In a time of fracturing and alienation, the truths laid out in The Family: A Proclamation to the World of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints answer the deepest longings of the human soul — witnessing that the entire Plan of Salvation is the sacred work of connection, relationships and divine oneness in family bonds.
This nine-paragraph document is only 600 words in length, yet it holds within it the foundational truths that have confirmed themselves to me over and over again across 20 years of study, research and teaching. Into our culture of fracturing, God has poured out truth about our relational nature, that his work is to enable us to be bound together, that not one of us is left without roots or branches, free-floating or disconnected.
The proclamation is grounded in a truth assuring every one of us complete belonging in a family of perfect heavenly parents who are divine love. As the document states: “All human beings, male and female, are created in the image of God. Each is a beloved spirit son or daughter of heavenly parents, and as such, each has a divine nature and destiny.”
When we look in the mirror we see them — our mother and our father — for we are in their image, carrying their divinity within us. Their bond of love is at the core of our beings.
I recently spoke to a professor of evolutionary biology from a very elite university who identifies as atheist. She has spent her life studying the male and female body, and the role of hormones in our unique development. When she asked me what my experience is like teaching about gender at BYU, I simply said, “We believe that we are the literal children of a divine mother and a father, born in their image.”
As I said these words, her eyes filled with tears. She looked at me and said, “I do not know why I am crying. That is the most beautiful thing I have ever heard.”
We are designed to become like our heavenly parents, beings of love, in the deepest form of connection and intimacy. More than simply a place, heaven is a quality of relationship — where “we see as we are seen, and know as we are known.”
I have treasured these words by Christian theologian and pastor, Timothy Keller: “To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear. But to be fully known and truly loved is, well, a lot like being loved by God.”
This is the love they are calling us into.
The purpose of the proclamation is to guide us in knowing the divine patterns and truths that define eternity, eternal joy and eternal love.
A unity of differences
The creation of the Earth happened through a series of differentiations — heaven and earth, light and dark, night and day, water and dry land. At creation’s pinnacle, we are given male and female, each designed for a distinct and special purpose that together they might become eternally one.
Only the metaphor of the rib can capture the depth of their equality and intimacy — not one ahead or behind, but side by side, guarding together the very essence of life — the heart and the lungs. The depth of their relationship is such that Adam describes Eve as “bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh,” an helpmeet, in Hebrew, “ezer kenegdo,” a complementary source of strength and divine help through partnership.
This oneness is the heartbeat of eternity. But it is also the heartbeat of society. Harvard anthropology professor Joseph Henrich described marriage as the keystone institution — providing the stability and wholeness on which society depends.
In the words of University of Virginia sociologist Brad Wilcox, marriage is the irreplaceable institution that “stabilizes the romantic relationships of adults, bridges the gender divide between men and women, endowing their lives with a deeper sense of meaning, direction and solidarity (and) above all, provides the ideal context for the bearing and rearing of children.”
Marriage was recently identified as the most significant distinguishing factor of happiness in the United States. But it also profoundly impacts children. As Wilcox states, “No other institution reliably connects two parents, and their money, talent, and time,” to create the secure and stable environment with nurturing caregivers that children depend on.
Jenet Erickson speaks at the BYU Conference on the 30th anniversary of the Family Proclamation, “Experiencing Jesus Christ Through the Family Proclamation,” held at the Gordon B. Hinckley Alumni Center Sept. 25-26, 2025.
The stability upon which children depend
That is why hundreds of studies comparing outcomes for children born outside marriage indicate increased risks in every developmental area: poverty, involvement in crime, failing in school, challenges to physical health, psychological distress, exposure to aggravated parenting, and abuse. We see similar outcomes for children born to cohabiting couples, related to the fact that they are much more likely to see their cohabiting parents break up, and instability in family relationships is very disruptive for children.
Making the choice to end a marital relationship that is abusive can be a courageous and beneficial decision, taking children out of a destructive environment. But marital division and divorce also mean increased risk — including an experience of inner division, and sometimes even exile for a child. Children are, after all, the embodiment of their parents’ union. For a child, there is a longing for the original intactness of their being, the loving union of the mother and father from whom they come.
