman\u2019s president and COO; Rasband was later called as a mission president in New York City, then as a General Authority, and in 2015 was sustained to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.\u200b<\/p>\n
These connections, by themselves, do not prove that Nelson’s family relationships were the decisive cause of any particular calling; Church leaders would emphasize prayerful discernment and individual qualifications. Yet the extraordinary density of these ties\u2014multiple sons-in-law called as mission presidents, their former corporate superiors elevated to General Authority and even apostolic rank\u2014begs the deeper theological question: Does God Himself exercise a divine prerogative to favor familial and professional networks above all else in selecting His leaders? If so, this would mark a stark departure from the biblical God who bypassed bloodlines for herdsmen and outcasts; if not, the persistence of such clustering indicts the discernment process as insufficiently heavenly to overcome earthly gravitational pull.<\/p>\n
Mormon Eye also underscored the material dimension of such callings. Drawing on leaked mission president benefit information and secondary summaries, the blog noted that mission presidents receive housing, transportation, health insurance, and other substantial support, and that their dependent children are eligible for significant tuition assistance or waivers up to the level of BYU tuition at Church\u2011owned schools such as\u00a0BYU,\u00a0BYU\u2013Idaho, and\u00a0BYU\u2013Hawaii. When four sons\u2011in\u2011law of a sitting prophet serve as mission presidents (with one also becoming a temple president), the cumulative financial and educational advantages accruing to the extended family, while not the only issue at stake, are substantial rather than trivial.<\/p>\n
\u200bThe M. Russell Ballard Lineage<\/b><\/span><\/p>\nThe Ballard lineage provides another instructive example. Elder M. Russell Ballard<\/strong><\/a>, who served as Acting President and then President of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles before his death in November 2023, was the grandson of two apostles, Melvin J. Ballard and Hyrum Mack Smith, and thus a great\u2011grandson of Hyrum Smith, brother of Church founder Joseph Smith Jr. A direct family connection to the founding Smith generation therefore extended into the twenty\u2011first\u2011century executive leadership of the Church. Similarly, Henry B. Eyring (First Counselor in the First Presidency under President Nelson) is the nephew\u2014through his aunt Camilla Eyring Kimball\u2014of former Church President Spencer W. Kimball. And M. Russell Ballard\u2019s son\u2011in\u2011law, Bradford James Brower, was called in 2010 to preside over the Canada Toronto West Mission, adding yet another link in the interlocking chain of familial advancement.<\/p>\nNepotism Extended: The Business World and the LDS Network<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\nThe scope of this analysis would be incomplete if it remained confined to strictly ecclesiastical callings. The LDS Church is also a major institutional economic actor, with business holdings and investments concentrated under\u00a0Deseret Management Corporation\u00a0and related entities, including Beneficial Life Insurance,\u00a0Deseret Book, the Deseret News, and KSL media outlets, and agricultural subsidiaries operating large tracts of land. In addition, its investment arm, Ensign Peak Advisors, has been reported by the Wall Street Journal and other outlets as managing a portfolio that reached on the order of 100 billion dollars by the late 2010s, highlighting the scale at which LDS institutional wealth intersects with global capital markets.<\/p>\n
Several General Authorities come from business careers that, by the nature of the LDS social ecosystem, intersect closely with their ecclesiastical networks.\u00a0Gary E. Stevenson, sustained as an apostle in October 2015, is a representative figure. Before his call as a General Authority, he served as chief operating officer of ICON Health & Fitness (now iFIT), a leading fitness\u2011equipment manufacturer with significant national and international reach. Biographical notes state that he sat on the Marriott School of Management National Advisory Council at BYU and on the Utah State University Foundation Board, and he is a graduate of what is now the\u00a0Jon M. Huntsman School of Business\u00a0at Utah State University\u2014an institution named after one of the Church\u2019s most prominent business families.<\/p>\n
The Huntsman family connection is particularly illustrative of how LDS business and ecclesiastical networks overlap. Industrialist and philanthropist\u00a0Jon Huntsman Sr.\u00a0served as an Area Authority Seventy and was the son\u2011in\u2011law of apostle\u00a0David B. Haight, making him part of an apostolic family network as well as the founder of a global chemical empire. His son,\u00a0Jon Huntsman Jr., went on to become governor of Utah and U.S. ambassador to China and Russia, further embedding the family at the intersection of LDS, business, and political elites. Within Huntsman Corporation itself,\u00a0Ronald A. Rasband\u2014now a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles\u2014served as president and chief operating officer of Huntsman Chemical, while President Nelson\u2019s son\u2011in\u2011law, Michael T. Ringwood,\u00a0spent roughly 14 years as a vice president in various Huntsman units before later being called as a General Authority. The Church hierarchy, the Huntsman business empire, and the apostolic quorums thus form a triangle of interlocking relationships that is neither purely religious nor purely commercial.<\/p>\n
Beyond the Huntsman nexus, LDS business influence and networked leadership extend into real estate, media, healthcare, and finance. The Deseret News and KSL television and radio stations, owned through Deseret Management, function as prominent media platforms that amplify LDS perspectives and whose leadership sits squarely within the Church\u2019s institutional orbit. In healthcare, the nonprofit system now known as\u00a0Intermountain Health\u00a0was created in 1975 when the Church transferred ownership of 15 church\u2011run hospitals (including LDS Hospital and Primary Children\u2019s) to a new independent foundation, leaving a legacy in which a major regional health network still bears the imprint of LDS institutional origins and ongoing social and leadership ties in a heavily Latter\u2011day Saint region.VII. The Theological Contradiction: Divine Calling and Human Networks<\/b><\/span><\/p>\nWe have now assembled sufficient historical and contemporary evidence to pose the central theological question: Does the documented pattern of nepotism and cronyism in LDS leadership advancement conflict with the Church\u2019s foundational claim that its leaders are divinely called rather than humanly selected?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\nOfficial Latter\u2011day Saint teaching is clear. The calling of apostles and prophets is framed as a matter of divine revelation, not human ambition or institutional maneuvering. Doctrine and Covenants 121, a key text on priesthood leadership, insists that \u201cno power or influence can or ought to be maintained by virtue of the priesthood, only by persuasion, by long\u2011suffering, by gentleness and meekness, and by love unfeigned; by kindness, and pure knowledge\u2026\u201d<\/em> and warns that many are \u201cnot chosen\u201d<\/em> because \u201ctheir hearts are set so much upon the things of this world, and aspire to the honors of men.\u201d<\/em> Drawing on this passage, Jacob Tubbs and Brianna Holmes argue in Public Square Magazine that LDS governance is rooted in \u201cdivine calling and service,\u201d<\/em> fundamentally different from corporate hierarchies and oriented toward \u201cservice over self, duty over dominion, and faithfulness over personal advancement,\u201d<\/em> concluding that \u201cit is not men who decide who should be called to lead and who should not. It is Jesus Christ.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\nTaken on its own terms, this seems a sincere and theologically coherent defense. In LDS ideology, men do not campaign for apostolic office, do not openly lobby for advancement, and are repeatedly told that leadership is a burden, not a prize. There is apparent faith and real sacrifice among many who occupy these roles. Yet this very claim\u2014that God alone controls who rises\u2014creates a theological problem when juxtaposed with the empirical record. If God is truly the primary determiner of who becomes an apostle or prophet, and if, across generations, those callings statistically cluster around a relatively small set of interrelated families and business elites, then one of two conclusions seems inescapable. Either God has a marked preference for men from LDS apostolic bloodlines and established networks <\/strong>(a claim that sits uneasily with the Church\u2019s rhetoric about the universality and impartiality of the gospel)<\/span>, or human social structures are exerting far more influence on the selection process than the official theology is willing to concede.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\nThis tension is sharpened by LDS teaching on prophetic succession. Spencer W. Kimball, in reflections often quoted in Church literature, emphasized God\u2019s control over life and death and suggested that the Lord could prevent tragedies but often does not, because there is \u201ca time to die\u201d<\/em> and God\u2019s purposes ultimately prevail. Within LDS discourse, this has undergirded a common assumption: because the next prophet is always the longest\u2011serving apostle, and because God ultimately oversees the timing of apostolic deaths, it is the Lord who decides which senior apostle lives to become president. Mormonism Research Ministry presses the logic: if succession is by seniority in a quorum whose membership has historically been shaped by kinship and elite networks, then \u201cthe answer\u2026 to the question, \u2018how does one get to be the prophet of the LDS Church?\u2019 seems to be by having the right family ties, coupled with longevity.\u201d<\/em> In other words, structural and familial factors heavily condition who can ever plausibly be in the \u201cspiritual line of fire\u201d<\/em> for the top office.<\/p>\nWhen placed alongside the New Testament witness, the LDS model diverges even more starkly. In Acts 1:21\u201322, Peter stipulates that Judas\u2019s replacement must be a man who \u201ccompanied with us all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us\u2026 unto that same day that he was taken up from us,\u201d<\/em> so that he might be \u201ca witness with us of his resurrection.\u201d<\/em> Historic Christian interpretation has seen here not only the specific choice of Matthias, but also a pattern: the apostolic office is tied to firsthand eyewitness of the risen Christ and functions as a foundational, not perpetually recurring, role in the Church\u2019s life. Critics such as Life After Ministry and others therefore argue that \u201cnot one of the Mormon apostles\u201d<\/em> meets the Acts\u20111 standard, since LDS apostles neither claim to have walked with the mortal Jesus nor to have seen the resurrected Christ in the public, evidential way Peter describes. Whatever one thinks of modern LDS apostleship, the biblical text nowhere lists dynastic lineage or institutional family connection among the qualifications Peter enumerates.<\/p>\nThus, the theological difficulty is not merely sociological but doctrinal. LDS scripture insists that priesthood leadership must eschew the \u201chonors of men\u201d<\/em> and cannot be maintained by worldly power; LDS apologists insist that Christ, not human preference, selects leaders; yet the actual distribution of high office is heavily skewed toward certain families and networks in ways that are difficult to attribute to divine impartiality. If leadership elevation were random with respect to kinship and social capital, the official story would fit more comfortably. Instead, the Church\u2019s own history and contemporary patterns suggest that, whatever role personal revelation may play, human social structures, kinship loyalties, and institutional cronyism are doing significant, perhaps decisive, work in determining who rises\u2014a reality that sits in deep tension with the Church\u2019s foundational narrative of divinely orchestrated, universally accessible calling.