Thirty years ago, on Sept. 23, 1995, President Gordon B. Hinckley, then the President and Prophet of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, stood at the pulpit in the Salt Lake Tabernacle and gave a proclamation to the world on the sacred importance of the family.
Over the next three decades, this powerful document, titled “The Family: A Proclamation to the World,” has guided members of the Church, and others, in strengthening home and family by adhering to its prophetic principles in an increasingly changing world.
On this episode of the Church News podcast, Church News reporter Mary Richards continues the discussion of “The Family Proclamation” and the family itself. She is joined by co-directors of Brigham Young University’s American Families of Faith Project, Loren Marks and David Dollahite, both of whom are professors of family life at Brigham Young University.
They highlight their 25-year interfaith research on religiously active families and how resilience is built through faith practices.
Listen to this episode of the Church News podcast on Apple Podcasts, Amazon, Spotify, bookshelf PLUS, YouTube or wherever you get podcasts.
Transcript:
David Dollahite: The proclamation is kind of a Liahona that can guide us through the wilderness of contemporary challenges. The family proclamation is a perfect combination of revelation about gospel truths, teachings about our eternal destiny and about our relationship with God and with each other, and it’s also a beautiful standard holding up the possibility that couples who focus on those principles that the proclamation mentioned and on being devoted to Christ and devoted to truth, the strengths that that can bring in a world that is increasingly difficult to make a marriage strong. And so I am personally incredibly grateful for living prophets, seers and revelators who brought forth the proclamation 30 years ago, and that I’ve observed very closely with my family, with my students, with others that we’ve interviewed and with the world in general, that people who will learn and abide by those principles in the family proclamation give themselves a much better opportunity to have strong marriages and families.
1:12
Mary Richards: This is Mary Richards, reporter at the Church News. Welcome to the Church News podcast. Today, we are taking you on a journey of connection as we discuss news and events of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Thirty years ago, on Sept. 23, 1995, President Gordon B. Hinckley — then the President and Prophet of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — stood at the pulpit in the Salt Lake Tabernacle and gave a proclamation to the world on the sacred importance of the family. Over the next three decades, this powerful document, titled “The Family: A Proclamation to the World,” has guided members of the Church and others in strengthening home and family by adhering to its prophetic principles in an increasingly changing world.
On this episode of the Church News podcast, we continue our discussion of the family proclamation and the family itself as we explore research findings by Brigham Young University’s the American Families of Faith Project.
I am joined today by co-directors of the project, Loren Marks and David Dollahite, both of whom are professors of family life at Brigham Young University and husbands and fathers. Welcome to the Church News podcast.
Loren Marks: Thanks for having us.
David Dollahite: Thanks, Mary. It’s great to be here.
2:32
Mary Richards: Tell me first a little bit about yourselves, and then we’ll talk about how the American Families of Faith Project was created. Should we start with you, Dave?
David Dollahite: Sure. So, we were very fortunate to get to interview a number of Latter-day Saint fathers of children with special needs back in 1993, and we didn’t actually ask them any questions about religion. It was sort of a traditional social-science project on family. But it turned out that because these fathers were dealing with some really difficult situations with children with various disabilities and illnesses, that they turned to faith, to God, to their church, to their beliefs very frequently.
And so even though we didn’t actually plan to study religion per se, and we didn’t even ask them any questions about religion, because of their faith and their experiences, they spoke quite often about how their beliefs, their religious rituals, their sense of answers to prayers and assistance from God’s Spirit was so helpful to them that we published those findings.
And we, as most qualitative research does, we included quite a few quotes, extensive personal quotes, and they spoke about God and faith and church a lot. And so that sort of began the process of our American Families of Faith Project, and then we later opened it up to include families from various faiths beyond just the Latter-day Saints.
4:01
Mary Richards: Yeah, it sounds like, Loren, this wasn’t something separate in their lives. It was a part of their lives. Their faith was everything to them. So of course they would talk about it.
Loren Marks: It’s been wonderful. The way that we approached this, we would visit with a rabbi, an imam, a pastor, a bishop and ask them to refer us to the strongest families in their congregation. And then we’d have the honor of visiting the homes of these wives and husbands, and we’d ask them about their challenges, their successes, how they were able to pull off building a strong marriage and family in a culture that doesn’t support that.
One of the wonderful things that comes away from it is we’re left with some secret sauce, some insights, their stories or narratives that we can share as university professors with young folks that are looking at marriage or early on in family life, while learning along with them ourselves about what strengthens families most.
