A World in Need. A Prophetic Response.

As early as April 1905, Elder Hyrum M. Smith warned in general conference against forces that would lead to "the disintegration of that family, and the scattering of its members." He was not alone, and the theme did not fade. In 1922 — and again forty-four years later — President David O. McKay taught that the home is "the fundamental unit of society." In 1947, Elder Stephen L Richards spoke of the tragic evils visible in the domestic life of his day and the disintegration of family life.

The pattern matters more than any single sermon: decades before the world's arguments about the family took their modern shape, the consistent voice from the pulpit was that the family is where society stands or falls. What changed over the century was not the Church's message — it was how urgently the world needed to hear it.

This came as counsel from the First Presidency to the whole Church, with a promise attached: great blessings would result for the families who obeyed.

Home evening made the Church's teaching about the family concrete. The home — not the meetinghouse — was declared the first place where faith is taught, and parents the first teachers. Every later step in this timeline, including the proclamation itself, builds on that foundation: when the Church says the family is central, it asks its members to live accordingly, one evening at a time.

After the Second World War, the community of nations wrote down what it believed civilization required. Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights included this: "The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State."

Hold on to that sentence. In 1948 it was uncontroversial — prophets and parliaments said nearly the same thing. Nearly fifty years later, the proclamation would close by calling on "responsible citizens and officers of government everywhere to promote those measures designed to maintain and strengthen the family as the fundamental unit of society" — an echo of language the world itself once affirmed. The rest of this timeline the story of how the world drifted from its own declaration, but the teachings of Jesus Christ and His prophets remained steadfast.

By the mid-1960s — as the sexual revolution gathered and divorce rates began their long climb, President Hugh B. Brown of the First Presidency testified, "Marriage, the family, and the home are among the most important subjects of our whole theological doctrine . . . as the family is the basic and fundamental unit of the Church and of society, its preservation and its righteous needs should take precedence over all other interests."

That same October 1966 conference, President N. Eldon Tanner addressed the disintegration of the family directly. Scholars find that references to the family roughly doubled in general conference from the 1960s to the 1970s.

In 1970 the Church did something institutionally remarkable: it cleared every Monday night of Church activities, worldwide, so that nothing the Church itself sponsored could compete with families gathering at home.

Proclamations are rare. Before 1980 the Church had issued only four — in 1841, 1845 (twice), and 1865 — each reserved for what the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve most wanted on the record before the world. For the sesquicentennial, President Spencer W. Kimball directed a fifth, and Elder Gordon B. Hinckley read it from the Fayette, New York, cabin where the Church was organized.

It declared: "We affirm the sanctity of the family as a divine creation and declare that God our Eternal Father will hold parents accountable to rear their children in light and truth." And further: "We teach that the most sacred of all relationships, those family associations of husbands and wives and parents and children, may be continued eternally when marriage is solemnized under the authority of the holy priesthood."

That same October, President Kimball explained the obligation behind such documents: "From the beginning, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has emphasized family life. We have always understood that the foundations of the family, as an eternal unit, were laid even before this earth was created! Society without basic family life is without foundation and will disintegrate into nothingness. . . . Therefore, whenever anything so basic as the eternal family is imperiled, we have a solemn obligation to speak out, lest there be critical damage to the family institution by those who seem to be deliberately destructive of it."

Fifteen years before 1995, the footings for the family proclamation were already created.

Read throughout the Church, the letter reaffirmed that intimacy is reserved for a man and a woman as husband and wife, and restated the standard of fidelity within marriage. It was one of several formal statements in the early 1990s in which the First Presidency put the Church's teachings about marriage on the record — years before any proclamation was drafted.

These statements are worth knowing about because the proclamation, when it came, was largely a consolidation: most of its sentences restate and reaffirm what the First Presidency had already said, scattered across letters and conference addresses, in one signed document.

When the United Nations declared 1994 the International Year of the Family, the First Presidency endorsed the observance and encouraged members to take part. The Church's instinct toward the international family conversation was to join it — to stand with the nations wherever they still stood by their own 1948 declaration.

That makes what happened over the following eighteen months more striking. It was at the United Nations Cairo conference in September, and the events that followed, where the world watched the definition of the family being quietly rewritten. Prophets and apostles counselled together and came to the decision that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints would need to state its own position-to the world.

The statement declared that "marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God" and announced the Church's doctrine which cannot change to support society's legalization of same-gender marriage. It was issued to the worldwide Church from the First Presidency, more than a year and a half before the proclamation was read.

What the proclamation added in 1995 was not a new position but a comprehensive doctrinal frame: the eternal identity of men and women, the purposes of family life, the responsibilities of parents, and the warning to the world, gathered into one signed declaration.

Speaking months before any drafting began, Elder Maxwell surveyed the social science and the politics in the current cultural landscape. He observed the world was beginning to regard the family as an institution to be redefined, and that public policies were increasingly built to weaken the family.

