A focus on families

According to its cover, the book was "written with support from church leaders and counseling professionals by those who have suffered from addiction and who have experienced the miracle of recovery through the Atonement of Jesus Christ." Eight years ago, Riley said, the church asked Family Services to seek out the wide variety of 12-step programs that were being used by local leaders in various locales and bring them all under one umbrella.

"When we first started writing this (handbook), we were told the church would never allow a 12-step program to see the light of day," he said. But a committee comprising professionals from around the country gathered "the best of everything we could find," and "it came out as a 12-step program. I would suggest that this is the best document ever written in relationship to addiction recovery. I think anyone dealing with addiction or other types of repentance issues could be well served by this," Riley said.

While the church expands resources for emotional outreach to members, it has also focused on moral issues in a larger political context, particularly within the past decade, in an attempt to shape local, national and international policy on issues like same-sex marriage. Those efforts followed closely on the heels of the LDS Church's 1995 "Proclamation to the World on the Family," which details the faith's beliefs about gender, family relationships and the responsibilities of men and women to marry and rear children.

Several domestic organizations that lobby the United Nations, known as non-governmental organizations or NGOs, have used the family proclamation as a blueprint for declarations of their own, seeking to garner political support for policies that support the traditional family. Scott Loveless, acting director of an NGO known as the World Family Policy Center at Brigham Young University, said that since its beginning in 1996, the center has sought affiliation with similar organizations looking to protect the natural family — including Catholics, Jews, Muslims, evangelicals and Eastern faith traditions.

While historically suspicious of each other, "we all realize there is a bigger enemy out there common to all of us." The push for policies that denigrates the obligations family members have to one another in favor of individual rights has become the common enemy, Loveless said. Family-friendly organizations fear U.N. resolutions that denigrate family life will become the legal rationale for similar national policies worldwide.

Traditional families are the seedbed for "learning about our obligations and responsibilities to others," he said, adding the push for family-friendly policymaking is fraught not only with politics, but with battles over semantics about what "family" means.