<\/p>\nFor a rigorous examination of both biblical texts and LDS historical records, this extensively researched essay<\/strong><\/a> dives into another view of the LDS prophet question: It examines whether the prophetic and apostolic offices as currently constituted in the LDS Church bear genuine resemblance to their New Testament antecedents, or whether they represent a fundamental departure from the biblical pattern.<\/p>\nThe Prophetic Office and Family Dynasties: A Biblical Perspective<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\nThe biblical record is instructive on the question of nepotism and divine calling. Again and again, the Hebrew Scriptures depict God raising prophets and leaders in ways that cut across, or even directly confront, existing religious and social power structures. Amos, for example, insists that he was not part of any prophetic dynasty or guild: \u201cI was no prophet, nor a prophet\u2019s son, but I was a herdsman and a dresser of sycamore figs\u201d<\/em> (Amos 7:14). Jeremiah, though from a priestly town (\u201cthe priests who were in Anathoth,\u201d<\/em> Jeremiah 1:1), is called by God over his own protest and quickly finds his ministry in collision with the religious and political establishment, including death threats from men in his own priestly community who want to silence his message. Isaiah\u2019s commissioning comes through a direct vision of the Lord in the temple\u2014\u201cI saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up\u201d<\/em> (Isaiah 6:1)\u2014not by inheritance of an office or election by an institutional council. When God chooses David, he explicitly passes over Jesse\u2019s older sons, whom Samuel initially assumes are the likely candidates; only after the youngest son is summoned from the sheepfold does the Lord declare, \u201cArise, anoint him, for this is he.\u201d<\/em> (1 Samuel 16:6\u201313).<\/p>\nThis pattern is theologically significant. In story after story, Scripture portrays God\u2019s choice as subverting human expectations about status and lineage rather than ratifying them. Paul generalizes this principle when addressing factionalism in the Corinthian church: \u201cFor consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth.\u201d<\/em>\u00a0(1 Corinthians 1:26). As commentators note, Paul\u2019s point is not that God never calls the educated or well born, but that the divine pattern normally runs against conventional hierarchies, so that \u201cnot many\u201d<\/em> of the wise, mighty, and noble make up the core of the called community. God chooses what is weak and low in the world precisely to undermine boasting in human networks and prestige.<\/p>\nViewed from this biblical\u2011theological vantage point, the question surrounding LDS leadership is not merely sociological but genuinely prophetic. An institution that claims to be led by the same God who bypassed Eliab for David, took a herdsman like Amos from his flocks, and set Jeremiah in opposition to his own priestly milieu ought, over time, to display a leadership pattern that breaks rather than reproduces entrenched family and status hierarchies. When the opposite pattern emerges\u2014when high leadership is repeatedly concentrated within overlapping family and social networks, generation after generation\u2014the claim that such appointments are direct continuations of the biblical calling pattern invites careful and sober re\u2011examination.<\/p>\n
The Church\u2019s Response: Divine Calling and the Problem of Opacity<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\nIt is important to note that the LDS Church has not been entirely unaware of concerns about nepotism. When Richard G. Hinckley\u2014son of President Gordon B. Hinckley\u2014was called to the First Quorum of the Seventy in April 2005, President Hinckley publicly disavowed any role in initiating his son\u2019s call and even joked about issuing a disclaimer before the sustainings. Commentators at Times & Seasons and Mormon Matters have pointed to this moment as evidence that an anti\u2011nepotism norm at least exists in the Church\u2019s self\u2011consciousness, even if that norm has not been strong enough to prevent a broader pattern of familial clustering in leadership.<\/p>\n
The institutional defense of this pattern typically rests on two pillars. First is the claim that Church callings\u2014especially to high office\u2014are made through prayerful, revelatory processes and are therefore categorically different from corporate promotions based on lobbying or self-advocacy. Official materials emphasize that leaders are \u201ccalled by proper authority\u201d<\/em> and that \u201cno prophet or any other leader in this Church\u2026 has ever called himself;\u201d<\/em>\u00a0the President of the Church seeks inspiration and may solicit recommended names, but the final choice is described as the Lord\u2019s.<\/p>\nSecond is the observation that growing up in a General Authority household\u2014often as so-called “cradle Mormons”<\/em> immersed from birth in Church doctrine, culture, and expectations without meaningful exposure to opposing viewpoints or critical perspectives\u2014can plausibly foster the qualities the Church values in leaders: deep doctrinal familiarity, unshakeable institutional loyalty, polished public speaking and administrative skills honed through lifelong service, and a cultural fluency that feels tailor-made for high office. On this view, the correlation between family connection and leadership is not favoritism but the natural fruit of environments that systematically nurture these traits from infancy, insulating cradle Mormons from the intellectual and spiritual friction that might challenge orthodoxy or broaden their worldview.<\/p>\nBoth arguments have real force and should be fairly acknowledged. The difficulty, however, lies in structural opacity. The LDS Church does not disclose how candidates for the Quorum of the Twelve or First Presidency are identified, evaluated, or eliminated. Public explanations from leaders like Elder D. Todd Christofferson acknowledge that the President of the Church may ask other apostles for suggested names, then privately seek confirmation and bring one or more \u201cinspired\u201d<\/em> names back to the council, but they explicitly state that \u201cwhat process he goes through exactly\u2026 is something private he pursues.\u201d<\/em> The General Handbook describes calling processes in general terms\u2014recommendations, confidential discussion, and prayer\u2014but provides no detailed, auditable criteria for top\u2011level selections. There are no public minutes, no independent oversight, and no way for members or observers to see how heavily informal networks, prior working relationships, or family connections weigh in the discernment process.<\/p>\nBecause the entire mechanism is presented as an act of divine revelation shielded from external scrutiny, it becomes impossible in practice to distinguish between two very different possibilities: a genuinely revelation\u2011driven selection that happens, in a given case, to favor a family\u2011connected candidate, or a socially driven selection shaped by kinship and professional networks that is subsequently narrated as revelation. The same opaque process can generate both outcomes, and from the outside, they are indistinguishable.<\/p>\n
This opacity is not incidental to the problem; it is constitutive of it. In any institution where selection procedures are confidential and their results repeatedly favor individuals tied to existing power networks, the burden of proof on claims of meritocracy\u2014or, in this case, of divine direction\u2014is substantial. For a church that asserts prophetic guidance and insists that God himself chooses its highest officers, the bar is higher still: it must not only be fair by human standards, but must credibly demonstrate that its leadership patterns reflect a guidance that transcends, rather than simply reproduces, the kinship and social structures in which its leaders are embedded.<\/p>\n
The Rank-and-File Perception<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\nWhatever the institutional reality, how ordinary Latter\u2011day Saints perceive these patterns matters both theologically and sociologically. As one author at Times & Seasons notes, awareness of nepotism is not confined to critics: \u201cpeople notice, even the orthodox who only speak about this in whispers to certain people.\u201d<\/em> In the same reflection, he recounts a comment from a BYU\u2013Idaho professor who joked that the university \u201ctakes nepotism very seriously\u2026except at the top,\u201d<\/em> a quip offered not by an outside opponent but by an insider who recognized and named the tension between stated principles and visible practice.<\/p>\nFor many current and former Latter\u2011day Saints, the perception that leadership advancement is shaped by family and insider networks becomes more than a sociological observation; it can precipitate a spiritual crisis. When the calling of a mission president, a Seventy, or an apostle is presented to the membership as the result of divine revelation\u2014as the Lord\u2019s own selection of \u201cthe right man in the right place\u201d<\/em>\u2014evidence that such callings cluster disproportionately within the extended families and close associates of existing leaders produces a deep dissonance. Either the Lord\u2019s guidance systematically favors those already connected to institutional power, which raises difficult questions about divine impartiality, or the language of revelation is at least partly overlaying and sanctifying choices significantly shaped by human relationships and structures.<\/p>\nFor the institution, this tension is not merely a public\u2011relations concern; it becomes a question of prophetic credibility.<\/strong> <\/span>The Church\u2019s ability to command the trust and spiritual loyalty of a global membership depends heavily on the plausibility of its claim that God directly guides its leadership choices. In such a context, every well\u2011documented instance where advancement tracks closely with family or social networks\u2014and where the opaque process offers no clear way to distinguish it from ordinary institutional nepotism\u2014incrementally erodes that plausibility for those who are paying attention.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\nA Sociological Framework: Why This Is Predictable<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\nLest this analysis appear to single out the LDS Church unfairly, it is important to place these findings in a broader sociological frame. Research on organizations and social networks has long shown that nepotism and insider preference are not aberrations caused by unusually bad actors; they are predictable outcomes of how trust, familiarity, and perceived competence function in human groups. Studies of \u201csimilarity\u2011attraction bias\u201d<\/em> and homophily\u2014the tendency to prefer people who resemble us in background, values, or status\u2014demonstrate that decision\u2011makers consistently evaluate candidates more favorably when they share demographic traits, institutional pedigrees, or social ties, because similarity feels like a cue of safety and reliability.<\/p>\nIn high\u2011stakes appointments, where failure is costly, and performance is hard to measure in advance, leaders tend to fall back on proxies for trustworthiness: shared history, overlapping networks, and family connections. Organizational behavior literature notes that kinship and prior relational ties offer especially strong \u201ctrust shortcuts,\u201d<\/em> because family members are assumed to be loyal and more predictable, even when objective competence signals are ambiguous. In that sense, institutional nepotism is simply the most concentrated form of a more general pattern: when in doubt, people choose those who feel familiar and \u201cknown quantities\u201d<\/em> to them.<\/p>\nIn a setting like the LDS Church, where trust is framed in explicitly theological categories\u2014worthiness, faithfulness, covenant loyalty\u2014the proxies for trustworthiness are densely cultural as well as relational. A man raised in a General Authority’s home offers decades of observable evidence of loyalty, doctrinal conformity, and institutional fluency, vouched for personally by those at the center. By contrast, a spiritually gifted convert from rural Brazil or West Africa remains largely “unknown”<\/em> beyond mediated reports. This stark asymmetry tilts decisions toward the familiar\u2014but why would divine leadership systematically exclude the global outsider in favor of the American insider? If God truly directs, the pattern indicts not His exclusionary preference, but the discernment process’s failure to transcend earthly familiarity.<\/p>\nCrucially, this dynamic does not require anyone to sit in a room and deliberately conspire to advance their relatives. It operates automatically, through well\u2011documented mechanisms of homophily and similarity\u2011based attraction, in which leaders sincerely experience those within their own networks as more trustworthy, more \u201cready,\u201d<\/em> and more obviously suited to leadership. In religious contexts, theological language\u2014\u201cwe felt a confirming impression,\u201d<\/em> \u201cthe Spirit confirmed this brother is the right man\u201d<\/em>\u2014can function as a sincere but incomplete account of a process that is also being powerfully shaped by these implicit sociological forces.<\/p>\nRecognizing this broader sociological reality should neither excuse LDS leaders’ sincerity nor foster complacency about the structural issues. What it exposes instead is a profound irony: leaders who claim direct, ongoing divine guidance appear unable to perceive\u2014or overcome\u2014the predictable human pressures that propel their decisions. Sociological patterns like similarity-attraction bias and homophily, well-documented across organizations, exert a gravitational pull toward family ties and insider networks that is automatic and subconscious, yet the LDS hierarchy has produced no discernible counterforce despite nearly two centuries of dominance by the same dynastic clusters.<\/p>\n
