Jed Woodworth works in the Church History Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He is also the author of the Revelations in Context essay on Section 89 of the Doctrine and Covenants entitled, “The Word of Wisdom.”
In the early 1830s, the Temperance Movement was in full swing in the United States. Chapters of temperance societies had an undeniable influence on the discourse of the day. The story of the coming forth of the revelation recorded as Section 89 of the Doctrine and Covenants has sometimes failed to take into account how the movement may have been an influence on Joseph Smith and the Saints.
Much like other prophetic revelations, the catalyst for this revelation seems to have come from multiple circumstances. Historical context helps to shed light on the extent to which the Temperance Movement may have been an influence and what that means.
In this episode of the LDS Perspectives Podcast, host Nick Galieti and Jed Woodworth delve into what is often referred to as the “Lord’s Law of Health.”
The LDS Perspectives Podcast
Episode 41: The Word of Wisdom with Jed Woodworth
Nick Galieti: Hello and welcome to this episode of the LDS Perspectives podcast. I’m Nick Galieti, host of this episode, and our guest is Jed Woodworth. Jed Woodworth is a writer in the church history department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Jed earned a PhD in history from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he specialized in colonial and early national America. He wrote a dissertation on the politics of American school reform during the first half of the 19th century.
During graduate school, Jed worked as a research assistant and editor of Richard Bushman’s landmark biography of Joseph Smith, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling. With Reid Neilson, Jed edited a collection of Bushman’s essays called Believing History. He has done historical editing for the history of cartography project, the Joseph Smith Papers project, and BYU Studies. Welcome, Jed. Thank you for coming in and talking with us.
Jed Woodworth: Thank you for having me.
Nick Galieti: Absolutely. You are the author of the Revelations in Context essay on the revelation in section 89 of the Doctrine and Covenants on the Word of Wisdom. How did you get picked to do this essay?
Jed Woodworth: Well, Matt McBride, who runs the web team at the LDS Church History Department, pitched this project on telling revelations from the perspective of story. If we looked at the revelations not as individual sections that had context behind them, but rather tried to group revelations together around a particular story, what would we find? It so happened that D&C 89 was one of the options, and I said, “I would like to do that.”
Nick Galieti: You raised your hand.
Jed Woodworth: I raised my hand, and he said, “Take it.”
Nick Galieti: This essay has a very interesting story. One that is often almost mistold sometimes by some people in our folk narrative, so what is the real setting of D&C 89?
Jed Woodworth: Well, the story begins with a very familiar scene to many Latter-day Saints, and that scene takes place in the Newell Whitney Store in Kirtland, Ohio, where Joseph Smith gathered a group of elders together to teach and instruct prior to their missionary service, and I think this story is interesting to Latter-day Saints because it involves a particular climate that we do not sanction today, namely tobacco spitting, tobacco chewing, smoking tobacco. The image of the prophet of God standing among the elders in a cloud of smoke is fascinating to us, I think, and we want to know, well, first of all, how did that come to be, and then how did that come to end?
We know that story, but as I got into the documents, I found myself more interested in the intersection between that story that we know so well and the larger context outside of Kirtland that had come to influence the way people understood the body and the way they understood the relationship of certain habits to the body.
Nick Galieti: What exactly are we seeing with respect to principles and perhaps even items in the Word of Wisdom specifically discussed in comparison to America at this time? Meaning, even items of personal cleanliness, hygiene, and the temperance movements. How does that come into play in this larger context of D&C 89?
Jed Woodworth: The way we normally understand D&C 89 is to say that the revelation grows out of a concern, and that concern is that the brethren were dirtying the floor with their tobacco spittle, and Emma also figures into this story. Emma Smith, Joseph’s wife, who was charged with cleaning the floor, whether that was an assignment, or whether that was something she chose to do. Her family happened to be living there at the time, Joseph and Emma, and their adopted twins. This is a task that she did. The account that we rely upon for Emma’s cleaning comes from Brigham Young in 1868. He gave a sermon where he referred to Emma complaining about the task. I found out in the course of my research that the account that Brigham Young gave is slightly different from the standard account.
Nick Galieti: How so?
