The new apostles

The new apostles are only 50% Americans, as opposed to the new General Authorities called, who are 62.5% American. The new members of the Presidency of the 70 called are 40% American, and they will make it as of August that only 3 of the 7 president will be American.

The Quorum of the 12 is now having two non-Americans for the first time since John A. Widstoe and Charles A. Callis were members, although since both Callis and Widstoe were US citizens who immigrated to the US at ages 10 and 11, they were for all intents and purposes Americans.

N. Eldon Tanner was born in the US because his mother was visiting her parents, but his family was resident in Canada. Marion G. Romney was born in Mexico, but came to the US as a youth, and his parents were of American origin.

Elder Uchtdorf had been to the US for pilot training prior to his call as a general authority, but had basically always been a resident of Germany. Elder Soares was living in Utah doing a special assignment for the Office of the Presiding Bishopric at the time of his call as a general authority. However he was born and raised, served his mission in and worked up until his call as a mission president in Brazil, some of that time as Director of Temporal Affairs for the Brazil South Area. Elder Soares was mission president in Portugal.

Elder Gong while the first clearly non-white apostle is without question American. Elder Soares is phenotypically white. The nature of his actual ancestry I am not aware of, so I can not rule out indigenous American or slightly more likely African ancestry. However other factors suggest to me that Elder Soares probably does not have any known African ancestry. Since he was born in 1958 he would have been just over minimum mission age at the time of the 1978 revelation, but I have not come across any suggestion that he has African ancestry, and even though there are lots of people with some level of African ancestry in Sao Paulo, it is people from places like Forteleza that are even more likely to have it. There are lots of people of fully traceable European ancestry in souther Brazil.

This does not change the fact that Elder Soares is clearly culturally distrinct from many Utah Mormons, although the number of people of Brazilian origin and descent in Utah is higher than some realize.

Elder Soares is another step in internationalizing the Quorum of the 12 along with Elder Uchtdorf, although I still think looking at it this way unreasonably minimizes the importance of other general authorities and of general officers.

At present the Church still calls General Officers exclusively from those living in Utah. The newly called general officers at this conference were all white Americans. Sister Craig was raised in Provo where her dad was a BYU professor, except her last two years in high school when he father was president of the Pennsylvania Harrisburg Mission. Her father was born in Logan, Utah but raised in New Brunswick, New Jersey where her grandfather was a professor at Rutgers University. Her grandparents were in the same ward as Elder Christopherson when he was a teenager and incluenced him enough that he mentioned Sister Craig's grandmother in one of his general conference talks, as an example of what faithful women in the Church can do.

Sister Craven, the new second counselor in the Young women general presidency was born in Ohio. Her father was in the US military. Her mother's maiden name was Kaszuk, a slavic name that fits with common names in parts of Ohio. Her parents joined the Church later while living in Texas, the family was sealed in the Swiss Temple while her father was stationed in Germany. She was however baptized in Utah, while her father was on a tour of duty in Vietnam. Growing up she lived in 7 US states and Germany and England.