Hank Smith: 00:00:01 Welcome to Follow Him. A weekly podcast dedicated to helping individuals and families with their Come Follow Me Study. I’m Hank Smith.

John Bytheway: 00:00:09 And I’m John Bytheway.

Hank Smith: 00:00:11 We love to learn.

John Bytheway: 00:00:11 We love to laugh.

Hank Smith: 00:00:13 We want to learn and laugh with you.

John Bytheway: 00:00:15 As together, we follow Him.

Hank Smith: 00:00:20 Hello, my friends. Welcome to a new episode of Follow Him. My name is Hank Smith. I am your host. I am here with my marvelous cohost, John Bytheway. Hello, John.

John Bytheway: 00:00:33 You’re supposed to use the list of adjectives I sent you, Hank, that was on there.

Hank Smith: 00:00:36 That marvelous was at the top of the list. I get them from your wife, Kim, not from you. We want to remind everybody to find us on social media on Instagram and on Facebook. If you want to watch the podcast, you can find us on YouTube. Also, if you want show notes where if you’re like, if you think to yourself, I want that quote. Or where did they get that from? You go to followhim.co, followhim.co. And of course, please rate and review the podcast. That helps us out quite a bit. John today’s guest, another brilliant mind from the church that we have the privilege to talk to comes highly recommended from his peers.

John Bytheway: 00:01:18 Oh, we’re delighted to have Jed Woodworth with us. He’s a historian with the church history department and he’s also right now, currently the lead or the managing historian of the book Saints, which I think we’re all reading and really enjoying. Two volumes now, have to ask him if a third is coming someday. Between 2002 and 2004 Jed assisted with the Richard Bushman landmark biography, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling. And he got his PhD from the university of Wisconsin, Madison. Specializes in American educational history. He’s married to former [Shauna Cluth 00:01:57]. They have six children from ages 15 down to one. So, we’re delighted to have him. Thank you for joining us today, Dr. Woodworth.

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 00:02:07 Thank you. I’m happy to be here.

John Bytheway: 00:02:08 Hey, I want to ask you, will there be a third volume of Saints and will the second one, will they come out with a really good looking leather-bound one like they did the first one?

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 00:02:17 Absolutely. Yes. So, volume three is pretty much in the bag. The first half is a translation and the second half is just awaiting the first presidency review. So, it’s pretty much done, but they’ve offered excellent criticism in the past. They’re very careful readers. So, we look forward to getting some comments back from them soon. The volume won’t appear until next spring. And the reason is that we now live in a church where all the languages need to go live at the same time. And so we’re awaiting translation. Saints goes live in 14 languages on the day it comes out in English. So, it won’t be coming out this year. The volume is outstanding. It’s gotten great reviews by our internal readers. And so I’m just hold on, it’s coming.

John Bytheway: 00:03:16 What a wonderful project. Thank you for working on that. We’ve enjoyed it.

Hank Smith: 00:03:19 If someone hasn’t read the two volumes that are available on Saints, I don’t know what we can do, John and I, and I’m sure Dr. Woodworth would say the same thing, to encourage you to take advantage of this. It is worth your time. Maybe it’s the idea that we get it for free that we think, oh, well they must be like a manual. It is special.

John Bytheway: 00:03:41 Yeah, and you can listen to it. My wife listens to it as she’s getting ready sometimes. And so you can, it’s never been easier.

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 00:03:49 Right. I would like to make a plug for a different part of Saints that many people I find do not know anything about. So, if you go to your gospel library app, there is an icon that says church history and restoration, and you click on that. It’s a profile of Joseph Smith or used to be, they may have changed it, but you click on that. And at the top, you’ll see Saints volume one, you’ll see Saints volume two. And you’ll also see an icon that says church history topics. And church history topics means that there is a special essay written on over 100 different topics. And we’ve conceptualized that as a deep dive into topics that we know people will be interested in, that we don’t have time to stop and linger in the writing of Saints, because Saints is a narrative history and narrative histories need to go at a brisk pace.

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 00:04:50 So, these are things like the angel Moroni or gold plates or sear stones, or what, politics like 19th century politics. And so if people are wondering, well, where do I get the detail that I want on other topics? I tell them to go there. You can find the list. If you look in the footnotes of saints, these topics are noted by a bold heading. It says church history topic, and then the subject. And so many people don’t know anything about these topics. There are also a number of videos that we’ve made that are outstanding. I’m sure you’ve shown some of these to your students. So, there’s a large apparatus of content that isn’t on the running text. Isn’t in the regular texts that you read that is connected with Saints, it’s still outstanding.

Hank Smith: 00:05:50 One of my favorite part parts of the, and this is just kind of the want to be historian in me, is I like to go read the sources cited and just see everything and just read some of these papers and journal entries. And you can really go to the sources themselves and read. And it’s just, man, as a historian, that’s got to be pretty fun to have all that at your fingertips.

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 00:06:18 Right, it is. And Hank, I’m sure you read online. You see that in the footnotes, you can click on a hypertext and any document that the church history library houses or owns, you can read the original. So, this is another advantage over the paper copy is all of those texts have been digitized. So, if you want to have a different reading experience, read Saints online.

John Bytheway: 00:06:48 We say so many times, Hank, don’t we, that it has never been easier with all of these resources that are as close as our phone to really learn this stuff. So, it’s a great time to live.