Secular and religious bodies routinely mitigate such biases through transparent criteria, diverse nominating pools, and accountability checks\u2014steps that demand no supernatural intervention, merely deliberate design. For men professing prophetic revelation, however, the failure to transcend these forces is theologically damning. If God truly directs the Quorum of the Twelve, why has the pattern of apostolic bloodlines and BYU-CES pipelines persisted so stubbornly, untouched by heavenly correction? The persistent replication of elite networks, generation after generation, suggests not divine transcendence but human unawareness: leaders mistaking sociological inertia for spiritual confirmation, their claims of heaven’s hand unwittingly masking earth’s.<\/p>\n
The Question of Declining Nepotism and the Rise of International Leadership<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\nIt is fair and important to acknowledge the genuine diversification that has occurred in LDS leadership in recent decades. Dieter F. Uchtdorf\u2014a German Latter-day Saint whose family joined the Church in postwar Europe and who became the first apostle from Germany and the first non\u2013U.S.-born apostle in over 50 years\u2014was called to the Quorum of the Twelve in 2004 and to the First Presidency in 2008, marking a significant departure from the nearly uninterrupted run of U.S.-born apostles with deep pioneer ancestry. Likewise, Patrick Kearon, a British convert with no pioneer Utah lineage, was called to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in December 2023 and ordained that same day, after serving as Senior President of the Seventy and as a General Authority based in Europe and the Middle East. As of 2026, he is a member of the Twelve; he has not been publicly announced as \u201cPresident of the Quorum\u201d<\/em> in the same formal sense as long-serving senior apostles who preside when the First Presidency is organized, so it is more precise simply to identify him as an apostle rather than as President of the Quorum.<\/p>\nThe quorums of Seventy have clearly become more international. Area and General Authority Seventies now routinely come from Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Europe, and Church Newsroom announcements explicitly describe the organization of Area Seventy quorums along global regional lines (Africa, Asia, Brazil, the Caribbean and Central America, Europe, Pacific, etc.), underscoring an intentional effort to have regional leaders from the areas they serve. This represents a real shift away from an earlier era when North Americans dominated nearly every quorum.<\/p>\n
Jeff Spector\u2019s multi\u2011year analysis at Mormon Matters also documents a modest trend away from direct bloodline nepotism in some mission president callings by around 2010. In his 2010 update, he notes that \u201cthe trend away from nepotism continues with a lot of leaders called from the areas they will serve in,\u201d<\/em> even as he observes that \u201cBYU professors, high-ranking Church and CES employees and \u2018well known\u2019 Church people continue to get calls.\u201d<\/em> Concrete examples include mission presidents without General Authority ancestry called from Latin America and other non\u2011U.S. regions, indicating that at least at this level, converts and non\u2011elite members have more pathways into leadership than in the 19th and early 20th centuries.<\/p>\nSeveral caveats remain important, however. First, the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles\u2014the body from which the next President of the Church is chosen by seniority\u2014has historically been the most resistant to outsiders and remains heavily drawn from established North American leadership networks, despite the notable exceptions of men like Uchtdorf and Kearon. The multigenerational family-network concentration at this level has been the most persistent and theologically consequential. Second, while the internationalization of the Seventies and Area Seventies is real and welcome, it has not yet translated into broad diversification at the very top of the hierarchy, where presidents and apostles are still overwhelmingly from a relatively narrow band of cultural, educational, and economic backgrounds. Third, as Spector and others have pointed out, professional proximity to Church power continues to function as a powerful alternative pipeline: BYU and Church Educational System employment, Deseret Book authorship, service in key Church departments, and senior roles in Church\u2011adjacent corporations (like Huntsman or other major Utah firms) repeatedly show up in the biographies of those called as General Authorities and mission presidents.<\/p>\n
Because the Church does not publish detailed criteria or procedures for selecting apostles, Seventies, or mission presidents, it is difficult to say definitively whether the observed diversification reflects a big structural change or a more superficial broadening at lower levels combined with continued concentration at the top. What can be said is that any shift away from kinship\u2011based selection has been gradual and incomplete, and that the theological rationale for more thoroughgoing reform\u2014the Church\u2019s own insistence that leadership is governed by divine direction rather than human preference\u2014remains as strong as ever.<\/p>\n
The Gospel Imperative<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\nFrom an evangelical Christian perspective, the LDS pattern of leadership nepotism strikes at the heart of biblical theology. The New Testament deliberately upends human hierarchies at every turn: Galilean fishermen like Peter, Andrew, James, and John\u2014unlettered laborers from a despised region (John 1:46; Acts 4:13)\u2014are elevated as the apostolic foundation (Ephesians 2:20). A Roman-collaborating tax collector, Matthew (Matthew 9:9), joins them. Women like Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Susanna\u2014whose legal testimony was routinely dismissed in first-century courts (Luke 8:1-3; John 20:1-18)\u2014become the first resurrection witnesses commissioned by the risen Christ Himself.<\/p>\n
Jesus reinforces this reversal: He calls the Twelve from obscurity, declares the “last will be first”<\/em> (Matthew 20:16), and praises childlike faith over elite status (Matthew 18:3-4). Paul crystallizes the principle: “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise\u2026 what is weak in the world to shame the strong\u2026 what is low and despised in the world\u2026 so that no human being might boast in the presence of God”<\/em> (1 Corinthians 1:27-29). James echoes it, warning against favoritism toward the rich while scorning the poor (James 2:1-7).<\/p>\nThis is no incidental quirk but God’s deliberate design: divine calling dismantles human prestige, nullifies network leverage, and glorifies the unlikely precisely to eliminate boasting in pedigree or power (1 Corinthians 1:31; Jeremiah 9:23-24). An ecclesiastical aristocracy where sacred office clusters in multigenerational bloodlines and institutional orbits does not merely deviate from this pattern\u2014it inverts it, sanctifying the very dynamics Scripture condemns.<\/p>\n
Conclusion: A Family Portrait of the Kingdom<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\nThe image with which the Life After Ministry<\/strong><\/em><\/a> analysis opens is starkly simple: \u201cIt\u2019s been said that looking at pictures of the General Authorities in Mormonism is like looking at family reunion photos\u2014not your family, mind you, but of a family you probably don\u2019t belong to.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\nThat image cuts to the core. Over nearly two centuries, the leadership of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has been molded by family and professional networks so concentrated, so enduring, and so exhaustively documented that their reality is beyond reasonable dispute. From Joseph Smith\u2019s documented appointment of 23 relatives to high office, through Brigham Young\u2019s private ordinations of his sons as apostles, through D. Michael Quinn\u2019s mapping of multigenerational dynasties, to the contemporary tangle of Nelson\u2019s sons-in-law as mission presidents, corporate executives rising to apostleship, and persistent clustering among BYU faculty and Church-adjacent elites, the pattern holds firm.<\/p>\n
Nothing here should impute bad faith to individual leaders; the evidence permits no such judgment. What it demands is unflinching clarity about the structural truth: an institution that asserts divine oversight of its leadership has, from inception to present, produced selections that track ordinary human networking with striking fidelity. The statistical weight of family-linked advancement\u2014persistent across generations, resistant to diversification at the apex, and amplified by polygamous intermarriage and professional proximity\u2014is too pronounced to dismiss as coincidence or mere happenstance.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\nFor the evangelical observer, this discrepancy strikes at a foundational test of prophetic legitimacy. Scripture portrays God routinely upending human hierarchies: herdsmen over priests, youngest sons over firstborns, fishermen over scholars. Institutions claiming that same divine hand should, over time, yield leaders whose origins defy social predictability, not replicate an ecclesiastical aristocracy. The LDS record, by contrast, aligns too closely with what sociology anticipates from closed elite networks, challenging the claim of transcendent selection.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\nFor the committed Latter-day Saint, this evidence demands a far more troubling question than defensiveness or rationalization can evade: If the Church\u2019s doctrine holds that God Himself selects leaders through direct revelation\u2014unbound by worldly ties or human preference\u2014why has the pattern of kinship dominance persisted so relentlessly, untouched by any divine intervention? No sociological explanation, however robust, can neutralize the dissonance. A leadership that consistently reproduces itself through bloodlines and insider networks is not merely culturally predictable; it flatly contradicts the claim that heaven overrides earthly dynamics.<\/p>\n
The absence of structural change\u2014transparent vetting, expanded pools beyond elite orbits, accountability beyond apostolic fiat\u2014is not incidental. It undermines the very foundation of LDS authority. If God directs the Quorum of the Twelve, why has He permitted nepotism’s gravitational pull to define His prophets for two centuries? A faith staked on heavenly selection cannot indefinitely abide earthly dynasties without calling its own prophetic claims into serious question. The evidence compels every faithful LDS member to confront whether what is claimed as God’s voice is, in reality, the echo of human networks wearing divine robes.<\/p>\n
Primary Sources and References<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n\u2022 Quinn, D. Michael. The Mormon Hierarchy: Extensions of Power. Signature Books, 1997, pp. 163\u2013170.