Elder Maxwell would shortly be appointed to the three-man committee that wrote the proclamation's first drafts. His April 1994 warning is a window into what Christ's apostles were studying as they wrote it.

"Like a ship without a rudder, without a compass, we drift from the family values which have anchored us in the past. World leaders and court judges agree that the family must endure if we are to survive. At the same time, they use the words freedom and choice as tools to pry apart the safeguards of the past and loosen up the laws on marriage, abortion, and gender. In so doing, they promote the very things which threaten the family." — Boyd K. Packer, May 1994

What the apostles later said they "could see coming," they were saying out loud, in real time, before a single word of the proclamation was drafted. Within months, President Packer himself would set its writing in motion.

President Hunter's brief administration — it would last just nine months — coincided almost exactly with the proclamation's creation. It was to his First Presidency that the finished draft would be submitted the following January, and under his leadership that the Twelve's fall 1994 deliberations went forward.

In his first general conference as President, in October 1994, he emphasized the calling of prophets and apostles as those with authority to preserve and protect the family as the foundation of society.

The International Conference on Population and Development met in Cairo at the height of the International Year of the Family. Church representatives attended and reported back; President Packer, who read the documents from the conference proceedings, later made the observation that stuck: "The word marriage was not mentioned."

For apostles of Jesus Christ, the omission was clarifying. The argument had moved: it was no longer about whether the family mattered, but about what a family is — and the institutions writing the world's consensus documents were answering that question by subtraction. Within weeks of Cairo, the Quorum of the Twelve took up the question of issuing a proclamation.

One note on the record, President Packer's 2003 retelling loosely reversed the order of the UN conferences, placing Beijing before Cairo. The contemporaneous record fixes Cairo in September 1994, with the Beijing women's conference following in September 1995 — after the proclamation was written and approved.

The Twelve reviewed doctrine and policy, and discussed what they saw coming. In Elder Russell M. Nelson's words: "We could see the efforts of various communities to do away with all standards and limitations on sexual activity. We saw the confusion of genders. We could see it all coming."

There was also a date on the calendar concentrating minds. A United Nations Year of the Family event had been announced for Salt Lake City itself. President Packer, speaking at BYU in 1998: "When it was announced that a United Nations Year of the Family Conference would be held in Salt Lake City, with delegates coming from abroad, the Brethren decided to declare our position in a proclamation: 'The Family: A Proclamation to the World.'"

Out of these councils, a drafting committee was appointed: Elders James E. Faust, Neal A. Maxwell, and Russell M. Nelson — with Elder Dallin H. Oaks later replacing Elder Maxwell. Elder Faust, senior of the three, suggested each write his own draft independently and then bring them together. The decision to write, the men assigned, and the reasons why are all on the record — in the apostles' own words and in the biographies written from their papers.

Each committee member wrote independently; the drafts were merged; and the combined text went to every member of the Twelve for review and revision. Elder Nelson served as principal draftsman. Elder Oaks later described the spirit of the work: "Prayerfully we continually pleaded with the Lord for His inspiration on what we should say and how we should say it. We all learned 'line upon line, precept upon precept,' as the Lord has promised."

President Packer, in a 1998 interview, was direct about authorship: "In council, we thought we must declare ourselves. . . . And so the members of the Twelve wrote that proclamation. It was considered word by word by the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve."

The family proclamation was initiated in the fall of 1994, drafted over the Christmas holidays, more than eight months before it was read publicly.

Its first appearance in any legal filing came in April 1997, nineteen months after the Tabernacle. The First Presidency, meanwhile, took the January text under advisement and refined it over the following months.

The proclamation was carried across a change of prophets. The combined First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve gave the document its approval around this transition. By spring 1995 the text was finished, approved, and in the new prophet's hands.

President Hinckley, president for barely three weeks, felt it was too early in his presidency for a major declaration, and he set the finished document aside. It waited six months.

What the delay shows is that the decision actually lived with the prophet — waiting until, in his judgment, the moment was right.

The largest UN conference to that date convened in Beijing to set a global platform on women's issues. Observers aligned with the Church — and many other people of faith, including the Vatican — came away troubled by what the platform emphasized and what it omitted: marriage and motherhood appeared chiefly as obstacles, and the "natural and fundamental group unit" of 1948 was nowhere to be found in the document's vision of the future.

Eight days after the conference closed, the proclamation was read in Salt Lake City. The two documents make an instructive pair: the world's statement about women written without the family, and the Church's statement about the family in which fathers and mothers stand "as equal partners" before God.

The Relief Society presidency — Elaine L. Jack, Chieko N. Okazaki, and Aileen H. Clyde — had independently planned their September meeting around the family. In a meeting arranged through Elder Robert D. Hales, President Hinckley worried aloud: ". . . you've already asked me to speak and I've prepared remarks and they'll take about eleven minutes. . . . I'm afraid it would overwhelm the meeting." The sisters' answer: "let's let that concern overwhelm the meeting if that would be the case."