My husband’s parents divorced when he was 6 years old. He still describes the moment when his mother asked, “Michael, who do you want to live with?” His 6-year-old heart could not respond. He grew up without religious faith, but had deep feelings for Christmas because, on that day, his parents would come back together to eat breakfast and open presents, and he would feel a wholeness again.
A loving, stable marriage provides what Leon Kass calls the durable “haven of permanent and unconditional love in an otherwise often unloving and undependable world” that children depend upon.
When that relationship is ruptured by mistreatment, abuse and divorce, children experience a betrayal of the primal trust they have reposed in their parents. We are designed for oneness, a oneness grounded in marriage.
Complementary contributions
Both a man and a woman are needed to create life, and both are needed to facilitate the nurturing of that life. By divine design, men and women “contribute differently but equally” through a “combination of complementary capacities and characteristics” to the sacred purposes of family life, according to apostle David A. Bednar of The Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Consider how both mothers and fathers experience a flood of oxytocin, the bonding hormone, in the process of caring for their new infant. But for mothers, oxytocin elicits bonding behaviors like cooing and cuddling. For fathers, the same hormone tends to elicit behaviors like tickling and tossing. These differences foreshadow more extensive complementary patterns exhibited across children’s development.
Mothers are primed to establish a bond through which the emotional communication that is essential for development can occur. Her infant is also primed to bond with her, already knowing her smell, her voice, her face. This remarkable relationship appears to shape the foundations of identity, sense of well-being and emotional understanding. In a complementary way, a father’s relationship appears to shape relational capacity, achievement, understanding of boundaries and emotion management.
Fathers tend to discipline less frequently than mothers but when they do, they tend to hold to the consequence while mothers tend to be more flexible. Mothers lay the foundation for emotional understanding while fathers build confidence in handling emotions and working with peers even in the way they roughhouse with children.
Mothers shape core capacity and identity, while fathers tend to foster independence, encouraging children to take more risks, from the secure place of a father’s protection and guidance. Mothers provide the foundation for children’s intellectual capacity, while fathers’ connection strongly predicts academic achievement.
Mothers also tend to be a strong source of emotional comfort and support while fathers offer daughters and sons a deep experience of what protective male love feels like, strengthening their daughters’ capacity for wise sexual decisions and their sons’ development of protective and nurturing masculinity.
Children are not a transition of loss
This leads us to the profound gift described in the family proclamation: “Children are an heritage of the Lord.” And yet, we live at a time when having children can be viewed as a transition of loss — loss of freedom, loss of identity, loss of public recognition, loss of pleasure.
I recently sat beside a new mother. Her infant, just 6 weeks old, was still struggling to nurse and bottle feed. His utter dependence struck me. He gazed directly into his mother’s face, locking his eyes on hers. In spite of having no real capacities, it was clear that he recognized her. I could see in his eyes that she was his entire world. For a second, his mouth broke into a smile and I watched her exhaustion give way to radiance.
Can we possibly measure what it means to the expansion of our own purpose, meaning and identity, to bring another life into being, to be another’s entire world, to quite literally enter eternity, becoming part of the past and the future forever, to have the privilege of knowing and witnessing the divinity of another, and to make possible their eternal life?
There is a reason that Harvard sociologist Carle Zimmerman found a pattern as he analyzed the rise and fall of all the great empires: at the peak of every great civilization, they were oriented toward the bearing and nurturing of children. Once they lost that orientation, their civilization lost its strength.
Focusing on children invites better of adults — pressuring their development, focusing them on building a better future, inviting them to sacrifice for something higher than themselves and imbuing their lives with meaning and purpose.
There is an answer to the fracturing, isolation, and emptiness of our day. And it is the work that God has called all of us into — healing and binding the family through covenant relationship with the Lord.
In the midst of our culture of fracturing and isolation, Christ invites us to turn our hearts to the promises he made to our fathers and mothers that he will redeem, restore, and make us one, that not one will be isolated or disconnected; that all may have the chance to become beings of love in divine eternal relationships forever.
Adapted from a talk, “We are Designed for Eternal Covenant Relationships” given Sept. 25, 2025, at the BYU Conference on the 30th anniversary of the Family Proclamation, “Experiencing Jesus Christ Through the Family Proclamation.”