\n\u2022 Thuet, Lane. \u201cNepotism and Church Leadership \u2013 It\u2019s All In The Family<\/strong><\/em><\/a>.\u201d Mormonism Research Ministry, February 6, 2007.
\n\u2022 Spector, Jeff. \u201cNepotism in the Church<\/strong><\/em><\/a>.\u201d Mormon Matters, April 14, 2008.
\n\u2022 Spector, Jeff. \u201cNepotism in the Church \u2013 2010 Update<\/strong><\/em><\/a>.\u201d Mormon Matters, May 7, 2010.
\n\u2022 Stephen C. \u201cNepotism in High Church Offices<\/strong><\/em><\/a>.\u201d Times & Seasons, October 23, 2022.
\n\u2022 \u201cNepotism in the Russell M. Nelson Administration?<\/strong><\/a>\u201d Mormon Eye, January 20, 2018.
\n\u2022 \u201cNepotism in the Mormon Church<\/em><\/a><\/strong>.\u201d Life After Ministry, January 13, 2016.
\n\u2022 Tubbs, Jacob, and Brianna Holmes. \u201cAmbition and Faith in The Church of Jesus Christ.<\/strong><\/em><\/a>\u201d Public Square Magazine, July 22, 2024.
\n\u2022 \u201cGary E. Stevenson<\/strong><\/em><\/a>.\u201d Wikipedia.
\n\u2022 Kimball, Spencer W. \u201cWe Thank Thee O God for a Prophet<\/em><\/strong><\/a>.\u201d Ensign, January 1973, p. 34.
\n\u2022 Doctrine and Covenants, Section 121.
\n\u2022 The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. 1 Corinthians 1:26; Acts 1:12\u201326; Isaiah 6; Amos 7:14; 1 Samuel 16:6\u201313.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nepotism, Family Networks, and the Question of Divine Calling in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints A Theological and Historical Analysis Introduction: The Family at the Top of the Kingdom Imagine attending a large corporate shareholder meeting, only to discover that nearly every seat at the executive table is occupied by a member…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7133,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[44,45,57],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latter-day-saints","category-mormonism","category-religion"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Gemini_Generated_Image_cpto1fcpto1fcpto.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7132"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7132\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7135,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7132\/revisions\/7135"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7133"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\u201cAt a primary level were kinship ties. No less significant were marriage connections\u2026 Convoluted relationships made the Mormon hierarchy an extended family, and extensive family connections persist among LDS general authorities today.\u201d Quinn\u2019s documentation does not stop with the founding generation. He demonstrates that every succeeding president of the Church through the early twentieth century maintained or increased the proportion of General Authority appointments going to men with close kinship ties to existing leadership. Summarizing his findings, Quinn observes:\u200b<\/p>\n \u201cWhere kinship was involved, Young\u2019s successors appointed only men with close kinship relations to current or former general authorities. Aside from Wilford Woodruff, LDS presidents after Young also doubled his proportion of appointments with close kinship connections. Twentieth-century presidents Joseph F. Smith and Heber J. Grant more than doubled the founding prophet\u2019s proportion of appointments with close kinship to other members of the Mormon hierarchy.\u201d John Taylor appointed eight relatives, including two sons. Wilford Woodruff appointed three relatives, including one son. Joseph F. Smith, the sixth LDS Prophet, appointed eleven relatives, including three sons\u2014one of whom, Joseph Fielding Smith, eventually became the tenth prophet of the Church. The succession of familial advancement is not occasional or incidental; it is multigenerational and deeply structural.\u200b<\/p>\n The practice of polygamy, which was official LDS doctrine from approximately the 1840s until Wilford Woodruff\u2019s 1890 Manifesto, dramatically amplified these family network effects. When senior leaders routinely took multiple wives\u2014often from the families of other leaders\u2014the resulting web of kinship became extraordinarily dense, as leadership families intermarried and produced overlapping lines of descent. Even after polygamy was officially abandoned, its legacy in consolidating family networks persisted for generations, helping to entrench what functioned in practice as an ecclesiastical aristocracy of bloodlines.<\/p>\n One of the most striking empirical claims about contemporary LDS leadership comes from Lane Thuet, writing for the Mormonism Research Ministry. Thuet conducted a detailed analysis of the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and concluded with a finding that is difficult to dismiss as coincidental:<\/p>\n 100% of them are related in some way to current or former general authorities of the LDS Church. In the top 2 leading quorums\u2014consisting of 15 men (The First Presidency and the Quorum of Twelve Apostles)\u2014five of these men are directly related to each other. Four are related to each other by marriage. Four are directly related to former LDS Presidents. Five are directly related to former apostles. Two are married to wives who are direct descendants of former presidents. Five are married to wives who are directly related to former apostles. Seven are married to wives who are relatives of current general authorities or of their wives.<\/i> Thuet noted only one apparent exception: Apostle Richard G. Scott appeared to have no blood ties to any other General Authority. Yet even in Scott\u2019s case, his wife was related to several current General Authorities and descended from a former LDS apostle. The family network appeared inescapable.<\/p>\n Beginning in 2008,\u00a0Jeff Spector<\/span>\u00a0of\u00a0Mormon Matters<\/span><\/strong><\/a>\u00a0undertook a multi\u2011year informal survey of familial connections among LDS General Authorities and other senior leaders, using sources such as the Church Almanac, the Deseret News\/Church News archive, the official LDS website, and Wikipedia. His resulting data table\u2014covering General Authorities, mission and temple presidents, and some auxiliary leaders\u2014documents dozens of close kinship connections across multiple generations.<\/p>\n A brief sample from the relationships he highlighted illustrates the scope (all relationships below are independently documented in church or reference biographies):<\/p>\n \u2022 Allan Forrest Packer, General Authority Seventy \u2014 <\/strong>Son of Boyd K. Packer, president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.<\/span><\/span> In his 2010 update, Spector noted what he saw as a modest trend away from direct father\u2011child or similarly obvious nepotism in some mission president callings, as the Church increasingly called presidents from the geographic regions where they would serve. At the same time, he observed that \u201cBYU professors, high\u2011ranking Church and CES employees and \u2018well\u2011known\u2019 Church people continue to get calls,\u201d<\/em> suggesting that even if strict blood\u2011line nepotism was tapering at certain levels, advancement through professional and social proximity to Church power\u2014what might be termed institutional cronyism\u2014appeared to be filling some of that space.<\/p>\n Writing in the LDS-aligned academic blog Times & Seasons<\/strong><\/a> in October 2022, scholar Stephen C. offered a measured but pointed assessment of the structural dynamics at play. His analysis is notable precisely because it comes from within a community of faithful Latter-day Saints who are also serious scholars:<\/p>\n Nepotism is the most natural of vices and needs to constantly be proactively guarded against, or else it will almost certainly creep into any large institution. In the early Church there just weren\u2019t a lot of options to choose from because it was so small, but as the Church becomes larger and more diverse it becomes increasingly unlikely that the best suited person for a high status calling happens to be the close relative of somebody else in a high status calling.<\/i> Stephen C. went on to document several specific contemporary examples: President Monson\u2019s daughter serving in the Young Women\u2019s General Presidency; President Eyring\u2019s son serving as President of BYU-Idaho; President Hinckley\u2019s son called as a General Authority Seventy; and Elder Jeffrey Holland\u2019s son being appointed President of Utah Valley University despite having no educational administration experience. He also noted a telling observation from a BYU-Idaho professor who quipped that the institution \u201ctakes nepotism very seriously\u2026except at the top.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n The Times & Seasons author was careful to note that any individual appointment might be genuinely meritorious, while still arguing that the pattern as a whole creates a legitimacy problem:<\/p>\n I suspect that, since only a fraction of sons of apostles are general authorities, there is an anti-nepotism norm operating at the highest level of the Church, but those guardrails need to be constantly refurbished since violating them is the most natural thing in the world, and within-family appointments, no matter how sincere, start to poke holes in that dam.<\/i> The administration of\u00a0Russell M. Nelson, sustained as the seventeenth president of\u00a0The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints\u00a0in January 2018, offers a particularly clear contemporary case study in LDS leadership nepotism and networked advancement. Much of the documentation comes not from hostile critics but from observers who collate publicly available sources\u2014mission president announcements in Church News, biographical notes on the Church\u2019s official site, LinkedIn profiles, and reference works such as Wikipedia.<\/p>\n In January 2018, the\u00a0Mormon Eye\u00a0blog<\/strong><\/a> published an analysis of President Nelson\u2019s extended family that highlighted a striking cluster of high\u2011level callings among his sons\u2011in\u2011law and their professional associates. The post notes:\u200b<\/p>\n \u201cFour of Russell M. Nelson\u2019s sons\u2011in\u2011law have been called as mission presidents (one was additionally called as a temple president), potentially saving his family thousands of dollars in tuition money if his grandchildren chose to attend a church school.