A Revelation and Its Widening Reach

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.