Jed Woodworth: It’s different in that we now have the shorthand notes for that sermon. The shorthand was taken by Brigham Young’s scribe, whose name was George Watt, and there’s a brilliant Pittman shorthand expert, a colleague of mine at the church history department, her name is LaJean Carruth. LaJean has been working with the Pittman shorthand of Watt for many, many … really decades. She’s been working with this and transcribing it, translating it. There are very few people in the world now that know Pittman. They learn a different kind of shorthand in school.
Anyway, what the shorthand says that LeJean has transcribed is that Emma could not make the floor clean. In other words, according to the original, recorded by Watt, it makes Emma less a complainer and more a fastidious homemaker, who is trying very hard to make the floor clean, and she can’t make it clean. So she goes to Joseph and she says, “We need to make a change here.” We don’t know exactly if she asked him to inquire of the Lord. We don’t know whether he started to pray about her concerns, but that is the beginning of a genesis of the revelation.
I think we like that story today. We like the fact that Emma is involved in the reception of a revelation. It turns out that when you investigate the larger culture surrounding health reform and temperance reform in the early 1830s, what you find is a massive interest, it’s very difficult to overstate how much interest there is in reform of the body during this time in America.
The landmark date is 1826 when the American temperance society is formed in Boston. Within five years, there are 5,000 temperance societies across America. Now you have to understand, America at this time only has about 12 million people. Five thousand societies. That’s about one society per 2,500 people, so imagine a town, this is a Utah reference, but imagine a town like Provo having 40 or 50 temperance societies.
Nick Galieti: Big deal.
Jed Woodworth: That’s what we’re talking about. One out of every 12 Americans was a member of this society, and when I say temperance society, what I mean is, these are societies dedicated to either lessening the influence of alcohol consumption on American soil or actually prohibiting alcohol. Many of these people took a temperance pledge where they promised to eliminate alcohol from their diets, and so this was floating around in the air and lots of people were talking about it. Kirtland had a temperance society.
Now temperance, of course, is only one aspect of the Word of Wisdom. There are other aspects mentioned there, but I would say alcohol consumption had the most energy among reformers at that time.
Nick Galieti: You quoted in your essay that there were actual statistics about the number of gallons that the average American drank of what we would call hard alcohol, or hard liquor.
Jed Woodworth: Right.
Nick Galieti: This was something that was double, triple, or quadruple what we’d even see today?
Jed Woodworth: Right. There are good reasons for this alcohol consumption. One of the main reasons is that water was not pure as it is today. If you lived in rural areas, you might find a pure well, but certainly in urban areas like Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, clean water was very hard to get ahold of. This was a time when cities were growing by leaps and bounds, especially large cities were growing exponentially.
Many Americans had to rely on some other form of drink than water. There was a problem with milk as well because there was no refrigeration technique at this time, so milk and water, which are beverages that Latter-day Saints would drink today, were not readily available.
Therefore, the temperance reformers said, “Well, we need to work first on the worst problem, and the worst problem is hard liquor, distilled liquor.” Many of these temperance societies were interested in eliminating that altogether. There was a wider variety on whether beer and wine and other lesser forms of alcohol were acceptable.
Nick Galieti: This is the setting coming into 1833, where Joseph has this revelation. Now, this revelation kind of occurs, or happens in the context more immediately in this school of prophets. Who was in the school of the prophets? What was its function? And perhaps maybe why was that significant to this revelation?
Jed Woodworth: That’s a good question. Today there’s interest in the composition of the School of the Prophets because we’ve become more aware that women and women’s voices are absent from the revelations, largely, and that we would like to see more women. We want to understand, how did women respond, and there have been some who have said women attended the School of the Prophets. It’s true the first day. The first day of the School of the Prophets, some women attended, almost as though it’s a kickoff, it’s a celebration —
Nick Galieti: A reception of sorts.
Jed Woodworth: A reception. But there’s no evidence that women attended after the first day. This was really a missionary preparation school. Now, missionary largely defined today would include women. Women and men go on missions, but in 1833 only men got formal calls to go on missions. They often had duties raising children at this time, and it was not the conception that women could go away for months at a time and preach the way men did.
These are elders who have been called to go east, west, south, north, and to come and get training on the doctrine of the kingdom.