\u201d\u200b<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The same analysis traced notable overlaps between Nelson\u2019s family network and the corporate careers of those connected to him. One son\u2011in\u2011law,\u00a0Bradley E. Wittwer\u00a0(widower of Nelson\u2019s daughter Emily, who died in 1995), served as a senior vice president at the health\u2011data company Ingenix in 2004\u20132005. During roughly the same period,\u00a0Kevin W. Pearson, later a General Authority Seventy, was CEO of Ingenix (1998\u20132005) and soon afterward was called as mission president in Tacoma, Washington (2005\u20132008), during which mission he was named a General Authority. Another son\u2011in\u2011law,\u00a0Michael T. Ringwood\u00a0(husband of Nelson\u2019s daughter Rosalie), worked as a vice president at\u00a0Huntsman Corporation\u00a0while\u00a0Ronald A. Rasband\u00a0served as Huntsman\u2019s president and COO; Rasband was later called as a mission president in New York City, then as a General Authority, and in 2015 was sustained to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.\u200b<\/p>\n These connections, by themselves, do not prove that Nelson’s family relationships were the decisive cause of any particular calling; Church leaders would emphasize prayerful discernment and individual qualifications. Yet the extraordinary density of these ties\u2014multiple sons-in-law called as mission presidents, their former corporate superiors elevated to General Authority and even apostolic rank\u2014begs the deeper theological question: Does God Himself exercise a divine prerogative to favor familial and professional networks above all else in selecting His leaders? If so, this would mark a stark departure from the biblical God who bypassed bloodlines for herdsmen and outcasts; if not, the persistence of such clustering indicts the discernment process as insufficiently heavenly to overcome earthly gravitational pull.<\/p>\n Mormon Eye also underscored the material dimension of such callings. Drawing on leaked mission president benefit information and secondary summaries, the blog noted that mission presidents receive housing, transportation, health insurance, and other substantial support, and that their dependent children are eligible for significant tuition assistance or waivers up to the level of BYU tuition at Church\u2011owned schools such as\u00a0BYU,\u00a0BYU\u2013Idaho, and\u00a0BYU\u2013Hawaii. When four sons\u2011in\u2011law of a sitting prophet serve as mission presidents (with one also becoming a temple president), the cumulative financial and educational advantages accruing to the extended family, while not the only issue at stake, are substantial rather than trivial.<\/p>\n \u200bThe M. Russell Ballard Lineage<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n The Ballard lineage provides another instructive example. Elder M. Russell Ballard<\/strong><\/a>, who served as Acting President and then President of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles before his death in November 2023, was the grandson of two apostles, Melvin J. Ballard and Hyrum Mack Smith, and thus a great\u2011grandson of Hyrum Smith, brother of Church founder Joseph Smith Jr. A direct family connection to the founding Smith generation therefore extended into the twenty\u2011first\u2011century executive leadership of the Church. Similarly, Henry B. Eyring (First Counselor in the First Presidency under President Nelson) is the nephew\u2014through his aunt Camilla Eyring Kimball\u2014of former Church President Spencer W. Kimball. And M. Russell Ballard\u2019s son\u2011in\u2011law, Bradford James Brower, was called in 2010 to preside over the Canada Toronto West Mission, adding yet another link in the interlocking chain of familial advancement.<\/p>\n The scope of this analysis would be incomplete if it remained confined to strictly ecclesiastical callings. The LDS Church is also a major institutional economic actor, with business holdings and investments concentrated under\u00a0Deseret Management Corporation\u00a0and related entities, including Beneficial Life Insurance,\u00a0Deseret Book, the Deseret News, and KSL media outlets, and agricultural subsidiaries operating large tracts of land. In addition, its investment arm, Ensign Peak Advisors, has been reported by the Wall Street Journal and other outlets as managing a portfolio that reached on the order of 100 billion dollars by the late 2010s, highlighting the scale at which LDS institutional wealth intersects with global capital markets.<\/p>\n Several General Authorities come from business careers that, by the nature of the LDS social ecosystem, intersect closely with their ecclesiastical networks.\u00a0Gary E. Stevenson, sustained as an apostle in October 2015, is a representative figure. Before his call as a General Authority, he served as chief operating officer of ICON Health & Fitness (now iFIT), a leading fitness\u2011equipment manufacturer with significant national and international reach. Biographical notes state that he sat on the Marriott School of Management National Advisory Council at BYU and on the Utah State University Foundation Board, and he is a graduate of what is now the\u00a0Jon M. Huntsman School of Business\u00a0at Utah State University\u2014an institution named after one of the Church\u2019s most prominent business families.<\/p>\n The Huntsman family connection is particularly illustrative of how LDS business and ecclesiastical networks overlap. Industrialist and philanthropist\u00a0Jon Huntsman Sr.\u00a0served as an Area Authority Seventy and was the son\u2011in\u2011law of apostle\u00a0David B. Haight, making him part of an apostolic family network as well as the founder of a global chemical empire. His son,\u00a0Jon Huntsman Jr., went on to become governor of Utah and U.S. ambassador to China and Russia, further embedding the family at the intersection of LDS, business, and political elites. Within Huntsman Corporation itself,\u00a0Ronald A. Rasband\u2014now a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles\u2014served as president and chief operating officer of Huntsman Chemical, while President Nelson\u2019s son\u2011in\u2011law, Michael T. Ringwood,\u00a0spent roughly 14 years as a vice president in various Huntsman units before later being called as a General Authority. The Church hierarchy, the Huntsman business empire, and the apostolic quorums thus form a triangle of interlocking relationships that is neither purely religious nor purely commercial.<\/p>\n Beyond the Huntsman nexus, LDS business influence and networked leadership extend into real estate, media, healthcare, and finance. The Deseret News and KSL television and radio stations, owned through Deseret Management, function as prominent media platforms that amplify LDS perspectives and whose leadership sits squarely within the Church\u2019s institutional orbit. In healthcare, the nonprofit system now known as\u00a0Intermountain Health\u00a0was created in 1975 when the Church transferred ownership of 15 church\u2011run hospitals (including LDS Hospital and Primary Children\u2019s) to a new independent foundation, leaving a legacy in which a major regional health network still bears the imprint of LDS institutional origins and ongoing social and leadership ties in a heavily Latter\u2011day Saint region.VII. The Theological Contradiction: Divine Calling and Human Networks<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n We have now assembled sufficient historical and contemporary evidence to pose the central theological question: Does the documented pattern of nepotism and cronyism in LDS leadership advancement conflict with the Church\u2019s foundational claim that its leaders are divinely called rather than humanly selected?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n Official Latter\u2011day Saint teaching is clear. The calling of apostles and prophets is framed as a matter of divine revelation, not human ambition or institutional maneuvering. Doctrine and Covenants 121, a key text on priesthood leadership, insists that \u201cno power or influence can or ought to be maintained by virtue of the priesthood, only by persuasion, by long\u2011suffering, by gentleness and meekness, and by love unfeigned; by kindness, and pure knowledge\u2026\u201d<\/em> and warns that many are \u201cnot chosen\u201d<\/em> because \u201ctheir hearts are set so much upon the things of this world, and aspire to the honors of men.\u201d<\/em> Drawing on this passage, Jacob Tubbs and Brianna Holmes argue in Public Square Magazine that LDS governance is rooted in \u201cdivine calling and service,\u201d<\/em> fundamentally different from corporate hierarchies and oriented toward \u201cservice over self, duty over dominion, and faithfulness over personal advancement,\u201d<\/em> concluding that \u201cit is not men who decide who should be called to lead and who should not. It is Jesus Christ.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n Taken on its own terms, this seems a sincere and theologically coherent defense. In LDS ideology, men do not campaign for apostolic office, do not openly lobby for advancement, and are repeatedly told that leadership is a burden, not a prize. There is apparent faith and real sacrifice among many who occupy these roles. Yet this very claim\u2014that God alone controls who rises\u2014creates a theological problem when juxtaposed with the empirical record. If God is truly the primary determiner of who becomes an apostle or prophet, and if, across generations, those callings statistically cluster around a relatively small set of interrelated families and business elites, then one of two conclusions seems inescapable. Either God has a marked preference for men from LDS apostolic bloodlines and established networks <\/strong>(a claim that sits uneasily with the Church\u2019s rhetoric about the universality and impartiality of the gospel)<\/span>, or human social structures are exerting far more influence on the selection process than the official theology is willing to concede.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n This tension is sharpened by LDS teaching on prophetic succession. Spencer W. Kimball, in reflections often quoted in Church literature, emphasized God\u2019s control over life and death and suggested that the Lord could prevent tragedies but often does not, because there is \u201ca time to die\u201d<\/em> and God\u2019s purposes ultimately prevail. Within LDS discourse, this has undergirded a common assumption: because the next prophet is always the longest\u2011serving apostle, and because God ultimately oversees the timing of apostolic deaths, it is the Lord who decides which senior apostle lives to become president. Mormonism Research Ministry presses the logic: if succession is by seniority in a quorum whose membership has historically been shaped by kinship and elite networks, then \u201cthe answer\u2026 to the question, \u2018how does one get to be the prophet of the LDS Church?