5:04
Mary Richards: That data you can prove, right? But also that example of the joy, I think too, is so crucial for our young adults in college or perhaps the world, when you’re sharing your findings and the things that you’ve learned.
David Dollahite: Yeah, we’ve learned that because we use so many direct quotes from these wonderful families that have built strong marriages, strong families and strong faiths throughout their life, they have a lot of insights. They’re very articulate, very passionate about what they believe and about how their beliefs make a difference in their life, about how their practices — how prayer, how attending services, how having, for example, Jewish families lighting Shabbat candles on Friday evening — how that strengthens their relationships.
And so, yes, our students and others who read our findings seem to learn, and they enjoy learning, from people who are actually living a life of faith and who have thought a lot about how their faith makes a difference in their life. And so, yes, it gives them a sense of hopefulness, a sense of joy, that there’s a way to, even though we’re living in a pretty changing, challenging, frustrating time for many people, being able to turn to God, turn to sacred texts, turn to religious leaders, turn to fellow believers, can make a real difference in strengthening marriage and family life.
6:23
Mary Richards: So, you’ve been now involved with this American Families of Faith Project for about 25 years? Is that right?
David Dollahite: Yeah.
Mary Richards: Yeah. So you’re starting to see trends and things as you’re doing this research. What are the most surprising discoveries you’ve made about religious families in your research?
6:39
David Dollahite: Well, one of the wonderful, surprising findings was how many and how deep are the commonalities across people from about 20 different Christian, Jewish and Muslim denominations that we interviewed folks in many states, about 30, almost 40 states in America. So you might think that there’s going to be a tremendous amount of diversity, and there certainly was diversity. About half of our sample were people from various ethnic and racial minorities and many denominations many face. So certainly there were differences.
But it was quite interesting and delightful how many commonalities there were. So, for example, belief in God, whether you believe in Jehovah or Allah or Jesus, it doesn’t make that much of a difference. What really matters is that you believe that there’s a being who loves you, who knows you, who can help you — who, when you’re having difficulties in your marriage and your family, when you’re experiencing griefs and challenges and changes, you can turn to God, and God can help you.
Sacred texts, whether you read the Torah or the Quran or the New Testament or the Book of Mormon, there are sacred texts, stories, principles that are in those scripture that help people to find answers to their difficult questions. And attending services, whether you attend a synagogue or a temple or a mosque or a chapel, you’re gathering with other believers. You’re listening to the word of God. You’re listening to religious leaders who are trying to impart some comfort, some wisdom. You’re there with fellow believers. You’re helping each other raise your children, so to speak.
And so, just that you’re a believer, that you’re a person involved in your faith community, that you do turn to God when things go hard, the commonalities were so deep. And I found myself so many times in the homes of these folks of many faiths, many races, many ethnicities, many parts of the country saying similar kinds of things about the ways that their religious beliefs and practices made a difference in their marriage and family life. And that was beautiful. It was delightful.
8:59
Mary Richards: Yeah. And Loren, same thing. You’re saying these same things?
Loren Marks: Yes. One of the things I think we’d love to convey to our listeners is that a lot of social science involves checking a box or just filling in a bubble, and we can learn some interesting things and important things through that approach. But Dave and I have had the honor to step into the homes of the families that he mentioned, to see the sacred artifacts in their homes, to see how they interact with each other. That’s been a blessing. It’s been the experience of a lifetime, in many ways. We also had the chance to ask them some pretty deep and probing questions.
But you asked, Mary, “What was surprising?” I think one of the things that was surprising for me was, although we didn’t ask a single question about divorce, that was not on the program, that of these families — and we’re talking about the strongest marriages, again, from their respective congregations — about a quarter, roughly, of the wives and husbands that we interviewed would say to us in the course of their interview, “Without the belief in God,” that Dave just talked about, “without this deep faith, we do not believe our marriage would have endured. We think that we would have divorced.”
And in some cases, there were couples that I spoke with who became more than a little emotional, saying, “The first year” — three years, five years, seven years — “were tough as we were trying to turn two ‘me’s into one ‘we,’ struggling to do this marriage thing.” And I think that one of the things we’d love to convey is if you’re one of those who’s struggling at Year 1 or 3 or 5 or 7, you hang in there with that faith in God, you may be one of those exemplary marriages 20 years down the road.
So it was inspiring to hear that marriage is challenging. It’s hard work. It’s not the default outcome, but from these couples that when they leaned on God, He helped them build a meaningful marriage and family across time.
