The Word of Wisdom

The Word of Wisdom is a health code of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a set of dietary laws that its members observe as a commandment and a mark of their faith. Originating in a revelation received by the church's founder Joseph Smith in 1833, it counsels against the consumption of certain substances and commends others, and in its present observance it is understood to prohibit alcohol, tobacco, coffee and tea, the last two identified with the "hot drinks" the text forbids, while encouraging the eating of grains, fruits and vegetables and the sparing use of meat. Adherence to the Word of Wisdom is a requirement for full participation in the church, including entry to its temples, and abstinence from alcohol, tobacco, coffee and tea is one of the most visible outward markers distinguishing Latter-day Saints in daily life.

Originally given, the text states, "not by commandment or constraint" but as counsel and a "principle with promise", promising health and hidden knowledge to those who keep it, the Word of Wisdom came over time to be treated as a binding obligation, its observance increasingly required through the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It exemplifies the way a number of religious traditions regulate the body and its appetites as part of the life of faith, treating the care of health and abstention from harmful substances as a religious duty and a form of obedience, and it has often been noted for its apparent anticipation, decades in advance, of modern medical warnings against tobacco and excessive alcohol. For Latter-day Saints its keeping is both a discipline of the body and a sign of covenant faithfulness and communal identity.

The Word of Wisdom began as counsel rather than command. Joseph Smith presented it in 1833 as a revelation given after his wife Emma complained about the mess and smell tobacco left in the room where the church's School of the Prophets met, and the text as recorded frames its dietary rules as sent by greeting and by good will rather than by commandment, a wording nineteenth-century Latter-day Saints did not treat as binding and that many members of the period continued to drink coffee, tea and alcohol without church censure. Its status changed gradually over the following century, driven partly by the American temperance movement, and it became a firm test of membership under church president Heber J. Grant in the 1920s and 1930s, who made observance an explicit requirement for a temple recommend, the credential needed to enter a temple for marriage or other ordinances.

Interpretation has kept moving since. Cola drinks, not mentioned in the original text at all, were debated for decades before church leaders settled on treating their caffeine content as a matter of personal judgement rather than prohibition, a position that still puzzles outsiders given the ban on coffee and tea. The 2019 guidance extending the code explicitly to vaping and to coffee-based drinks shows the same pattern continuing: a text fixed in 1833 is applied to substances and products its author never encountered, through decisions made by the church's governing leadership rather than by any change to the revelation itself.