Opinion: The LDS Church’s family proclamation is commentary — not revelation

On Sept. 23, 1995, President Gordon B. Hinckley stood before the women of the Relief Society and unveiled what has since become one of the most cited, celebrated and contested texts in modern Mormonism: “The Family: A Proclamation to the World.”

It was only the fifth time in the history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that leaders had issued something called a “proclamation.” Before then, the genre was so little used — and so little remembered — that most Latter-day Saints couldn’t name one. In fact, many of those earlier efforts are now curiosities at best. One proclamation from 1865 even demanded the complete destruction of Lucy Mack Smith’s biography of her son church founder Joseph Smith — hardly a position the modern church maintains, given how often her book is now cited.

That history raises an awkward but important question: what exactly is a “proclamation”? There has never been a clear answer.

Unlike scripture, proclamations aren’t canonized. Unlike revelations, they don’t claim to be divine communications. And they don’t always reflect a consistent, timeless consensus that we might expect of doctrine. Apostle Boyd K. Packer once called the 1995 text a “revelation,” but church editors later scrubbed that word from his printed remarks. Clearly, leaders themselves know the label is a little slippery.

And yet the 1995 proclamation has endured in ways its predecessor proclamations never did — and its 2020 successor on the bicentennial of Joseph Smith’s “First Vision” has not. The family document hangs on living room walls, is recited in sacrament and General Conference talks, has been quoted in countless legal briefs, has energized political campaigns across the globe and divided the faithful. For many members, it isn’t just a proclamation — it’s the proclamation.

The 1995 proclamation is considered doctrine by today’s standards, presenting itself as timeless truth, even while its contents reflect the shifting sands of church history. In the 19th century, leaders preached plural marriage as central to God’s plan; up to the late-20th century, they believed marriage was been a man and a woman of the same race, refusing to allow some interracial marriages. The proclamation’s idea of “equal partnership” between husbands and wives would have sounded foreign to most apostles before the 1970s. And “gender as an eternal characteristic”? President Joseph Fielding Smith would like a word. He consistently taught as doctrine that “after the resurrection, there will be neither male or female sex” for the vast majority of humanity.

If the family proclamation is not revelation, not scripture and not unchanging doctrine, then what is it? I’d argue it’s best understood as commentary.

That may sound underwhelming, but commentary is one of the oldest and most important genres in religion. Jews, Christians, Muslims and more have long used commentary to interpret sacred texts for new times and circumstances. The 1995 proclamation does exactly that: It rereads Genesis 1-3 through the lens of late-20th-century anxieties about feminism, same-sex marriage and the breakdown of “traditional” family structures. It also issues a warning that “calamities” will follow if its interpretation is ignored. Like the other conservative religious commentaries on family values that became so popular in the 1980s and ’90s, the proclamation addresses the moment by appealing to timeless truths.

Like all commentary, though, it doesn’t end the conversation. It sparks new ones. In 2019, President Dallin H. Oaks “clarified” that the proclamation’s use of “gender” means “biological sex at birth.” By 2022, the church reinterpreted the proclamation’s political role no longer to block same-sex marriage in all of society but rather to protect religious freedom for those who don’t affirm it. In other words, the commentary has itself been recommented on.

That’s why understanding the proclamation as commentary matters. It frees us to see it as one moment in a longer, evolving debate about family, gender and marriage in the Latter-day Saint tradition that reflects the values of its era. And it reminds us that every declaration, no matter how authoritative, is still an interpretation that someday could be reinterpreted again.

Three decades on, the family proclamation may loom larger than any of its predecessors. But history is always commentary upon commentary. How it will be reinterpreted in the next 30 years remains to be seen.

Note to readers • Taylor G. Petrey is a professor of Religion at Kalamazoo College, author of “Tabernacles of Clay: Gender and Sexuality in Modern Mormonism,”and other books.