This Far But No Further

A Brief Reflection on President Dallin H. Oaks' 2025 Discourse on the Family Proclamation

I begin by acknowledging that many church members have a really hard time with the Proclamation on the Family. I have seen evidence of this in at least two respects in my own life:

First: I have spent hundreds of hours during more than a decade working with and counseling young church members in the Bay Area. For many of them, the Proclamation lands as exclusionary, myopic, and hurtful. They see gay marriage, especially, as a great blessing for many of those they love, and wonder why God would inspire prophets to fight so ardently against it. These concerns are not abstract or theoretical; they feel the weight of the Proclamation’s words as having done real harm to themselves and those they love.

Second: It is difficult to know anymore what vital parts of the Proclamation mean in my own life. A number of years ago, my own young family underwent a series of wrenching changes. In ways I did not foresee and still do not entirely understand, the stable foundation we had built for our family crumbled, and I suddenly found myself a single father, parenting alone. Left to grapple with these new realities, the overall message of the proclamation felt confusing, distant, and unreal.

With all of this, perhaps you can understand why, when President Oaks—arguably the Proclamation’s foremost defender and explicator—rose to his feet for his first speech while leading the church (albeit as the president of the Quorum of the Twelve, not yet as the prophet) and began immediately referencing the Proclamation, my insides clenched and my brow furrowed.

I wasn’t sure I was ready to hear what he had to say.

Surprisingly, however, as I listened I eventually felt my muscles relax, and I experienced my mind softening into a dramatically different understanding of what the Proclamation is and what it is meant to do. I don’t know what Elder Oaks intended with the talk, but as I listened to him tell the story of his own youth, something shifted inside me.

In unadorned and moving prose, Oaks described growing up on his grandfather’s farm, and the horrible day when, as a little boy, he received the news that his father had died. I can’t remember seeing him show obvious emotion from any pulpit in any conference before; but on October 12th, 2025, he openly wept as he told his listeners about his memory of running to take refuge in his room, where he sobbed on his bed.

He then told of how his grandfather came to him there, took him in his arms, and lovingly proclaimed “I will be your father.” He went on to recount how his single mother—who also struggled mightily under the burden of being left bereft of her beloved, but who was buttressed by the love and support of her parents and other loving family members and friends—raised him and his siblings in the light of the gospel, making the very best she could of a tragic set of circumstances. One could not help but flinch and feel deeply affected when Oaks described her, after the death of his father, as “alone and broken.”

It is true, of course, that 15 men originally signed the proclamation. We have no way of knowing directly what Oaks’ role in drafting the document would have been. That said, however, he has frequently referenced and defended it. And, in his recent discourse, President Oaks was speaking for the first time as the man directing the church, making his words and approach here worth special attention.

In the past I have often heard the proclamation being held up as a standard or an ideal. It has been set out as if its purpose is to condemn those who do not meet or match the precepts that it outlines. One would think, listening to how we often discuss the document, that it was meant as a cudgel with which to beat down anyone whose family doesn’t look prepared to be photographed for the cover of a church magazine.

But this talk from President Oaks offers a different and more expansive framing for the document. He did not walk back his emphasis on the doctrine; rather, he offered a way to approach and understand the doctrine that suggests it can have a different meaning and purpose than we usually lend to it. For me, his situating the doctrine within the context of the story from his own life shifted the way I encounter what the proclamation says and does.

It does this first by referencing—again and again and again—the fact that most families look nothing like the unrealistic “ideal” we often discuss. (In fairness, the proclamation itself also acknowledges this, but this is a caveat we rarely emphasize.) Repeatedly, President Oaks acknowledges with compassion and candor the very many circumstances that render earthly families unstable, corruptible, complicated, incomplete, and even sorrowful.

But beyond even this rhetorical acknowledgement, what hit me hardest about his talk was simply this: at base, he was not articulating a disembodied or abstract set of principles. He was telling a tragic and wrenching story of a young family whose father had unexpectedly died. Just as Lehi taught his son Jacob (before leaving him, too, as a boy without a father), President Oaks was reminding us that “it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things” (2 Nephi 2:11). In the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, we acknowledge that we inhabit a fallen and difficult world. The theological argument can be made that a crimson streak of tragedy weaves itself through the very fabric of our universe. After all, we believe in a Jesus who was required to “go forth, suffering pains and afflictions and temptations of every kind; . . . that his bowels may be filled with mercy, according to the flesh, that he may know according to the flesh how to sucker his people according to their infirmities” (Alma 7: 11–12). Likewise, we worship a God whom Enoch found weeping over the challenges we experience in mortality (see “The Grandeur of God”).

Against this pervasive and tragic backdrop, the Proclamation on the Family takes on, for me, an entirely different meaning. In this framing, I see the proclamation’s emphasis on the importance of family—including “found family,” whether those surrogate family members come from extended families, wards, or the ranks of our friends—as an acknowledgement of the aching need we all have for a group of people who will close ranks around us when things get hard, who will buoy us up when we are down, and who will offer support, no matter the circumstances.

The proclamation, then, may be seen not as a stick with which to beat those who fall short of some imaginary ideal, but as an urgent invitation for us to band together through bonds of both sealing and affection against the gale-force winds that will buffet many of us throughout our lives. Without ascribing to President Oaks an outsize role in the drafting or adoption of the proclamation, I find it telling and beautiful to think that at least one contribution to the proclamation’s origin was the longing of a little boy, bereft of his father and clinging to his mother and his found family as a source of support while the world he had known crumbled around him.

Perhaps the proclamation was never meant to make us feel guilty for falling short of a largely illusory or at least elusive ideal. Perhaps, instead, it was meant to call us to offer comfort amid the complexity of mortality, to teach us that brokenness is to be expected and that against such tattered reality, our family—in whatever form it might take—is meant to stand as an immovable bulwark. Perhaps we are meant to find in the proclamation words to console the cri de coeur of a small boy, shouting inchoately at the universe. We might hear, in effect: When life gets too hard, when all comfort is taken forcibly from us, when tragedy stalks our lives and chaos threatens to rob us of meaning and beauty, our families can stand against the onrushing tide of despair and allow us to stand firm, declaring, “this far, but no further.” (Job 38:11).

Tyler Johnson is a medical oncologist and associate editor at Wayfare.

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Art by Andrei Andreevich Tutunov.