Last month, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints shared a young man’s story about deciding to support the career of his wife, a pediatric neurologist — a career he says she was born for.

“Supporting her doesn’t shrink my purpose — it expands it,” he says, according to a post from the church’s official Instagram account.

Judging from some of the 2,100 comments across Instagram and X, you’d think the guy had just proclaimed motherhood was dead and that the church had planned the funeral.

The dude-bros came out in force, with comments like, “How is she gonna have children if she’s busy being a doctor all day?” and accusations that the church’s public relations department had suffered from “estrogen poisoning.”

But then there was a backlash to the backlash — a string of social media posts from orthodox young Latter-day Saints who applauded the church’s new positive messaging about women’s careers.

Some assert that the position isn’t new for the church and that it has always been supportive of women achieving their dreams. Consider this Instagram reel from a young woman who says our doctrine supports women working, and that this is not a change:

“It’s not even a contradictory statement to the family proclamation,” she says. ” … It’s not pandering; it’s not the church changing its tune. It’s the church teaching the fullness of the family proclamation.”

Or there’s this one from a young Latter-day Saint dad:

“People analyze the family proclamation through the lens of something that is completely outdated,” he remarks. “And like I said, your culture will affect how you view doctrine.”

He then gives a quick history lesson, claiming that some members have been falsely influenced by outdated cultural ideas that women should stay home. Those ideas are based in privilege and an obsolete cultural “lens in which women had no rights.” He says, “When you do that in 2026, it just doesn’t apply.”

What the proclamation says

It’s fascinating that both influencers draw support for women working from the 1995 family proclamation, which is not official Latter-day Saint scripture but might as well be. On the face of it, the document doesn’t provide bulletproof support for women working outside the home, especially if they’re moms. Here’s the relevant text:

“By divine design, fathers are to preside over their families in love and righteousness and are responsible to provide the necessities of life and protection for their families. Mothers are primarily responsible for the nurture of their children. In these sacred responsibilities, fathers and mothers are obligated to help one another as equal partners. Disability, death, or other circumstances may necessitate individual adaptation. Extended families should lend support when needed.”

But @comefollowmeautumn expands the phrase “individual adaptation” to include everyone. You don’t have to have a death in the family or a disability or any other rare circumstance to make adaptations that fit your family’s needs, as she says on Instagram. It’s like Oprah giving out cars to everyone in her audience: “You get an individual adaptation! And you get an individual adaptation! Everybody gets an individual adaptation!”

I love how she does this unapologetically, just as I love how @batchloriv faithfully and unapologetically deconstructs some of the church’s standard teachings about gender and parenting that Latter-day Saint leaders have promulgated from the pulpit for generations.

For example, the idea that mothers are naturally better nurturers? No. Just, no. “That’s a skill issue,” he says. “Saying that men are not good with kids? Jesus Christ was great with kids. And I’m trying to be like Jesus Christ.” [Insert mic drop.]

But the idea that women are naturally and uniquely more nurturing than men isn’t just an outdated cultural idea — it’s been taught by top leaders of the church. As a recent example, at the church’s 2018 General Conference, President Henry B. Eyring spoke of the special “nurturing gifts of women,” their “innate and great capacity to sense the needs of others and to love” and their greater susceptibility to the “whisperings of the Spirit.” It was gender essentialism at its finest, packaged as the will of God for women. And it drew from decades of similar teachings by other church leaders.

What past church leaders taught

This serves to gently remind the rising generation that the church has not always encouraged women to develop their gifts when such development takes them outside the home. That’s a highly selective reading of our history. These influencers are coming of age in a very different religion — one that has gone from demonizing working mothers to quietly tolerating them to giving them the highest and most publicly visible callings in the whole church.

In fact, @batchloriv chides people who he says quote former President Spencer W. Kimball on motherhood out of context. He claims that Kimball’s teaching did “not forbid women from going into education and pursuing their careers.”

But Kimball did exactly that. He led the charge against passing the Equal Rights Amendment because if women had equal rights under the law, they might abandon their God-ordained mandate to stay home and raise children.

Kimball also said the following things, and they were reiterated multiple times by other church leaders and local leaders:

• “It was never intended by the Lord that married women should compete with men in employment. They have a far greater and more important service to render.”

• “The husband is expected to support his family and only in an emergency should a wife secure outside employment.”

• “I beg of you, you who could and should be bearing and rearing a family: wives, come home from the typewriter, the laundry, the nursing, come home from the factory, the café. No career approaches in importance that of wife, homemaker, mother — cooking meals, washing dishes, making beds for one’s precious husband and children.”

Much of Kimball’s rhetoric was later picked up and expanded on by President Ezra Taft Benson, who as an apostle told members in a 1981 General Conference that women were divinely ordained to support men in their careers by staying home with the children.

“In the beginning, Adam was instructed to earn the bread by the sweat of his brow — not Eve,” Benson insisted. “Contrary to conventional wisdom, a mother’s place is in the home!”

He warned that mothers who shirked their stay-at-home responsibilities would reap the consequences. “The seeds of divorce are often sown and the problems of children begin when mother works outside the home,” he taught. “You mothers should carefully count the cost before you decide to share breadwinning responsibilities with your husbands.”

This was preached repeatedly as God’s holiest doctrine and deeply influenced several postwar generations.

While I’m sympathetic when today’s young Latter-day Saints rightly point out that such teachings are basically nonsense, I’m also sympathetic to their elders who took such counsel to heart back in the day and are now bewildered by the church’s seeming about-face.

I remember a young woman I knew who stood up in sacrament meeting in the late 1990s to announce she was quitting the career she had trained so hard for because she’d just had a baby and the prophets had taught that mothers needed to stay home. My heart ached for her. I wonder how she feels about that decision now. Probably, like many Latter-day Saint women of our generation and before, she has experienced both joy and regret.

I never agreed with the late 20th-century “gospel” that there was no substitute for a mother’s arms, or that men would be somehow lessened — emasculated, even — if their wives worked outside the home. But those really were church teachings — official doctrines, not just cultural add-ons.

So, in the wake of Mother’s Day, I’m celebrating that many younger members are able to slough off the teachings of the past. But let’s not forget that these were actual church teachings. And now, it seems, God’s will is something else.

Note to readers • The views expressed in this opinion piece do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.