11:21
Mary Richards: I see that teaching in the family proclamation. “The family is ordained of God,” it says. And so of course He would want to help us and we would want to include Him in that, in our marriage, in our family, in our parenting. And you see that played out in the research too.
And also, to quote from the family proclamation, that “happiness in family life is most likely to be achieved when founded upon the teachings of the Lord Jesus Christ.” So we see this all-encompassing principle here that you see as well.
How have you observed differences in family resilience between various faith traditions and also in Latter-day Saint families?
11:59
David Dollahite: So, I want to comment on what you just mentioned about the teaching in the family proclamation that marriage is ordained of God, and family is central to God’s purposes. That’s a nice way to summarize what we found, is that when couples built their marriage on God, on a shared faith, it made a huge difference. And it’s not to say that families or couples who don’t share faith or who don’t have faith can’t have a strong marriage. They can. It’s just much more difficult to do that. There’s great power in having shared belief in a transcendent being, in a God who loves you and knows you and has the power to help you. That has tremendous unifying power.
And then the idea that marriage is central to God’s purposes, of course, we live in a culture where there are thousands of ways that you can spend your time and energy, and you can attend to so many shows and programs and activities, and there’s so many ways to spend your time and energy, other than focused on your family. But if you believe that family is central to God’s purposes and you believe in God, then you’re more likely to make the kinds of choices, the kinds of commitments, the kinds of sacrifices that put marriage high on your priority list and that encourage you to devote your energies, your time, your focus on strengthening your family.
So those two teachings in the proclamation have tremendous power for Latter-day Saint families, as well as for other families who choose to make God very important in their life.
13:38
Mary Richards: You’re nodding too, Loren.
Loren Marks: Yes. One scholar of world religions has said that in the health club of American religions, there is the jacuzzi, and there is the weight room. To reframe a little bit, you asked about resilience, and resilience, I think, might be defined in some ways as strengths during adversity, strength in the face of adversity, and you’ve got to build muscle. Think that faith, religion, the Abrahamic traditions that we’ve studied asks something of their people. We’re familiar with the Prophet Joseph Smith talking about a religion that requires sacrifice has more power to produce faith unto salvation than one that would ask little, to paraphrase poorly.
The families that we interviewed, I think, built spiritual muscle. They built resilience across time by doing hard things, working together, sacrificing so that when hard times hit — not if, but when — that they’d built some relational muscle. They’d built some relationship with their Creator that helped them through.
I think of, for example, our family lived in Louisiana for 13 years, very hot and humid summers. While we were there one year, the monthlong Muslim fast of Ramadan fell during summer, long days, hot, humid days, and I had the the blessing of watching the example of a dear Muslim friend and her husband go through Ramadan without food or water during the long daylight hours, and to see the strength that that built, that muscle. And of course, that wasn’t just a religious principle. They were able to carry that strength in to other areas in their life. I will also mention it was an honor to be invited to join them for a Ramadan breaking of the fast, where at the end of the day, as the sun sets, the Muslim community will gather together and break the fast together.
And the experience of that is not all-you-can-eat buffet excess but a very reverent feeling that might be classified as: “We bow our heads to thank Allah for all he’s given us. We get ready to eat food. There are many others who don’t have that blessing and privilege. May our fast be dedicated to them, may our sacrifice ease their pain, lighten their burden.” And as Dave mentioned a moment ago, you would leave many of the experiences we had, both with families of our own faith and others, with an upward draft. You wanted to go home and be a better husband, a better father.
And that was the effect that these interviews had on on us personally, on the 300 students who’ve worked with us on the project and also many of the readers who’ve had a chance to hear the words of these women and men a year or 10 years or 20 years after the fact, the power is still there.
Mary Richards: That builds faith, doesn’t it, yes.
17:09
David Dollahite: So, and you asked about resilience, and I didn’t really address that. So I’d like to just say something Loren inspired me, reminded me, of many Jewish families that we interviewed. Our Jewish friends have a beautiful practice of lighting Shabbat candles and then joining for a meal, blessing bread and wine, resting from earthly things. They don’t talk about business or money. They don’t carry money. They try to focus their efforts on God and spirituality and each other.
And many of our Jewish friends mentioned how in the midst of the changes, in the midst of the stresses and struggles that they felt that all families experience, being able to know that each Friday evening, at sundown, they were going to gather, they were going to light Shabbat candles, offer prayers, bless bread and wine, offer prayers, talk about the Torah, discuss God’s scripture, how to be better Jews. They mentioned a number of them, and we interviewed about 30 Jewish families, and most of them mentioned that the Shabbat ritual of gathering in the home on the Sabbath as a family to worship together, to talk together and to set aside those daily, regular practices that they did the other six days was so peaceful.