\u2019 seems to be by having the right family ties, coupled with longevity.\u201d<\/em> In other words, structural and familial factors heavily condition who can ever plausibly be in the \u201cspiritual line of fire\u201d<\/em> for the top office.<\/p>\n When placed alongside the New Testament witness, the LDS model diverges even more starkly. In Acts 1:21\u201322, Peter stipulates that Judas\u2019s replacement must be a man who \u201ccompanied with us all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us\u2026 unto that same day that he was taken up from us,\u201d<\/em> so that he might be \u201ca witness with us of his resurrection.\u201d<\/em> Historic Christian interpretation has seen here not only the specific choice of Matthias, but also a pattern: the apostolic office is tied to firsthand eyewitness of the risen Christ and functions as a foundational, not perpetually recurring, role in the Church\u2019s life. Critics such as Life After Ministry and others therefore argue that \u201cnot one of the Mormon apostles\u201d<\/em> meets the Acts\u20111 standard, since LDS apostles neither claim to have walked with the mortal Jesus nor to have seen the resurrected Christ in the public, evidential way Peter describes. Whatever one thinks of modern LDS apostleship, the biblical text nowhere lists dynastic lineage or institutional family connection among the qualifications Peter enumerates.<\/p>\n Thus, the theological difficulty is not merely sociological but doctrinal. LDS scripture insists that priesthood leadership must eschew the \u201chonors of men\u201d<\/em> and cannot be maintained by worldly power; LDS apologists insist that Christ, not human preference, selects leaders; yet the actual distribution of high office is heavily skewed toward certain families and networks in ways that are difficult to attribute to divine impartiality. If leadership elevation were random with respect to kinship and social capital, the official story would fit more comfortably. Instead, the Church\u2019s own history and contemporary patterns suggest that, whatever role personal revelation may play, human social structures, kinship loyalties, and institutional cronyism are doing significant, perhaps decisive, work in determining who rises\u2014a reality that sits in deep tension with the Church\u2019s foundational narrative of divinely orchestrated, universally accessible calling.<\/p>\n For a rigorous examination of both biblical texts and LDS historical records, this extensively researched essay<\/strong><\/a> dives into another view of the LDS prophet question: It examines whether the prophetic and apostolic offices as currently constituted in the LDS Church bear genuine resemblance to their New Testament antecedents, or whether they represent a fundamental departure from the biblical pattern.<\/p>\n The biblical record is instructive on the question of nepotism and divine calling. Again and again, the Hebrew Scriptures depict God raising prophets and leaders in ways that cut across, or even directly confront, existing religious and social power structures. Amos, for example, insists that he was not part of any prophetic dynasty or guild: \u201cI was no prophet, nor a prophet\u2019s son, but I was a herdsman and a dresser of sycamore figs\u201d<\/em> (Amos 7:14). Jeremiah, though from a priestly town (\u201cthe priests who were in Anathoth,\u201d<\/em> Jeremiah 1:1), is called by God over his own protest and quickly finds his ministry in collision with the religious and political establishment, including death threats from men in his own priestly community who want to silence his message. Isaiah\u2019s commissioning comes through a direct vision of the Lord in the temple\u2014\u201cI saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up\u201d<\/em> (Isaiah 6:1)\u2014not by inheritance of an office or election by an institutional council. When God chooses David, he explicitly passes over Jesse\u2019s older sons, whom Samuel initially assumes are the likely candidates; only after the youngest son is summoned from the sheepfold does the Lord declare, \u201cArise, anoint him, for this is he.\u201d<\/em> (1 Samuel 16:6\u201313).<\/p>\n This pattern is theologically significant. In story after story, Scripture portrays God\u2019s choice as subverting human expectations about status and lineage rather than ratifying them. Paul generalizes this principle when addressing factionalism in the Corinthian church: \u201cFor consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth.\u201d<\/em>\u00a0(1 Corinthians 1:26). As commentators note, Paul\u2019s point is not that God never calls the educated or well born, but that the divine pattern normally runs against conventional hierarchies, so that \u201cnot many\u201d<\/em> of the wise, mighty, and noble make up the core of the called community. God chooses what is weak and low in the world precisely to undermine boasting in human networks and prestige.<\/p>\n Viewed from this biblical\u2011theological vantage point, the question surrounding LDS leadership is not merely sociological but genuinely prophetic. An institution that claims to be led by the same God who bypassed Eliab for David, took a herdsman like Amos from his flocks, and set Jeremiah in opposition to his own priestly milieu ought, over time, to display a leadership pattern that breaks rather than reproduces entrenched family and status hierarchies. When the opposite pattern emerges\u2014when high leadership is repeatedly concentrated within overlapping family and social networks, generation after generation\u2014the claim that such appointments are direct continuations of the biblical calling pattern invites careful and sober re\u2011examination.<\/p>\n It is important to note that the LDS Church has not been entirely unaware of concerns about nepotism. When Richard G. Hinckley\u2014son of President Gordon B. Hinckley\u2014was called to the First Quorum of the Seventy in April 2005, President Hinckley publicly disavowed any role in initiating his son\u2019s call and even joked about issuing a disclaimer before the sustainings. Commentators at Times & Seasons and Mormon Matters have pointed to this moment as evidence that an anti\u2011nepotism norm at least exists in the Church\u2019s self\u2011consciousness, even if that norm has not been strong enough to prevent a broader pattern of familial clustering in leadership.<\/p>\n The institutional defense of this pattern typically rests on two pillars. First is the claim that Church callings\u2014especially to high office\u2014are made through prayerful, revelatory processes and are therefore categorically different from corporate promotions based on lobbying or self-advocacy. Official materials emphasize that leaders are \u201ccalled by proper authority\u201d<\/em> and that \u201cno prophet or any other leader in this Church\u2026 has ever called himself;\u201d<\/em>\u00a0the President of the Church seeks inspiration and may solicit recommended names, but the final choice is described as the Lord\u2019s.<\/p>\n Second is the observation that growing up in a General Authority household\u2014often as so-called “cradle Mormons”<\/em> immersed from birth in Church doctrine, culture, and expectations without meaningful exposure to opposing viewpoints or critical perspectives\u2014can plausibly foster the qualities the Church values in leaders: deep doctrinal familiarity, unshakeable institutional loyalty, polished public speaking and administrative skills honed through lifelong service, and a cultural fluency that feels tailor-made for high office. On this view, the correlation between family connection and leadership is not favoritism but the natural fruit of environments that systematically nurture these traits from infancy, insulating cradle Mormons from the intellectual and spiritual friction that might challenge orthodoxy or broaden their worldview.<\/p>\n Both arguments have real force and should be fairly acknowledged. The difficulty, however, lies in structural opacity. The LDS Church does not disclose how candidates for the Quorum of the Twelve or First Presidency are identified, evaluated, or eliminated. Public explanations from leaders like Elder D. Todd Christofferson acknowledge that the President of the Church may ask other apostles for suggested names, then privately seek confirmation and bring one or more \u201cinspired\u201d<\/em> names back to the council, but they explicitly state that \u201cwhat process he goes through exactly\u2026 is something private he pursues.\u201d<\/em> The General Handbook describes calling processes in general terms\u2014recommendations, confidential discussion, and prayer\u2014but provides no detailed, auditable criteria for top\u2011level selections. There are no public minutes, no independent oversight, and no way for members or observers to see how heavily informal networks, prior working relationships, or family connections weigh in the discernment process.<\/p>\n Because the entire mechanism is presented as an act of divine revelation shielded from external scrutiny, it becomes impossible in practice to distinguish between two very different possibilities: a genuinely revelation\u2011driven selection that happens, in a given case, to favor a family\u2011connected candidate, or a socially driven selection shaped by kinship and professional networks that is subsequently narrated as revelation. The same opaque process can generate both outcomes, and from the outside, they are indistinguishable.<\/p>\n This opacity is not incidental to the problem; it is constitutive of it. In any institution where selection procedures are confidential and their results repeatedly favor individuals tied to existing power networks, the burden of proof on claims of meritocracy\u2014or, in this case, of divine direction\u2014is substantial. For a church that asserts prophetic guidance and insists that God himself chooses its highest officers, the bar is higher still: it must not only be fair by human standards, but must credibly demonstrate that its leadership patterns reflect a guidance that transcends, rather than simply reproduces, the kinship and social structures in which its leaders are embedded.<\/p>\n Whatever the institutional reality, how ordinary Latter\u2011day Saints perceive these patterns matters both theologically and sociologically. As one author at Times & Seasons notes, awareness of nepotism is not confined to critics: \u201cpeople notice, even the orthodox who only speak about this in whispers to certain people.\u201d<\/em> In the same reflection, he recounts a comment from a BYU\u2013Idaho professor who joked that the university \u201ctakes nepotism very seriously\u2026except at the top,\u201d<\/em> a quip offered not by an outside opponent but by an insider who recognized and named the tension between stated principles and visible practice.