Tabernacles of Clay by Petrey Taylor G.;

Author:Petrey, Taylor G.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2020-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Four: Proclaiming the New Heterosexual Family

In the 1990s, LDS church leaders significantly revised their teachings on heterosexuality, renewing confrontation with a perceived threat about growing social acceptance of homosexuality. One moment defined how the church would see itself, its members, and its doctrines in this new battlefront. At the General Relief Society Meeting in the Salt Lake Tabernacle on September 23, 1995, President Gordon B. Hinckley stood and read a 605-word document, “The Family: A Proclamation to the World.”1 Hinckley, then eighty-four years old, had just ascended to the church presidency in March, following the death of his feeble predecessor Howard W. Hunter, who had served a mere nine months in the role. The short document became a sensation in subsequent years—a doctrinal foundation that branded the message and identity of the church itself. Faithful church members framed and hung the message on their walls and pasted copies into their scriptures. Eventually, BYU would develop a required class based on the text. Church leaders had issued only a handful of proclamations, mostly in the nineteenth century.2 The 1995 proclamation on the family was different from all those that had come before—and no other proclamation has been issued since. It became simply the Proclamation, in common parlance.

The Proclamation codified church teachings about gender roles, parenting, heterosexual marriage, and public policy. It reflected the embrace of politics as a means of furthering the church’s vision for society. The family was given an explicitly political goal in the text: “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.” Failure to heed this warning would result in dire consequences: “We warn that the disintegration of the family will bring upon individuals, communities, and nations the calamities foretold by ancient and modern prophets.” Invoking the socio-sexual myth of civilizational decline, the Proclamation taught that the modern heterosexual family was a part of the created order and brought peace and stability to the nation and the world.

This chapter is about how LDS leaders were thinking about gender roles in the 1990s to define their political and psychological agendas, both leading up to the Proclamation and in its aftermath. But this was also a time that LDS teachings about gender roles were in significant flux. LDS leaders backed away from strong prohibitions against women’s work and demoted those teachings to optional counsel. Church leaders altered the terms of proper heterosexual performance to accommodate practices once deemed essential to the bulwark of sexual difference itself. The competing ideologies of patriarchal and egalitarian marriages continued to wrestle for dominance. Yet, this conflict seemed less important now—the category of heterosexuality could accommodate these changes to earlier ideals. Heterosexuality ascended over patriarchy as the defining Mormon doctrine of marriage and family.

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