It brought such comfort. It brought in the midst of various changes, personal changes, family changes, societal changes, economic changes, all that stuff swirling around. Having that regular weekly ritual was beautiful. It was comforting. It was a powerful way to sort of set aside all the other craziness and be together and sit around the table and enjoy a meal together, and they would sing hymns and talk about things that mattered, and it was just a powerful — lots of social science research has shown that regular rituals, regular routines, help people deal with stresses, that when things are changing and going crazy, to know that you’re going to do certain things that matter to you and that those things will stay the same, that brings great comfort to children, to teenagers and to adults.
19:34
Mary Richards: Regular patterns, and something that’s the core of your family too, and your religion. I’m looking at this line that “successful marriages and families” — and this is in the family proclamation — “are established and maintained on principles of faith, prayer, repentance, forgiveness, respect, love, compassion, work and wholesome recreational activities.” What you’re talking about is also a part of that, those things that we do as part of our family fabric, or family culture, our faith tradition, are protective, aren’t they? They’re building resilience, but they’re protective.
What kinds of protective factors have you identified in religious families that help them thrive despite societal pressure? Society might be thinking, “Why do you do a Shabbat meal? Why are you fasting on Ramadan? Why are you doing this or that?” What helps families thrive through these things?
20:28
Loren Marks: When we take the chance to pause, I think it sends a message to our children about what matters most. Even if the family home evening or scripture study itself turns out to be a little bit of a train wreck — and we’ve all had those — we’re still conveying to our children it matters enough, faith and family matters enough, to take a punctuated breath from all the busy stuff that Dave was talking about to remind ourselves what matters most.
I’m also reminded of our dear friend and colleague Heather Howell Kelley, who’s worked with us on the project, who has said more than once, “Family worship, family rituals, they’re not meaningful every time, but they are meaningful over time.” So even when we have a fail, even if it’s an epic fail, there’s something that’s conveyed to our children about what matters most when we don’t quit and we keep at it anyway.
21:32
David Dollahite: Yeah, well said.
Mary Richards: Yeah. I’m immediately thinking of my fourth son and how he grumps the most when we say, “Let’s take a pause from whatever we’re doing. We’ve got everybody here, back from practice or school or work or whatever. We’re going to read scriptures.” And he’ll grump and stomp his way to the table, but then he’s the first to be ready. It’s so interesting, because it could be easy to just give in to his sweet little temper and think, “Well, maybe we’ll just skip it today. He’s tired.”
But I’m the first to realize that he thrives on that; that routine of, “Well, of course we read scriptures. Of course we do it. This is what we do.” We’ve even had neighbors who have been over, and, Loren, before we started recording, you talked about bonus children that your family has also scooped in. That can be something good as an example for them, too, if you’re, “It’s time to read scriptures. We’re going to do it. If anybody’s over around the table, grab a pair and read along with us.”
Loren Marks: Absolutely.
22:24
Mary Richards: Yeah. I love that. And how important is it, then, to really do these things, to walk the walk, versus talk the talk?
David Dollahite: Yeah, that’s a great question. So, we’ve observed and listened to these families for years, really decades, and one of the big takeaway messages about practices like Shabbat, like family home evening, like scripture study in a family context is that it really is important for parents to show that they want to do these things, not just talk about them, but do them in a regular way. And so, be firm about what practices the family is going to do, and do that despite changes, despite challenges, despite all the ways, all the distractions, all the many other things that a family could do other than gather together and take some time and read sacred texts together, or gather together, take some time and pray together.
However, it’s also very important for families to have flexibility, to be firm that, “Yes, we do this, we value this. We’re going to make sure that we continue these rituals, these traditions, these practices,” along with being flexible about children’s different personalities, different ages, different interest levels, different stresses that they’re experiencing. And so we’re going to have family home evening, but when we have it, how long it lasts, what we do during family home evening, that can change over time. That can be flexible with what our children’s needs are.
In our family, for example, growing up, we learned that our children really didn’t care for Dad talking on and on and teaching a lesson, so to speak. They really loved discussion. They really loved when we talked together. So, something we did was have a question jar. Kids could ask questions, they could write them down, put them in the question jar, and when it came time for the lesson portion of family home evening, we changed that to having a discussion, and the discussion would be questions posed by any one of us, and all of us could share our thoughts and our experiences, and our kids really enjoyed that.