"With so much of sophistry that is passed off as truth, with so much of deception concerning standards and values, with so much of allurement and enticement to take on the slow stain of the world, we have felt to warn and forewarn. In furtherance of this we of the First Presidency and Council of the Twelve Apostles now issue a proclamation to the Church and to the world as a declaration and reaffirmation of standards, doctrines, and practices relative to the family." — President Gordon B. Hinckley

Six hundred nine words, about eleven minutes. Afterward, in the hall, Elder Oaks told the Relief Society presidency: "Do you understand that you have just been in an historic moment? . . . I have never seen a prophet make a decision in a meeting like that, about something we have spent a year with. . . . I think he made the decision to read that proclamation dependent on your response."

Most members received it as a restatement of the obvious, as President Nelson's biographer records. In 1995, that a family is built on the marriage of a man and a woman, and that gender is an eternal part of identity, were hardly contested claims. The proclamation was not written for the world of 1995. It was written for today.

Elder Ballard, who had participated in the drafting through the council system, used the tenth anniversary to restate the proclamation's warnings and promises for a Church that was beginning to need them more than it had in 1995. Two years earlier he had described the work itself: the Twelve, troubled by what they saw as they traveled the world, crafting through the Church's council system a declaration that would make the Lord's position on the family unmistakable.

Addressing the World Congress of Families V, Elder Nelson laid out the proclamation's teachings for delegates of many faiths, framing the family as "the hope for the future of nations." The document written for the Church and "to the world" was increasingly doing its second job: over the years its authors gave copies to government leaders and international bodies, and its language began appearing wherever the case for the family needed making.

Speaking at the Vatican's Humanum colloquium — a gathering of religious leaders from fourteen faith traditions — President Eyring bore witness of marriage as the union of a man and a woman, drawing on the proclamation and his own marriage, and looked forward to a "renaissance of happy marriages." A document once received as a restatement of the obvious was now the Church's contribution to a worldwide interfaith defense of the family.

Twenty-one years after the apostles' council concluded "we could see it all coming." The questions the proclamation answered in 1995 — what marriage is, what gender means, what families are for and even though the world has changed and departed from Christ's teachings on marriage and the family, the proclamation still stands.

Elder Rasband later recounted the counsel he received at his call: "This proclamation is now yours. Your name is right here. Feel it and teach it like you own it." The proclamation bears no signatures; it is issued in the name of the councils of the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve. Each apostle called since 1995 steps into that ownership — which is why the document has not faded with its original authors, but has been taught, cited, and defended by every apostle called in the thirty years since.

Speaking at a United Nations event on family policy, Sister Bingham carried the proclamation's teachings to the institution whose 1994 Year of the Family had helped prompt its writing — a fitting return. The Relief Society, whose 1995 presidency had been in the room when a prophet chose the moment to read it, was now presenting its principles on the world's largest stage.

"Subjects were identified and discussed by members of the Quorum of the Twelve for nearly a year. Language was proposed, reviewed, and revised. . . . It was a surprise to some who thought the doctrinal truths about marriage and the family were well understood without restatement. Nevertheless, we felt the confirmation and we went to work."

He closed by quoting President Ezra Taft Benson — "every generation has its tests and its chance to stand and prove itself" — and added his own witness: "I believe our attitude toward and use of the family proclamation is one of those tests for this generation."

Meeting with Argentine legislators in Buenos Aires, Elder Holland presented the proclamation as the Church's statement on the institution their laws were then debating. Conference pulpit, courtroom, congress, colloquium — by its third decade the proclamation had been carried into every kind of forum where the family's future was being decided, exactly as a document addressed "to the world" was meant to be.

Twenty-five years after serving as the family proclamation's principal draftsman, President Nelson stood as President of the Church and read a new proclamation marking two hundred years since the First Vision. The moment closed a circle: the apostle who had pleaded for inspiration "line upon line" over a family declaration now held the office that decides when the Church speaks to the world — and the rare instrument of a proclamation was used again, underscoring how deliberately such documents are made.

Thirty years after The Family: A Proclamation to the World was first presented, Church leaders continue to affirm its enduring doctrinal foundation. In October 2025, Elder Ronald A. Rasband declared:

"The proclamation on the family is, as President Hinckley stated, doctrine, my dear brothers and sisters."

That same conviction had been expressed three years earlier by President Dallin H. Oaks, who taught:

"We affirm that the family proclamation, founded on irrevocable doctrine, defines the kind of family relationships where the most important part of our eternal development can occur."

Together, these teachings reaffirm that The Family: A Proclamation to the World is more than a response to the issues of its day. It remains a clear declaration of Heavenly Father's eternal doctrine of the family and continues to guide His children in this life and throughout eternity.