<\/p>\n For many current and former Latter\u2011day Saints, the perception that leadership advancement is shaped by family and insider networks becomes more than a sociological observation; it can precipitate a spiritual crisis. When the calling of a mission president, a Seventy, or an apostle is presented to the membership as the result of divine revelation\u2014as the Lord\u2019s own selection of \u201cthe right man in the right place\u201d<\/em>\u2014evidence that such callings cluster disproportionately within the extended families and close associates of existing leaders produces a deep dissonance. Either the Lord\u2019s guidance systematically favors those already connected to institutional power, which raises difficult questions about divine impartiality, or the language of revelation is at least partly overlaying and sanctifying choices significantly shaped by human relationships and structures.<\/p>\n For the institution, this tension is not merely a public\u2011relations concern; it becomes a question of prophetic credibility.<\/strong> <\/span>The Church\u2019s ability to command the trust and spiritual loyalty of a global membership depends heavily on the plausibility of its claim that God directly guides its leadership choices. In such a context, every well\u2011documented instance where advancement tracks closely with family or social networks\u2014and where the opaque process offers no clear way to distinguish it from ordinary institutional nepotism\u2014incrementally erodes that plausibility for those who are paying attention.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n Lest this analysis appear to single out the LDS Church unfairly, it is important to place these findings in a broader sociological frame. Research on organizations and social networks has long shown that nepotism and insider preference are not aberrations caused by unusually bad actors; they are predictable outcomes of how trust, familiarity, and perceived competence function in human groups. Studies of \u201csimilarity\u2011attraction bias\u201d<\/em> and homophily\u2014the tendency to prefer people who resemble us in background, values, or status\u2014demonstrate that decision\u2011makers consistently evaluate candidates more favorably when they share demographic traits, institutional pedigrees, or social ties, because similarity feels like a cue of safety and reliability.<\/p>\n In high\u2011stakes appointments, where failure is costly, and performance is hard to measure in advance, leaders tend to fall back on proxies for trustworthiness: shared history, overlapping networks, and family connections. Organizational behavior literature notes that kinship and prior relational ties offer especially strong \u201ctrust shortcuts,\u201d<\/em> because family members are assumed to be loyal and more predictable, even when objective competence signals are ambiguous. In that sense, institutional nepotism is simply the most concentrated form of a more general pattern: when in doubt, people choose those who feel familiar and \u201cknown quantities\u201d<\/em> to them.<\/p>\n In a setting like the LDS Church, where trust is framed in explicitly theological categories\u2014worthiness, faithfulness, covenant loyalty\u2014the proxies for trustworthiness are densely cultural as well as relational. A man raised in a General Authority’s home offers decades of observable evidence of loyalty, doctrinal conformity, and institutional fluency, vouched for personally by those at the center. By contrast, a spiritually gifted convert from rural Brazil or West Africa remains largely “unknown”<\/em> beyond mediated reports. This stark asymmetry tilts decisions toward the familiar\u2014but why would divine leadership systematically exclude the global outsider in favor of the American insider? If God truly directs, the pattern indicts not His exclusionary preference, but the discernment process’s failure to transcend earthly familiarity.<\/p>\n Crucially, this dynamic does not require anyone to sit in a room and deliberately conspire to advance their relatives. It operates automatically, through well\u2011documented mechanisms of homophily and similarity\u2011based attraction, in which leaders sincerely experience those within their own networks as more trustworthy, more \u201cready,\u201d<\/em> and more obviously suited to leadership. In religious contexts, theological language\u2014\u201cwe felt a confirming impression,\u201d<\/em> \u201cthe Spirit confirmed this brother is the right man\u201d<\/em>\u2014can function as a sincere but incomplete account of a process that is also being powerfully shaped by these implicit sociological forces.<\/p>\n Recognizing this broader sociological reality should neither excuse LDS leaders’ sincerity nor foster complacency about the structural issues. What it exposes instead is a profound irony: leaders who claim direct, ongoing divine guidance appear unable to perceive\u2014or overcome\u2014the predictable human pressures that propel their decisions. Sociological patterns like similarity-attraction bias and homophily, well-documented across organizations, exert a gravitational pull toward family ties and insider networks that is automatic and subconscious, yet the LDS hierarchy has produced no discernible counterforce despite nearly two centuries of dominance by the same dynastic clusters.<\/p>\n Secular and religious bodies routinely mitigate such biases through transparent criteria, diverse nominating pools, and accountability checks\u2014steps that demand no supernatural intervention, merely deliberate design. For men professing prophetic revelation, however, the failure to transcend these forces is theologically damning. If God truly directs the Quorum of the Twelve, why has the pattern of apostolic bloodlines and BYU-CES pipelines persisted so stubbornly, untouched by heavenly correction? The persistent replication of elite networks, generation after generation, suggests not divine transcendence but human unawareness: leaders mistaking sociological inertia for spiritual confirmation, their claims of heaven’s hand unwittingly masking earth’s.<\/p>\n It is fair and important to acknowledge the genuine diversification that has occurred in LDS leadership in recent decades. Dieter F. Uchtdorf\u2014a German Latter-day Saint whose family joined the Church in postwar Europe and who became the first apostle from Germany and the first non\u2013U.S.-born apostle in over 50 years\u2014was called to the Quorum of the Twelve in 2004 and to the First Presidency in 2008, marking a significant departure from the nearly uninterrupted run of U.S.-born apostles with deep pioneer ancestry. Likewise, Patrick Kearon, a British convert with no pioneer Utah lineage, was called to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in December 2023 and ordained that same day, after serving as Senior President of the Seventy and as a General Authority based in Europe and the Middle East. As of 2026, he is a member of the Twelve; he has not been publicly announced as \u201cPresident of the Quorum\u201d<\/em> in the same formal sense as long-serving senior apostles who preside when the First Presidency is organized, so it is more precise simply to identify him as an apostle rather than as President of the Quorum.<\/p>\n The quorums of Seventy have clearly become more international. Area and General Authority Seventies now routinely come from Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Europe, and Church Newsroom announcements explicitly describe the organization of Area Seventy quorums along global regional lines (Africa, Asia, Brazil, the Caribbean and Central America, Europe, Pacific, etc.), underscoring an intentional effort to have regional leaders from the areas they serve. This represents a real shift away from an earlier era when North Americans dominated nearly every quorum.<\/p>\n Jeff Spector\u2019s multi\u2011year analysis at Mormon Matters also documents a modest trend away from direct bloodline nepotism in some mission president callings by around 2010. In his 2010 update, he notes that \u201cthe trend away from nepotism continues with a lot of leaders called from the areas they will serve in,\u201d<\/em> even as he observes that \u201cBYU professors, high-ranking Church and CES employees and \u2018well known\u2019 Church people continue to get calls.\u201d<\/em> Concrete examples include mission presidents without General Authority ancestry called from Latin America and other non\u2011U.S. regions, indicating that at least at this level, converts and non\u2011elite members have more pathways into leadership than in the 19th and early 20th centuries.<\/p>\n Several caveats remain important, however. First, the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles\u2014the body from which the next President of the Church is chosen by seniority\u2014has historically been the most resistant to outsiders and remains heavily drawn from established North American leadership networks, despite the notable exceptions of men like Uchtdorf and Kearon. The multigenerational family-network concentration at this level has been the most persistent and theologically consequential. Second, while the internationalization of the Seventies and Area Seventies is real and welcome, it has not yet translated into broad diversification at the very top of the hierarchy, where presidents and apostles are still overwhelmingly from a relatively narrow band of cultural, educational, and economic backgrounds. Third, as Spector and others have pointed out, professional proximity to Church power continues to function as a powerful alternative pipeline: BYU and Church Educational System employment, Deseret Book authorship, service in key Church departments, and senior roles in Church\u2011adjacent corporations (like Huntsman or other major Utah firms) repeatedly show up in the biographies of those called as General Authorities and mission presidents.<\/p>\n Because the Church does not publish detailed criteria or procedures for selecting apostles, Seventies, or mission presidents, it is difficult to say definitively whether the observed diversification reflects a big structural change or a more superficial broadening at lower levels combined with continued concentration at the top. What can be said is that any shift away from kinship\u2011based selection has been gradual and incomplete, and that the theological rationale for more thoroughgoing reform\u2014the Church\u2019s own insistence that leadership is governed by divine direction rather than human preference\u2014remains as strong as ever.