There were times when kids were really busy with homework, with deadlines, with stresses, so we would make home evening a little shorter. I remember one time we decided, because one of the kids said something like, “Why do we have to go on for 45 minutes to an hour? Why can’t we just do this in 15 minutes?” So we said, “OK, we’ll do it in 15 minutes.” So we had a really short, abbreviated home evening, and it turned out that the kids later said, “No, that was too short. It’s OK. We can go long.”
But had we not been flexible and listened and tried to accommodate and just said, “No, we do what we do. We will not change. You must conform to what we as the parents want,” that would have sent the wrong message. So, the right message is: We value this, we value God, we value each other. We’re going to gather and do sacred things. But we’re also going to listen to each other and be responsive to people’s demands and situations and preferences and try to make this gathering as enjoyable for everyone as possible.
Mary Richards: You’re having a family council, really, in those ways, yeah.
David Dollahite: Exactly.
Mary Richards: That’s important too, right.
25:56
Loren Marks: The power of lived example is something that came up across race, across religion, across region of the country again and again, things that would resonate with Emerson’s dictum — your actions or what you do speak so loudly that I cannot hear your words, to paraphrase loosely.
But something that we’ve seen again and again, we’ve tried to wrap up in the phrase that we call “the principle of lived invitation,” which simply says our behavior is permission to others to behave similarly. But it is more than that. It is an invitation to do so. I don’t know that that holds any more true than in the parent-child relationship, and any of us who’ve been parents for more than three months know that sometimes that’s a bad thing, when you see your kid mimic your bad behavior or your bad word. But what a responsibility to lead by example instead of by word.
26:59
Mary Richards: How has “The Family: A Proclamation to the World” influenced your research with the American Families of Faith Project?
David Dollahite: That’s a great question, Mary. So, probably in more broad terms, the proclamation influenced us in the BYU School of Family Life. Starting right when President Hinckley issued the proclamation, we began thinking about how we might teach classes at BYU that would focus on the proclamation, and we began writing books to serve as textbooks for those classes.
And so we got 100 authors, mostly from BYU and Latter-day Saints from other contexts as well, to think about the proclamation and what implications proclamation principles and teachings would have for families. And so we developed that book and used that book as a textbook for many years. And then over the years, we’ve updated that. We’ve had additional books focused on the proclamation, up until very recently, just this year, is the fourth of those books.
And so in terms of our classroom teaching, we’ve tried to help our students see that the principles and the practices taught in the proclamation are not only religious truths from living prophets, seers and revelators, but they’re also consistent with good research on family processes. Lots of research shows that, for example, highly religious families, folks who take their faith really seriously, tend to have stronger marriages, less divorce, better parent-child relationships, less mental health challenges, more joy and peace and optimism.
There’s lots of benefits that social science research and medical research has now shown so that principles in the proclamation are religious truths and powerful doctrines that can guide our thinking and our actions, but they’re also demonstrated through really high-quality research. And hundreds of good studies document that the kinds of practices that are taught in the family proclamation are really good for couples, really good for families, really good for children. And so it’s nice to have that sense of confidence that a document, kind of modern scripture, is not only sound religiously, it’s also sound from social science research.
And so our research, our now 25 years of studies of about 300 highly religious families from across various faiths, has been part of that. We’ve now published a couple hundred scholarly journal articles in scholarly journals that have contributed to this now literally hundreds, if not thousands, of studies that document that the teachings of living prophets are not just religious truths, not just religious ideals, but also sound guidelines for living marriage and family life in a very challenging world. So our research has been part of that supportive process.
30:06
Mary Richards: So, Loren, what findings from your research most strongly support or align with these principles we’re talking about, the principles in the family proclamation?
Loren Marks: Mary, I love the question. The short answer is we simply don’t have time, because there are so many principles, as Dave was indicating, that our best efforts and the best efforts of many other leading social scientists have shared. In interest of time, I’ll say that we have an American Families of Faith website, americanfamiliesoffaith.byu.edu, and our wonderful outreach director, Laura McKeighen, has put together a document where we walk through the family proclamation with hyperlinks and with each principle, with each paragraph, often each sentence, it’s hyperlinked to work that our team has produced over the past 25 years that supports with rigorous social science research the principles outlined.
And you can find that very easily on the website by just putting “proclamation” in the text box. And it’s a fun journey. To look through those principles you mentioned earlier — even if you just look at faith, prayer, repentance, forgiveness, respect, love, compassion, work, wholesome recreational activities — those nine principles our student teams have spent years looking at some of those concepts, trying to figure out, “How do we do family life well?” And the proclamation, it’s a wealth, it is such a treasure, compressed into one page.
