The Family ProclamationDevScriptures · Scholarship · Stories
Jesus Christ walking a hillside path at sunset with a young woman and a young man, a bay and a village below them.

Our vision

Teacher-quality wisdom. Even at 2AM.

An independent faithful voice, built on the platform the youth are already turning to: AI.

01  The problem

Youth are asking. Secular AI is answering.

Teens aren't turning to their parents, leaders, and teachers for answers to their most important life questions; they're turning to ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. Secular AI models are trained to be popular-- to say whatever their data suggests the average user wants to hear: "An AI companion is only a mathematical algorithm. It does not like you. It does not care about you ... [It] can never bear witness of the Father and the Son." (Elder Bednar)

Secular sources are giving youth instantaneous, personalized "answers" to the deepest concerns of their lives-- before parents even knew they had questions!

3 in 4

Teens use AI companions. One in three seek serious life guidance from apps instead of people, turning to their AI companions for emotional support, and even romance.

Common Sense Media, 2025

Only ~37%

Of young women raised in the Church today still identify as Latter-day Saints by the time they turn 18. By contrast, the retention rate for their male peers is almost 60%. Many youth leave over perceived disagreements with Church positions on gender and sexuality.

BYU Studies, 2026

Why these conversations are so hard

Feelings of embarrassment

Youth and young adults care deeply how others perceive them. Many worry that even asking questions about gender, sexuality, family and doctrine will change how their parents, leaders and teachers think of them.

They don't know what to ask

Many young adults have a general sense of anxiety or tension on these topics, but they don't know how to take that "general sense" to a parent or trusted leader.

Adults aren't trained to answer

This Church is a lay ministry. Very few of us are trained to answer difficult questions from uncomfortable teenagers with grace, wisdom and doctrinal clarity in the spur of the moment.

02  The solution

A faithful voice in a familiar format

We've built an AI chat system trained to answer like a wise Bishop: unhurried, compassionate, and unapologetically true to the doctrine, who isn't afraid to be specific when appropriate.

Every chat opens with hope in Jesus Christ, grounds its answer in the words of apostles and prophets, cites supportive social science where applicable, and ends with an invitation to turn to God and His servants for guidance.

Who it is for

Young Latter-day Saints

Somewhere to take the question they will not say out loud, at the hour they actually have it.

Parents

The words for the conversation they know they should have started, and the sources to stand on.

Bishops and leaders

Counsel for the leader, not the youth — how common this is, and which outside sources they may reach for.

Teachers and professors

A cited lesson in minutes on any line of the Proclamation, and somewhere to send a student you cannot answer in class.

What we have built

Here is a walk through each of them, in the order a reader tends to meet them: the chat first, then the ways into the Proclamation itself, and then the library we have written by hand.

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A chat that hands you onward

Most AI models are trained to encourage continued use and, ultimately, dependence.

Ours takes the opposite approach. We recognize that "artificial intelligence can answer questions, but it cannot answer prayers. It can organize information, but it cannot offer revelation, covenant connection, or divine truth" (Elder Gerrit W. Gong, 2026)

So the chat hands the reader onward — to the scriptures, to a Bishop, to a parent, and to the Lord. Not off the site: the rest of what is here is where it hands them next.

See it in action

Let's watch how a young woman and her dad might both use the chat.

A seventeen-year-old, at midnight

What should I do if my feelings about my body do not match what the Church teaches?

We've thought carefully about this one. Here's where we landed:

If you experience discomfort about gender—or love someone who does—you may be trying to understand two things at once. What does God say about being male or female? And what do I do when someone's feelings about the body seem to conflict with what God has revealed?

Those are deeply personal questions. Let's take a look at what the restored gospel of Jesus Christ teaches you about yourself: Heavenly Father knows exactly who you are. You are His spirit son or daughter, your identity as male or female began before this life, and the body you received in mortality belongs within His eternal purposes for you.

The Family: A Proclamation to the World teaches that every person is a “beloved spirit son or daughter of heavenly parents” and that gender is an essential part of our “premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose.” And, because of Jesus Christ, your feelings about your body do not have to carry the impossible burden of telling you who you eternally are. God has already revealed something about that.

Let's see what else He says about you as His son or daughter.

Read the full answer →

9 sources

  1. 1Sexuality and Gender, Part Three: Gender Identity (The New Atlantis, Mayer & McHugh)thenewatlantis.com
  2. 2Can modern science change your sex? — Ryan T. Andersonyoutube.com
  3. 3Can a boy be trapped in a girl's body? — Ryan T. Andersonyoutube.com

These are real chat interactions captured from our site.

Try it yourself

What powers the chat

Our chat doesn't search the whole web; we've curated a library of faithful resources for it to pull from. Every answer names the rich set of resources it drew on and invites the reader to learn more.

And our library of faithful content is always growing. Our site automatically crawls many decades of Church talks, magazines, family studies, and dozens of other sources, cataloging faith-promoting family content and keeping our library always up to date.

660,000+

Documents scanned

160,000+

Family-relevant documents indexed for search

100+

High-quality sources

370+

Articles we have written ourselves, and more to come

A few of our top sources

  • All Church publications
  • Institute for Family Studies
  • FAIR
  • Scripture Central
  • BYU Journals
  • Pew Research Center
  • Family Research Council
  • Ethics and Public Policy Center
  • Brookings Institution
  • Interpreter Foundation
  • Deseret News
  • Common Sense Media

How we choose and rank sources →

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Scripturelike study

Prophets teach that the Family Proclamation has "a divine origin" and "deserv[es] the reverence given words from God." They teach that the Proclamation is "revelatory" and "scripturelike".