<\/p>\n From an evangelical Christian perspective, the LDS pattern of leadership nepotism strikes at the heart of biblical theology. The New Testament deliberately upends human hierarchies at every turn: Galilean fishermen like Peter, Andrew, James, and John\u2014unlettered laborers from a despised region (John 1:46; Acts 4:13)\u2014are elevated as the apostolic foundation (Ephesians 2:20). A Roman-collaborating tax collector, Matthew (Matthew 9:9), joins them. Women like Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Susanna\u2014whose legal testimony was routinely dismissed in first-century courts (Luke 8:1-3; John 20:1-18)\u2014become the first resurrection witnesses commissioned by the risen Christ Himself.<\/p>\n Jesus reinforces this reversal: He calls the Twelve from obscurity, declares the “last will be first”<\/em> (Matthew 20:16), and praises childlike faith over elite status (Matthew 18:3-4). Paul crystallizes the principle: “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise\u2026 what is weak in the world to shame the strong\u2026 what is low and despised in the world\u2026 so that no human being might boast in the presence of God”<\/em> (1 Corinthians 1:27-29). James echoes it, warning against favoritism toward the rich while scorning the poor (James 2:1-7).<\/p>\n This is no incidental quirk but God’s deliberate design: divine calling dismantles human prestige, nullifies network leverage, and glorifies the unlikely precisely to eliminate boasting in pedigree or power (1 Corinthians 1:31; Jeremiah 9:23-24). An ecclesiastical aristocracy where sacred office clusters in multigenerational bloodlines and institutional orbits does not merely deviate from this pattern\u2014it inverts it, sanctifying the very dynamics Scripture condemns.<\/p>\n The image with which the Life After Ministry<\/strong><\/em><\/a> analysis opens is starkly simple: \u201cIt\u2019s been said that looking at pictures of the General Authorities in Mormonism is like looking at family reunion photos\u2014not your family, mind you, but of a family you probably don\u2019t belong to.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n That image cuts to the core. Over nearly two centuries, the leadership of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has been molded by family and professional networks so concentrated, so enduring, and so exhaustively documented that their reality is beyond reasonable dispute. From Joseph Smith\u2019s documented appointment of 23 relatives to high office, through Brigham Young\u2019s private ordinations of his sons as apostles, through D. Michael Quinn\u2019s mapping of multigenerational dynasties, to the contemporary tangle of Nelson\u2019s sons-in-law as mission presidents, corporate executives rising to apostleship, and persistent clustering among BYU faculty and Church-adjacent elites, the pattern holds firm.<\/p>\n Nothing here should impute bad faith to individual leaders; the evidence permits no such judgment. What it demands is unflinching clarity about the structural truth: an institution that asserts divine oversight of its leadership has, from inception to present, produced selections that track ordinary human networking with striking fidelity. The statistical weight of family-linked advancement\u2014persistent across generations, resistant to diversification at the apex, and amplified by polygamous intermarriage and professional proximity\u2014is too pronounced to dismiss as coincidence or mere happenstance.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n For the evangelical observer, this discrepancy strikes at a foundational test of prophetic legitimacy. Scripture portrays God routinely upending human hierarchies: herdsmen over priests, youngest sons over firstborns, fishermen over scholars. Institutions claiming that same divine hand should, over time, yield leaders whose origins defy social predictability, not replicate an ecclesiastical aristocracy. The LDS record, by contrast, aligns too closely with what sociology anticipates from closed elite networks, challenging the claim of transcendent selection.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n For the committed Latter-day Saint, this evidence demands a far more troubling question than defensiveness or rationalization can evade: If the Church\u2019s doctrine holds that God Himself selects leaders through direct revelation\u2014unbound by worldly ties or human preference\u2014why has the pattern of kinship dominance persisted so relentlessly, untouched by any divine intervention? No sociological explanation, however robust, can neutralize the dissonance. A leadership that consistently reproduces itself through bloodlines and insider networks is not merely culturally predictable; it flatly contradicts the claim that heaven overrides earthly dynamics.<\/p>\n The absence of structural change\u2014transparent vetting, expanded pools beyond elite orbits, accountability beyond apostolic fiat\u2014is not incidental. It undermines the very foundation of LDS authority. If God directs the Quorum of the Twelve, why has He permitted nepotism’s gravitational pull to define His prophets for two centuries? A faith staked on heavenly selection cannot indefinitely abide earthly dynasties without calling its own prophetic claims into serious question. The evidence compels every faithful LDS member to confront whether what is claimed as God’s voice is, in reality, the echo of human networks wearing divine robes.<\/p>\n \u2022 Quinn, D. Michael. The Mormon Hierarchy: Extensions of Power. Signature Books, 1997, pp. 163\u2013170. Nepotism, Family Networks, and the Question of Divine Calling in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints A Theological and Historical Analysis Introduction: The Family at the Top of the Kingdom Imagine attending a large corporate shareholder meeting, only to discover that nearly every seat at the executive table is occupied by a member…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7133,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[44,45,57],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latter-day-saints","category-mormonism","category-religion"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Gemini_Generated_Image_cpto1fcpto1fcpto.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7132"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7132\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7135,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7132\/revisions\/7135"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7133"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n\u2014 D. Michael Quinn, The Mormon Hierarchy: Extensions of Power, p. 163\u200b<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\n\u2014 D. Michael Quinn, The Mormon Hierarchy: Extensions of Power, pp. 169\u2013170\u200b<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\nThe Statistical Reality: A Documented Pattern<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n
The Mormonism Research Ministry Analysis<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\n
\n\u2014 Lane Thuet, Mormonism Research Ministry, mrm.org\/nepotism<\/b><\/p><\/blockquote>\nThe Mormon Matters Survey (2008\u201310)<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\n
\n\u2022 Richard G. Hinckley, General Authority Seventy \u2014<\/strong> Son of Gordon B. Hinckley, 15th president of the Church.<\/span><\/span>
\n\u2022 Virginia H. Pearce, First Counselor in the Young Women General Presidency \u2014 <\/strong>Daughter of President Gordon B. Hinckley.<\/span><\/span>
\n\u2022 Henry J. Eyring, later president of BYU\u2013Idaho \u2014 <\/strong>Son of Henry B. Eyring, counselor in the First Presidency.<\/span><\/span>
\n\u2022 Gerrit W. Gong, then a General Authority Seventy \u2014 <\/strong>Son\u2011in\u2011law of Richard P. Lindsay, former member of the Second Quorum of the Seventy.<\/span><\/span>
\n\u2022 Merrill C. Oaks, former member of the Second Quorum of the Seventy \u2014 <\/strong>Brother of Dallin H. Oaks, apostle and later president of the Quorum of the Twelve.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\nTimes & Seasons: The Academic Perspective<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\n
\n\u2014 Stephen C., \u201cNepotism in High Church Offices,\u201d Times & Seasons, October 23, 2022<\/b><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\n\u2014 Stephen C., Times & Seasons, October 23, 2022<\/b><\/p><\/blockquote>\nThe Nelson Administration: A Case Study<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n
Nepotism Extended: The Business World and the LDS Network<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n
The Prophetic Office and Family Dynasties: A Biblical Perspective<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\n
The Church\u2019s Response: Divine Calling and the Problem of Opacity<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n
The Rank-and-File Perception<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\n
A Sociological Framework: Why This Is Predictable<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n
The Question of Declining Nepotism and the Rise of International Leadership<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n
The Gospel Imperative<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n
Conclusion: A Family Portrait of the Kingdom<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n
Primary Sources and References<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n
\n\u2022 Thuet, Lane. \u201cNepotism and Church Leadership \u2013 It\u2019s All In The Family<\/strong><\/em><\/a>.\u201d Mormonism Research Ministry, February 6, 2007.
\n\u2022 Spector, Jeff. \u201cNepotism in the Church<\/strong><\/em><\/a>.\u201d Mormon Matters, April 14, 2008.
\n\u2022 Spector, Jeff. \u201cNepotism in the Church \u2013 2010 Update<\/strong><\/em><\/a>.\u201d Mormon Matters, May 7, 2010.
\n\u2022 Stephen C. \u201cNepotism in High Church Offices<\/strong><\/em><\/a>.\u201d Times & Seasons, October 23, 2022.
\n\u2022 \u201cNepotism in the Russell M. Nelson Administration?<\/strong><\/a>\u201d Mormon Eye, January 20, 2018.
\n\u2022 \u201cNepotism in the Mormon Church<\/em><\/a><\/strong>.\u201d Life After Ministry, January 13, 2016.
\n\u2022 Tubbs, Jacob, and Brianna Holmes. \u201cAmbition and Faith in The Church of Jesus Christ.<\/strong><\/em><\/a>\u201d Public Square Magazine, July 22, 2024.
\n\u2022 \u201cGary E. Stevenson<\/strong><\/em><\/a>.\u201d Wikipedia.
\n\u2022 Kimball, Spencer W. \u201cWe Thank Thee O God for a Prophet<\/em><\/strong><\/a>.\u201d Ensign, January 1973, p. 34.
\n\u2022 Doctrine and Covenants, Section 121.
\n\u2022 The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. 1 Corinthians 1:26; Acts 1:12\u201326; Isaiah 6; Amos 7:14; 1 Samuel 16:6\u201313.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"