31:41
David Dollahite: And in case any of our listeners are concerned that the kinds of things that are cited there are just long, boring, social science scholarly articles — yes, there are a number of those, although we think that our stuff isn’t boring; we think it’s quite exciting. But we also have a number of articles that have been published in more popular, general-audience publications, for example, Public Square Magazine, the Deseret News, the Church News, other places that are brief, very relevant, personable kinds of articles. So it’s not just a long slog through a bunch of social science data. We’ve also included publications that we hope will be of interest to anyone.
32:30
Mary Richards: And I’ve seen your work cited in the Liahona, all these other places, parenting.ChurchofJesusChrist.org, another resource where, you’re exactly right, where you’re finding all of this backed up by data, but you also have strong testimonies of the prophetic nature of it as well.
Isn’t that interesting how this works in your life? You’re both husbands and fathers, you’re both researchers, but you’re also men of faith too.
32:55
David Dollahite: Well, we try to be, and yes, it’s a beautiful thing that we’ve been able to live our dream and do research and writing on a subject that we care profoundly about, about faith, about family. And it’s been an incredible blessing to get to go into the homes of wonderful families of many faiths and sit with them in their living rooms, around their kitchen tables. And I had the blessing to interview about 60 families with teenage children. So I got to sit with moms and dads and their teenage kids and hear the kids talk about their beliefs and their practices. And it was very encouraging, because it’s easy for people to be discouraged about the younger generations or “those teenagers” or it’s easy for people to be kind of cynical about generations that don’t do things exactly the way that they did things, or that they currently do things.
What I was really blessed to enjoy was sitting there and hearing teenagers talk about how their beliefs and their practices and their identities and their willingness to sacrifice for their beliefs made a big difference in their life and helped them to feel confident and helped them to feel even though the teenage years are stressful and challenging and changing and a lot of sense of peer pressure, so many of these kids were talking about how they found that because they took their faith seriously, because they loved God, because they were willing to stand up for their Muslim or Catholic or Jewish or Latter-day Saint beliefs and standards that, yes, it might make them a little different from their peers, sometimes quite different. And yes, there might be some pressure, and yes, there might be some teasing, but for the most part, most of their peers greatly respected them and helped them to be different and tried to protect them from parties that would be doing things that they wouldn’t want to participate in.
And there was this great sense of security and confidence, which in a teenager is a beautiful and powerful thing, because there’s so many anxieties that are roiling around. And so it was beautiful to watch these kids — sometimes Latter-day Saints think that we’re the only ones living these kind of lives of devotion and of sacrifice. Thankfully, many youth of many faiths are living similar kinds of ways, and it was beautiful to hear these kids talk about how their friends of other faiths who are also trying to take their faith seriously would support them and encourage them and understand them.
So, teenagers who want to live a devoted life of faith, it can be a lonely thing, but there are people doing similar kinds of lives that can serve as friends and supports.
35:58
Mary Richards: I tell that to my two teenagers in high school all the time: “You’re not alone, and get those roots deep if you can, and be strong. And you’re not alone.” And you’re seeing this play out in the research, how protective it is, how it builds that resilience, like we’ve talked about so far.
Yeah, that was me growing up in Missouri. I had friends of different faiths and those who looked out for me. I was so grateful. We became great friends. Those, “Oh, don’t bother Mary. She can’t do that. Just leave her alone.” And they stood up for me.
And all these things that you’ve learned and that you’ve studied and you’ve been with these families, looking forward, what other things do you hope to study involving families? What things are you looking forward to in this research that you’re doing?
36:41
David Dollahite: That’s a great question, Mary. So, we thus far, for more than 25 years, have focused on shared faith marriages and long-term happily married folks who share a faith. And we’ve learned a lot from that, and it’s been helpful, because a lot of research that’s been done for decades has shown that, in fact, highly religious couples who share a faith are much more likely to have happy marriages and lasting marriages. But we didn’t know much about why. We knew that that was the case statistically, but what our research has found out is why. We’ve been talking about that.
Well, we also are well aware that not all couples share a faith, and interfaith marriages are an increasing part of contemporary society, so we’ve now interviewed about 35 couples of interfaith marriages and tried to find out from them what works for them. “How do you navigate serious religious differences? What can you do as a couple to have strengths in your marriage despite religious differences?” So we’ve been publishing about that.