Nick Galieti: And they’re all sitting around chewing tobacco, smoking pipes. You say we don’t know exactly other than Emma’s issue with the floors. Do we know kind of how Joseph actually approached the Lord? Do we know what question he asked? Was it, “Should we still hold the School of the Prophets here or should we move it?” How did this question receive its answer?
Jed Woodworth: We don’t know the exact question, but I think we know enough to imagine what was being asked. The revelations speak of the elders becoming holy, without spot. At the time, part of the rhetoric surrounding tobacco and alcohol involved the filthiness of tobacco, especially the spitting.
Nick Galieti: That’s gross.
Jed Woodworth: Well, from our perspective it was gross.
Nick Galieti: We see it as gross. Yeah.
Jed Woodworth: And at this time Americans, and I think this is … The next essay to be written will have to have a larger context, a larger frame than just America because this is a western European phenomenon as well, and perhaps if I knew the sources in Asia better, perhaps there’s something going on there as well.
There is a very deep current of feeling as though public display of spit, for example, is not what we should be doing. And really, the larger context here, or the larger movement at work, is the gentrification of society at large, where a growing middle class population is now adopting the habits and the customs of the upper classes, and the upper classes for generations had abhorred dirt and grime and so on, and so now more middling people are now starting to feel the same way.
Now, as for Joseph Smith, I quote a source, I believe it’s footnote six, that says Joseph did not use tobacco. There’s some debate about this. Later sources suggest that Joseph may have smoked on occasion. I actually think it’s a mistake to dwell on this question of whether prophets once behaved as we behave today. There are all sorts of cases where if we go back in time we would find a different standard of behavior according to the culture in which one lived. I don’t go to the New Testament and say Jesus drank wine; therefore, I should think less of him.
Nick Galieti: Or that it gives license for us today.
Jed Woodworth: Correct. I think the question really is what is asked of us today? The Lord is going to speak according to our understanding, according to our own language, and if the language of the day in 1833 was to drink alcohol on occasion, mild beer for example, or to use tobacco as a salve for a rotten tooth, which was done on occasion. Brigham Young did that into the 1850s. I don’t think it’s our place to say that that’s our standard. I think the prophets have always said we need to keep our eye on the ball, and the ball being what are the prophets teaching today?
Nick Galieti: Part of that speaks to the evolving nature of revelation and continuing revelation that we see throughout the early church. As they learned something they had to change their practices or whatever that may be. There was always kind of an adjustment period that took place. This idea that everyone came to the church from a variety of backgrounds and variety of teachings and philosophies on religion and life, so we’re going to see that as Joseph presents something, such as the Word of Wisdom, there’s going to be a difference of experience coming to that, of a different way to live it.
Jed Woodworth: Well-said.
Nick Galieti: As we kind of look at other aspects of the Word of Wisdom, there are other things that are talked about. One of those particular things being the term “hot drinks,” which in your essay you talk about hot drinks as being perhaps different than what we may even think of today, or even what it was later clarified to be. What was the role of hot drinks with respect to maybe even this temperance movement?
Jed Woodworth: Well, hot drinks for temperance reformers usually meant coffee and tea, as they mean for Latter-day Saints today, but coffee and tea were actually well-received by reformers because they served as a substitute. Everyone knew that there was some kind of kick. They didn’t know about the exact chemicals in coffee and tea, but they understood that it provided a physiological reaction that was pleasurable for some people. The reformers did try and sell the coffee in particular as a substitute for alcohol. Of course, alcohol and coffee have different reactions to the body, but nonetheless it was framed that way.
Now coffee is one of those things where the Latter-day Saints had a very slow dance with coffee, in getting rid of it. I think it just took time to build up a tradition where absolutely no coffee was the standard, but that was very slow-going. Three generations, sometimes four, and coffee drinking was tolerated well into the Utah territorial period and even later. But then there came a time when several Latter-day Saint leaders, who were crusaders in this respect, namely Heber J. Grant and Francis Marion Lyman, when they really clamped down on this in their preaching and convinced their brethren that there needed to be a more exacting standard.
Just returning to the 1830s context for a minute, Latter-day Saints had their definition of coffee and tea as meaning hot drinks from Hyrum Smith, who is quoted in a Nauvoo discourse saying that hot drinks mean coffee and tea. There were some people … I don’t think Latter-day Saints, at least I’m not aware of the source in this respect, but there were some people at the time who shunned hot drinks because of the effect that it might have on bodily humors, so there was a theory that the optimum working of the body involved various bodily, what were called humors or fluids inside the body. Often there were thought to be four of them, and that if you had or ingested a substance that was too hot that that could disrupt your good health.