Since the Proclamation is "scripturelike," we treat it like scripture.

We've annotated every phrase of the Proclamation with cross-references and prophetic commentary, just like the standard works for casual readers. Each footnote links to a rich study guide, perfect for teachers, scholars, and serious students who want to dive deep. We even have a cross-referenced printable version you can add in your paper scriptures.

38 phrases are annotated so far, carrying 1,184 curated resources between them — 656 scriptures, 211 pieces of scholarship, 128 stories. Here is one of them.

Paragraph 5

“We affirm the sanctity of life and of its importance in God's eternal plan.”

Attached to this one phrase: 79 curated resources.

32

scriptures

31

scholarship

8

stories

8

further resources

Peruse the Proclamation →Read the full Study Guide →Print the scripture insert →

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Prophecy, not politics

A reader who thinks the Proclamation is "a legal position written by lawyers" has usually never been told the whole story. We collected dozens of firsthand accounts to create a richly sourced timeline of the Church's focus on the family, the shifting social views, and prophetic testimony about the revelatory process of writing the Family Proclamation.

Fall 1994

In the temple: "We had better proclaim our position"

At the urging of Acting President Boyd K. Packer, the Quorum of the Twelve spends a day in their Salt Lake Temple council room on one subject — the family — and decides to prepare a proclamation.

September 4–15, 1995

Beijing rewrites the language of womanhood and family

The UN Fourth World Conference on Women meets in Beijing; participants sympathetic to the family report it was redefining marriage and unsupportive of motherhood.

September 20, 1995

"Let's let that concern overwhelm the meeting"

Three days before the general Relief Society meeting, President Hinckley meets the Relief Society presidency, reveals that a proclamation exists — then asks for their advice.

Read the whole history →

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The Proclamation from the pulpit

It seems like the Family Proclamation was all over the talks in the nineties and 2000s. But do Church leaders still regularly quote and teach it today?

That is a question we can answer with data. Our "From the Pulpit" tool finds every citation of the Family Proclamation since 1995, and keeps cataloging them automatically as new talks are published. The result is a searchable record, charted over time, where any citation leads straight back to the talk it came from. So have Church leaders stepped away from it?

Not by a long shot.

2,239 recorded citations by 207 speakers, every one of them dated and linked.

2026 is still in progress — its lighter bar is a partial year, not a decline.

See all of them →

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A library written by people, not by the machine

Behind the chat is a shelf of writing with names on it. Every answer, essay and lesson here was written or edited by a person on our contributors page — a professor of family life, a Harvard-trained policy researcher, an Institute director — and reviewed before it went up. The chat draws on this shelf like any other source, and cites it the same way.

It is where a reader ends up when a question deserves more than a paragraph: a full answer to the question they typed, a lesson a teacher can take into class on Sunday, or somebody else's story of having lived it.

33

Answers

103

Essays

29

Stories

159

Come, Follow Me

6

Lessons

33

Podcast

14

Blog

Browse everything we have written →

03  Why an independent voice?

The Church needs independent voices

Elder Kevin W. Pearson, speaking as an official representative of the Church on assignment from the Quorum of the Twelve, pled for more independent organizations — more voices getting involved in supporting and defending the doctrines of the Gospel:

There is great stuff out there that's not official correlated material, and it's necessary and we want more of it.

He was asked if parents and Church leaders should use these independent, non-Church sources when ministering to others. He responded:

Yes, you can use them. Yes, you should use them … You know what's heartbreaking? When you hear stake presidents [who] say, "I really don't know if I can use these resources."

Elder Kevin W. Pearson, 2018

FAIR, Scripture Central, the Interpreter Foundation and others have answered the prophetic call to ensure "no more uncontested slam dunks" against Church history and doctrine. But many today aren't leaving over intellectual concerns — they're leaving over social issues, because they don't understand the plan of salvation and the doctrine of the family in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The Church has asked for independent voices to step up and fill that need. This is our attempt to answer that call.

Our editorial and chat guidelines

Unfortunately, many Latter-day Saint bloggers, podcasters and influencers mingle their own opinions, theories and politics in with the Gospel. We strive to follow President Nelson, who asks us to stop putting question marks behind the prophet's statements and put exclamation points instead. Here are some of the guiding principles we have written directly into the code of the site to keep it an exclamation-point site:

  1. 1Begin with hope in Jesus Christ, before anything else is said.
  2. 2When sources disagree, prophets and apostles win. Scholarship and personal experience sit beside revealed doctrine, never over it.
  3. 3Never invent or approximate a quotation, a statistic, a story or a source. If it is not in front of you, it does not go on the page.
  4. 4Never contradict the Proclamation, the standard works, or the sustained teachings of the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve.
  5. 5Say plainly when the answer is not known, rather than filling the gap.

"We give our names unto the world"

Elder Quentin L. Cook urged us not to wear masks of anonymity online. So we do not wear one.

This site is published by Skyline Research Institute, a registered 501(c)(3). Our board, advisors, writers and peer reviewers come from the BYU School of Family Life, BYU religious education, the Church Educational System, law, journalism and public policy, alongside a young adult advisory board — every one of them named, with their credentials, on one page.

See who we are →

Get involved

Send your students here

Assign it, then tell us what they asked and where the answer fell short.

Start with the chat →

Send us your research

If your work bears on the family and the doctrine, we want it in the library.

Send it over →

Correct us

If an answer is wrong we want to know before a sixteen-year-old reads it.

Get in touch →

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Everything here is free and always will be. Money buys more articles, more stories, and reach.

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