Matthew Scott Holland was born in Provo, Utah, on June 7, 1966. He married Paige Bateman in 1996. They are the parents of four children.

Elder Holland graduated from Brigham Young University in 1991 with a bachelor’s degree in political science. He spent a year at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem as a Raoul Wallenberg Scholar before working several years for an international management consulting firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He earned a master’s degree and PhD in political science from Duke University in 1997 and 2001, respectively, and then worked as an associate professor of political science at Brigham Young University from 2001 to 2009.

He has served in a number of Church callings, including full-time missionary in the Scotland Edinburgh Mission, Sunday School teacher, ward mission leader, high councilor, bishop, and ward Young Men adviser. At the time of his call, he had been serving as president of the North Carolina Raleigh Mission.

Elder Holland is currently serving in the North America Southeast Area Presidency and in various committee assignments at Church headquarters.

During his academic career he became a national expert on American political thought and was invited to be a visiting scholar at Princeton (2005) and Oxford University (2017). In 2009 he was named president of Utah Valley University, a position he held until 2019, when he was called to serve as a mission president.