Nick Galieti: Like an equilibrium.
Jed Woodworth: Correct. That may have been something that was floating around in the minds of Latter-day Saints. Certainly many others believed that at the time. But there’s nothing in the revelation to suggest that directly. In all of the prescriptions, in fact, it says such-and-such is not good. One of the striking things that I found when I really got into the temperance rhetoric and the health reform rhetoric was the degree to which there were all sorts of justifications made for why alcohol or tobacco, for example, were not good for people. Many of these attempts to persuade were … incited fear … were designed to scare people into not doing these things. The Lord never says that in the revelation. That impressed me on some level, that the Lord just says this is not good. No explanation required. They are not for man.
Nick Galieti: It’s interesting that you bring up this temperance movement that was so strongly against alcohol, but pushed coffee and tea as kind of, I don’t want to call it a gateway, but some weaning off of alcohol in some respects, so within the temperance movement, we see that there are influences perhaps on the Word of Wisdom, at least why there was interest from Joseph to inquire about that, but we also see that in the revelation itself there are things that kind of contradicted or maybe even went beyond to a point from what even was happening in the temperance movement of the time. While there might be an impact, it wasn’t a copy.
Jed Woodworth: Right. I’d like to talk for a minute about revelation and the nature of revelation. For many years, Latter-day Saints never mentioned the temperance reform going on outside of Kirtland, and indeed inside Kirtland. I think that’s because revelation and context traditionally in our church, and this involves historians too, have been separated, and so the relationship between context and revelation has always been one of confusion. What is the influence of the surrounding context on the revelation?
This confusion has taken two forms. One is you either talk about context as a source for the revelation, and often this is … Let’s be honest, anti-Mormons are interested in doing this because they believe that if you find a source for the revelation, then that somehow invalidates it as revelation. You say Joseph was reading in the newspaper, and he found an article that talked about temperance, and then he adopted exactly what he read. Somehow, if you were to find that, such a thing doesn’t exist, but if you found it, the thinking would be that that invalidates the revelation. That’s one approach.
The other approach is not to talk about the context because you’re nervous about it. I look at everything as context. I think context is everywhere. I think this is part of our tradition actually. We haven’t acknowledged it. Look at the First Vision. We don’t understand the First Vision unless we understand the Palmyra context: Joseph Smith’s own questioning, the revivals in the area. To me it’s not frightening in the least to see a hygiene and health reform and temperance movement that is in the air and in the water and in what the Saints were breathing at the time. In fact, it makes it all the more necessary that there be a revelation, but the revelation itself arbitrates between competing claims made in the culture.
My view of culture as grounds that make a revelation intelligible, I think allows me to say we need not be intimidated by the surrounding culture, and there’s always going to be a component that is implicated in the revelation, and that’s fine. We should study, we should explore, and if we found that the prophet had listened to a debate or read something, last time I checked, that’s one way that we can receive revelation. You read something, and you now are—
Nick Galieti: Prompted.
Jed Woodworth: You need to prompt. You’re prompted in a new way. You need some kind of answer.
Nick Galieti: Yeah. Kind of like listening to a podcast. They might be prompted to seek an answer to something.
Jed Woodworth: They might be.
Nick Galieti: We talk about context, and we talk about how it first started back in 1833, but we do see some evolution of the application, the adherence, the interpretation of the Word of Wisdom. How does that application or that interpretation kind of evolve over time? Even to modern day.
Jed Woodworth: I think there’s debate about what a principle, what the promise means. This is the language early in the revelation. It says that this revelation is a principle with a promise, and there’s been debate over the course of our history whether a principle is the same as a commandment, and President Hinckley is on record as having said, “What the Lord gives as advice is just as good as a commandment to me.” I think that there’s some truth in that, that the debate between principle versus commandment is sort of an empty one, but nonetheless, there have been ebbs and flows in the way the Word of Wisdom was enforced.
In Kirtland there was a movement afoot to excommunicate people for tea drinking in the seventies quorum. That it was a really kind of —
Nick Galieti: It’s a pretty hard line.