We also are aware that increasingly, people choose not to be religious, and now we’re up to 25-30% of Americans who say that they’re not religious. And so what about when one person is religious in a marriage and the other person is not? How do those couples make that work? And in particular, what happens when a marriage begins with both people on the same page religiously — so they’re both Catholic, or they’re both Latter-day Saint, or they’re both Jewish, they both are believers — and then one person decides it no longer works for them, that they no longer believe, they no longer want to participate in that faith community?
And so we’ve now got a study with people from nine different faith communities who are experiencing religious changes, where one person has had some type of a significant change in their spiritual or religious lives, and then how is that affecting their relationship? So we’ve got data, both quantitative and qualitative data, from people who’ve experienced religious changes, and we’re asking them, “So, when you made this religious change, how do you think that’s affected your spouse, your child, your sibling?” So those are changers.
We’ve interviewed about 800 or 1,200 changers, and then we’ve interviewed loved ones, people whose loved one has made some significant change, and we’ve asked them, “How has that religious change” — when they’ve stopped coming, or they’ve converted to a different faith — “how has that affected you? How has that affected your relationship?” So we’re moving into these more complicated relationship and religion situations where there’s not shared agreement about religion, and what happens when there’s changes, when there’s differences, when there’s maybe conflicts over religion. How do you maintain a strong marriage and family life?
We’re also interviewing, we’ve interviewed now, a number of folks that are not religious and asked them, and they have also very strong marriages. So we’ve asked them, “How do you make your marriage strong without, as many people do, relying on a shared belief or a shared faith community? How do you do that?” And so, that’s where we’re heading now.
40:12
Mary Richards: I’m looking forward to learning more about that research. I know many of our listeners, I know someone in that situation, they might be in it themselves, or a loved one who has that very thing happening. So this will be so interesting to learn more about, and also in the things you’re learning about.
What advice would you give, then, to faith communities trying to support families in today’s environment?
40:35
Loren Marks: It’s difficult for me to convey the love and the respect that Dave and I have for President Russell M. Nelson — as a Prophet, but also as a person of profound wisdom and insight. In 2018, he gave a talk on “Becoming Exemplary Latter-day Saints.” It was intriguing to Dave and to me, because our past 25 years have been spent interviewing exemplary people from a variety of faiths, including our own. And then in the same conference, we were presented by our Prophet with a focus, an emphasis, that we needed to be home-centered and Church-supported.
As we took some time and thought over that next week or so following that conference, we realized that in some ways, President Nelson was talking in a summative way about our 25-year adventure, interviewing exemplary families. And what had got them there? Faith in their home, building faith in their home. For the Jewish families, the sacred Shabbat ritual. We already talked earlier about the Ramadan fast and the power for Muslim families. For Latter-day Saint families, their family home evenings or “Come, Follow Me” discussions or scripture study, family prayer.
And I thought, “This is 25 years of work that our Prophet is summing up in two talks.” And so we’re in a position that’s unique, I think, in that we can say, “Amen. Spiritually, amen, exclamation point.” And in terms of social science, we’ve got 300 diverse families who essentially, in some ways, are saying something very similar to President Nelson: Build faith in your home. Try to model the kind of marriage that you hope your children will have one day. Have a shared family vision. Focus on the Savior in all that you do. And it’s been a blessing to have that modeled for us by families within our faith and outside of our faith, but in exemplary ways.
43:02
David Dollahite: One of the things that we did as a result of that talk, in our thinking about how we might help Latter-day Saint families become a little more home centered in their worship, was we got permission from our stake presidents — me from a local stake president here in Utah, Loren from a stake president in Louisiana — to ask LDS families how they were doing with the “Come, Follow Me,” with the new initiatives to try to be more home and family centered in their worship.
And it was a beautiful experience to hear from about 500 Latter-day Saint families about how that was going for them and what kind of things they were finding was working and what things were not working so well. And so Loren had the idea and led out on a book that we published. And in that book, we report some of the findings from our longtime American Families of Faith Project, and also a lot of insights from Latter-day Saints in Utah and Louisiana about what they’re doing that they feel is working and what challenges and obstacles they’re facing, and how they’re going about trying to overcome those.
And so, our hope is that these kinds of research findings and listening carefully to families of faith that are trying to do their best to bring their faith into their home — because it’s one thing to go to a church building, go to a synagogue or a mosque or a cathedral or a temple or a chapel, as a couple, as a family. It’s another thing to try to bring in meaningful ways, but also in loving, kind ways, faith into the home. In our homes, we’re who we really are. We’re at our best and our, unfortunately, our worst. Our selfishness, our fatigue, our desire to just escape and just veg is part of many people’s home and family life.
