At the beginning of October, in the immediate wake of President Russell M. Nelson’s passing, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (sometimes called the “Mormon Church”) held its biannual General Conference: a global gathering where church leaders address members. Two senior leaders focused on “The Family: A Proclamation to the World,” a 1995 document has stirred controversy and debate for three decades. While its stance on gender and marriage often dominates discussion (and much of the scholarship), the proclamation’s roots in the 1990s family policy debates reveal a broader message about family wellbeing that deserves renewed attention.
In September 1995, President Gordon B. Hinckley introduced the family proclamation, emphasizing not only traditional marriage and gender complementarity, but also child-rearing, parental responsibilities, and even the value of work. In President Hinckley’s address, concerns with welfare and family breakdown were placed side-by-side with those over same-sex marriage. He lamented the “appalling” statistics of out-of-wedlock births and the cycle of teen pregnancy, poverty, and welfare dependency, calling it the “bitter…fruits of casting aside standards of virtue.” Hinckley declared “that it should be the blessing of every child to be born into a home where that child is welcomed, nurtured, loved, and blessed with parents, a father and a mother, who live with loyalty to one another and to their children.”
Divorce and family breakdown had been addressed for years by Church leadership prior to the proclamation. But the decade leading up to the proclamation saw major shifts in the public and political discussions surrounding these topics. Today’s hyperfocus on LGBT+ issues can overshadow the proclamation’s holistic approach to family wellbeing and bury the political context from which it emerged.
In 1984, Charles Murray’s Losing Ground burst on to the scene, arguing that the U.S. welfare system created perverse incentives followed by rational, understandable responses. Some of these results, Murray believed, included the choice to remain unmarried and unemployed in order to continue receiving welfare benefits. Murray’s claims were controversial, but highly influential in the years to come.
The focus on family breakdown also increased in broader circles, thanks largely to Bill Moyers’ 1986 CBS documentary The Vanishing Family – Crisis in Black America. Moyers interviewed welfare-dependent single mothers along with the absentee fathers. These conversations painted the picture of a government system crowding out and replacing providers in the home. While Murray could be dismissed due to his conservatism, Moyers had strong liberal credentials thanks to his time as White House Press Secretary under Lyndon Johnson and his prolific career in journalism. The documentary allowed for a more open discussion among the masses on the subject of family breakdown.
The conversation about family breakdown began to find bipartisan acceptance a few years later. As Mitch Pearlstein explains in From Family Collapse to America’s Decline, William Galston’s paper “A Liberal-Democratic Case for the Two-Parent Family” became highly influential among Democratic members of the National Commission on Children. This influence led to the following acknowledgment in the commission’s 1991 report: “Children do best when they have the personal involvement and material support of a father and a mother and when both parents fulfill their responsibility to be loving providers.”
In 1992, Vice President Dan Quayle gave his famous “Murphy Brown Speech” in which he discussed “the breakdown of the family structure, personal responsibility and social order in too many areas of our society.” The speech earned its nickname from the single brief reference to the TV show Murphy Brown: “a character,” Quayle maintained, “who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid professional woman, mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another lifestyle choice.”
The speech was met with ridicule from pundits and even uncertainty from the White House. However, the following year social scientist Barbara Dafoe Whitehead wrote her Atlantic piece “Dan Quayle Was Right.” It reviewed decades of scholarly literature, demonstrating that divorce and out-of-wedlock births have negative effects on children. President Bill Clinton even recognized that Quayle’s comments weren’t necessarily wrong. While in office, Clinton described out-of-wedlock births as “wrong” and their growing rate a “disaster,” explaining, “You shouldn’t have a baby before you’re ready, and you shouldn’t have a baby when you’re not married. You just have to stop it.”
These various trends in the public and political perception of welfare, work, and family breakdown eventually culminated in the passing of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act under President Clinton. The next couple years saw the publication of Growing Up With a Single Parent by sociologists Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur and Fatherless America by Institute for American Values founder David Blankenhorn. These two volumes further supported the idea that the two-parent household was the ideal environment for raising a child.
It’s easy to remember the family proclamation only for the debates it still sparks. But its origins remind us that it was also a prophetic response to a wider crisis of family fragmentation and transformation. From Murray to Moyers to Whitehead to Clinton, concern over welfare dependence and family breakdown had been growing among Latter-day Saint leaders and the public at large. It was within this context that President Hinckley revealed the family proclamation to the world. While same-sex marriage legalities most definitely played a role in the proclamation’s conception, the American discussion regarding family fragmentation (especially fatherlessness) and welfare dependency also paved the way and helped shape its final draft.
Over the years, the social science from across the political spectrum has continued to support the principles outlined in the family proclamation. Children raised by their biological parents in a low-conflict marriage tend to thrive economically, educationally, and psychologically. To be concerned about educational attainment, poverty, and mental health is to be concerned about the state of the family. In an age of declining fertility rates, rising rates of out-of-wedlock births, and increasing loneliness, the proclamation’s call for strengthening families seems less like a culture-war slogan and more like an antidote to social fragmentation. We would all do well to give ear to the proclamation’s final lines: “we warn that the disintegration of the family will bring upon individuals, communities, and nations the calamities foretold by ancient and modern prophets. We call upon responsible citizens and officers of government everywhere to promote those measures designed to maintain and strengthen the family as the fundamental unit of society.”
Walker Wright is the manager of Academic Programs at a public policy think tank in Washington, DC.