Jed Woodworth: A hard line that was drawn, but so often it depends on who’s in charge. That was later loosened up. Along the trek west there was a lot of coffee drinking. There was tobacco chewing in the Tabernacle in the 1850s and 1860s, which required Brigham Young to actually say, “If you’re going to spit in the Tabernacle, please bring a spittoon and hit the mark.”
Nick Galieti: It’s funny to picture that when you go to the Tabernacle now.
Jed Woodworth: It’s very, very foreign to our sensibilities now, but these were rough-hewn people, and tobacco chewing was part of the culture out of which they came. They were just learning to adopt the mores of the gentry. As I said earlier, it really required a couple of generations before Mormons saw themselves as refined people who were fit for polite society. But the irony is, by 1920, polite society was smoking more than ever, and by that point, the Latter-day Saints had decided: “We’re going to pull back from that, and our way of fitting into polite society is to be totally upright and sober in every respect.”
It was a way for us to cultivate a new way of being in the world, as we went out into the world after the gathering that was called off, we knew that we needed a way to stand out, to identify ourselves as Latter-day Saints, and the Word of Wisdom became a new form of boundary maintenance, where individuals could go out and actually be defined through their own behavior as opposed to affiliation with a corporation who had certain unusual practices, like plural marriage. Once those unusual practices came to an end, we developed new ways of marking ourselves as Latter-day Saints that allowed individuals to control whether they were Latter-day Saints or not.
Today, of course, there’s no more prominent marker than Word of Wisdom observance. As Latter-day Saints go out, they’re noted as people who do not drink, who do not smoke — we’re clean-living people. Part of what I hope the essay does is it shows that it’s not just the context in the past that matters, but for someone who believes in revelation as we do, it’s the context in the future. I think our historians have not yet really figured this out: a way to write about future context somehow influencing a revelation. It makes us nervous to talk about that because historians are not very good at clairvoyance.
Nick Galieti: It’s not empirical.
Jed Woodworth: It’s not empirical, and yet I think from a believer’s standpoint where we we’re going as a people and as a church is just as important as where we came from.
Nick Galieti: With that being said, the challenge with these revelations and context is to learn from this past experience of the saints, but in a way that we just … We don’t use it as permission for certain behaviors today. We understand that there was, as we talked about before, to kind of swing around, what happened back then in that time doesn’t always apply equally to now, but we do have a way to draw benefit from it, derive some value.
Jed Woodworth: We do. I think that that’s always the fear and one reason why our history has been sanitized in the past is that we were worried about people taking license. I think even today with plural marriage. One of the reasons why it’s not spoken of so frequently is we’re worried about people not only in this country but around the world saying, “Well, if we once did it, then we should be able to practice plural marriage once again.” I understand the concern, and I understand why history sometimes is sanitized. I think we need more empathy for why that happens. It doesn’t always mean that that’s the best way to go. I personally, I would rather teach people the truth and then teach them, or make clear, why God is going to speak one thing in one era and then speak another thing in another era. I think that’s one of the brilliant parts of our church. One of the comforting parts for me is to know that God will always speak the truth, but that he will speak it in the language that I understand, or in the way my ancestors understand it, according to the needs of the time.
The needs of the times change. They change over time. The sooner we come to grips with change over time, the better off we will be in life. Certainly this is a life skill for people who don’t read history, but certainly when you read history, you find change everywhere, and change is not the boogeyman. Change is not scary. It’s just part of life, and I think the sooner we come to accept change, the better off we’ll be.
Nick Galieti: We want to thank you Jed for coming in and talking about your Revelations in Context essay on section 89 of the Doctrine and Covenants on the Word of Wisdom. Thank you for coming in and sharing your history and your insights on this subject.
Jed Woodworth: You’re very welcome.
Disclaimer: LDS Perspectives Podcast is not affiliated with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The opinions expressed on this episode represent the views of the guests and the podcaster alone, and LDS Perspectives Podcast and its parent organization may or may not agree with them. While the ideas presented may vary from traditional understandings or teachings, they in no way reflect criticism of LDS church leaders, policies, or practices.
The post Episode 41: The Word of Wisdom with Jed Woodworth appeared first on LDS Perspectives Podcast.
Continue reading at the original source →