The Church will more likely than not have its first non-American president since John Taylor by 2046

Gérald Caussé was called into the Q12 on Thursday to fill the vacancy left by Russell M. Nelson’s passing. Elder Caussé was born in France, making him the third called Q12 member in a row to have been born outside the US (following Ulisses Soares and Patrick Kearon). The Church has only had one president born outside the US, John Taylor, who was born in England in 1808. With this group of three, especially following after German-born Dieter F. Uchtdorf, the question is how soon we might see another.

To answer this question, I ran a little simulation like I have a bunch of times before (most recently in this post). I performed 10,000 random number draws for each Q15 member, and compared them to survival probabilities for each future month based on a mortality table from the Society of Actuaries to get each man’s 10,000 estimated remaining lifespans. Then, using the established rule that the senior living Q15 member becomes president when the president dies, I found how likely it was (i.e., in how many simulated futures) for each man to become Church president. In this simulation, I added an extra check, which is in how many simulations a non-American-born Q15 member became president, and when in those simulations it happened.

This first graph shows the result for this last question: the probability of at least one non-American-born Q15 member becoming president by each date in the future. (In case it isn’t clear, the dates are in YYYYMM format.) There’s an early probability bump in the 2030s, when Elder Uchtdorf has a good probability (and as I’ve noted before, probably better than this analysis suggests, given Jeffrey R. Holland’s ill health), and then a later increase in the 2040s when the three most recently called members have a good chance, especially as a group and given they’re in seniority order right after each other. As you can see, I’ve noted the month when the probability crosses over 50%, near the end of 2046. Note that the simulation goes out 60 years even though the graph only shows the first 30.

Here’s another graph that shows for each individual year and month, what the probability is that the Church president is American born or not American born (or a yet-to-be-called member whose place of birth is unknown). You can see the same lumps of probability as in the graph above, Elder Uchtdorf to the left in the red line, and Elders Soares, Kearon, and Caussé lumped together on the right.

I also added Elder Caussé to my usual summary table that shows his estimated lifetime probability of becoming president, as well as how long his terms of service might be. As he’s younger than everyone senior to him, but not drastically so (like Dallin H. Oaks and David A. Bednar were at the time they were called), he has a fair but not good chance of becoming president eventually.

This last graph you’ve likely seen versions of before. It’s only different from the one in my September post in that I’m now able to separate Elder Caussé out from the “any new Q15 member” line.