So, how do you effectively bring scripture study, prayer, gospel teaching, joy, religious ritual and tradition? How do you bring those things into the home — into a growing family, a changing family, a family with different people, different personalities, different ages, different interests, different levels of belief and faith — how do you do that well? It’s really challenging. And so we, in all of our work, we tried to address ways and tips and sort of positive approaches that families can use to do that.
45:50
Mary Richards: I’ve been so grateful for this discussion as a wife and a mother, as a woman of faith, trying to have that in my own home.
Our last question on the Church News podcast is: What do you know now? And so I want to ask Loren and then Dave: What do you know now about our Heavenly Father’s plan for His children and building strong, resilient families of faith?
46:18
Loren Marks: My takeaway after doing this work for 25 years plus with Dave is that our loving Heavenly Father and Savior have given us an embarrassment of riches. We have been blessed with so much. We have the marvelous work and a wonder of the Book of Mormon, which changed Dave’s life in a day. That’s another story for another time. It changed mine more slowly. We have a profoundly wise Prophet who has had the goodness to model the kinds of things that he’s asking us to do out of love.
In the case of both Dave and myself, we’ve been blessed with the choicest of wives. We live in an area, literally where we’re doing this podcast, where if we wanted to, we could walk on our feet to multiple houses of the Lord. We are in a world that has a lot of darkness, but there is so much light, so much light available to us, that we can draw upon to build wonderful relationships with heaven and with each other that I don’t think we’ve ever stood in a place of greater strength or hope than we do right now.
And to follow up on something that Dave said earlier, the young people that we have the pleasure to interact with in this rising generation, I do not hesitate to say that the best of this group, the best of this generation, are so far ahead, spiritually and relationally, of where we were at that stage, that I have tremendous hope in the future that will grab a hold of this wealth of riches, to connect with heaven, to connect with each other and prepare the world for the millennial reign. Dave?
48:32
David Dollahite: Loren mentioned the Book of Mormon changed my life in a day, and it was a profound change in my life. I was raised in a context that was religious, but I myself was not religious. And I am incredibly grateful for God bringing me to the Restoration through the Book of Mormon. And I’ve now seen enough over 66 years of life, of marriages and families blessed profoundly by faith, both in the faith that I love and are committed, profoundly committed, to myself The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But I’ve also seen God bless His children from various faiths and help them to strengthen their marriages and families through love of Him and devotion to Him.
The family proclamation is an unbelievable modern revelation that came at a perfect time. It came before unbelievable societal changes that have impacted people and couples and families and children. And the proclamation is kind of a Liahona that can guide us through the wilderness of contemporary challenges and the increasing struggles that many people have in believing in God and being involved in a faith community. More and more people that aren’t able to bring themselves to believe, to practice, to observe a faith. And the family proclamation is a perfect combination of revelation about gospel truths, gospel teachings, about our eternal destiny and about our relationship with God and with each other.
And it’s also a beautiful standard holding up the possibility that couples who focus on those nine principles that the proclamation mention and focus on being devoted to Christ and devoted to truth, the strengths that that can bring in a world that is increasingly difficult to make a marriage strong. There are so many forces and distractions that lead people often to places that are not healthy mentally. Social media creates all kinds of concerns for young men and young women. So many kinds of distractions lead people off into places where they’re not connected with God or with their best selves or with their loved ones.
So, the principles and the practices of the family proclamation have been a tremendous light in an increasingly darkened world. And so I am personally incredibly grateful for living prophets, seers and revelators who brought forth the proclamation 30 years ago, and that I’ve observed very closely with my family, with my students, with others that we’ve interviewed and with the world in general, that people who will learn and abide by those principles in the family proclamation give themselves a much better opportunity to have strong marriages and families and to hold themselves together when so many forces are pulling families apart.
52:02
Mary Richards: Thank you for listening to the Church News podcast. I’m Church News reporter Mary Richards. I hope you learned something today about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and had your faith in the Savior increase by looking through the Church News window as a living record of the Restoration. Please subscribe, rate and review this podcast so it can be accessible to more people. And if you enjoyed the messages we shared today, please share the podcast with others. Thanks to our guests; to my producer, KellieAnn Halvorsen; and to others who make this podcast possible. Join us every week for a new episode. Find us on your favorite podcasting channels or with other news and updates about the Church on TheChurchNews.com or on the Church News app.