Hank Smith: 00:07:02 Dr. Woodworth our lesson this week is on four sections of the Doctrine and Covenants. A famous one, Doctrine and Covenant section 89. And then you have also sections 90, 91 and 92. So, it’s February of 1833. The church is coming up on its third year anniversary. So, take us back as far as you want and set us up for the context. What’s happening that leads to section 89 and these next revelations?

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 00:07:34 Well, thank you very much. So, in December of 1832, the Lord says, and the revelation we now know is section 88, that he wants the saints and Kirtland to build a temple and a school. And the school begins that winter, the temple is going to take a number of months to get going. But Joseph Smith almost immediately convenes a school, which you can think of it as the first missionary training center. These are elders older than our current elders today, who are being called into the field and they need training and instruction. And so he assembles them together in the Newell K. Whitney storehouse, where many of the revelations were received and they meet in the back room on the main floor. And there are basically two contexts for D&C 89. One is a large context. And one is a small context. The large context is the problem of drunkenness in America.

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 00:08:36 This was a huge problem in the 1820s. In fact, by 1830, the per capita drinking rate in the United States was higher than at any other time in our history, even today. In fact, by three times today. So, historians have shown that the average person drank seven gallons of alcohol per year. Now, if you know what a gallon jug is like, that’s a huge amount, and this is man woman and child. And so this was a large problem in America. And part of this, part of the reason for the problem is that the alternatives to alcohol were not very good. So, impure drinking water, bad milk. Commoditization had not yet been discovered. And there was problems with meat eating because there was no refrigeration, you couldn’t keep meat fresh. And so as a result of these problems, there was a dietary and temperance reform movement going on in the early 1830s.

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 00:09:49 In fact, there was a temperance society in Kirtland that the saints came into. So, they didn’t found it. It was already there when they moved to Kirtland. So, this is the large context with a lot of different swirling propositions for reform in the air. This small context we all know about, which is that when Joseph stood up to teach in the school of the prophets, it’s a very small room, if you’ve been into the store. And there are probably 20 men in the room, there was at least one woman who was there on the first day. But all the accounts that we have say that it was men who were going on their missions. And as soon as he started talking, teaching them, they would put tobacco in their pipes and began smoking. Some of them would chew tobacco and spit it on the floor.

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 00:10:44 And according to a later account from Brigham Young, who is not in the room by the way, but he learned this from participants. Emma complained to Joseph that she could not clean the floor. Now, I’ll tell you just a sidelight on this. So, my colleague LaJean Carruth, she is one of the few people in the world who know Pitman shorthand, which is no longer taught in American colleges or high schools. So, it’s really a 19th century shorthand that no one knows much about. Well, we have the sermon where Brigham Young talked about Emma complaining.

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 00:11:24 And in the published version, in the journal of discourses, it just makes it sound like Emma is upset that she has to clean this mess, but LaJean Carruth read the shorthand of the sermon, the unpublished shorthand, and found that in the shorthand, it actually says that Emma was upset that she could not get the floor clean, that she tried with some hired girls to clean the floor and that she wasn’t able to get it clean. So, in the shorthand, it makes Emma look more like a perfectionist and less like a complainer. And so I found that detail interesting.

Hank Smith: 00:12:01 That is interesting.

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 00:12:02 About the context. So, basically we have this problem where you have the Lord’s prophet. Who’s trying to teach profound spiritual truths in like a Gandalf cloud of smoke circles. And this is a contradiction. I mean, I think today we can see that, that it muddles the message. So, as a result of that, Joseph prays and receives this revelation, there are several who were with him at the time he receives it. It was received in the evening. And that’s pretty much the context of a local and a global context.

John Bytheway: 00:12:48 I’m intrigued by what you said about alcohol. Maybe it was safer than the water back then. And when I served my mission in the Philippines, and it was almost a mission rule to go buy a soft drink, so to stay hydrated because it was so hot. And not to drink the water. But if you’re out and you’re really hot, go buy a bottle of pop on a Sunday even, because you’ve got to stay hydrated and the water, if you just get water from somebody off the street, this is before bottled water was so prevalent, but that was interesting that you said the alcohol, there weren’t a lot of other alternatives. Is that how you put it?

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 00:13:27 The alternatives were not safe. It was a huge problem. And people could see it. They could see families being disrupted, marriages being broken up, and a number of reformers really rooted in Boston formed the American Temperance Society in 1826. And that society was committed to teetotaling namely, total abstinence of alcohol. And so part of the society was to go around and get pledges from people of who would be willing to totally give up alcohol. So, this was a plank that was floating around. But I’d like to talk more later about the competition of these planks. And I think one of the things that this revelation does is it helps people to arbitrate between competing claims.

Hank Smith: 00:14:21 Yeah. I was going to say, if you’re into the Temperance movement, what options are you offering? I promise to not drink alcohol, what are my options now?

John Bytheway: 00:14:34 Part-time temperance?

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 00:14:36 I mean, most alarming for us today is that children were drinking. Children would drink all day sometimes. This would be their apple juice or their whatever, ice water, and to see kids … And of course, addiction was not well understood there in this time period, but it could be seen that you just keep going back to the barrel.

Hank Smith: 00:15:03 You become dependent.

John Bytheway: 00:15:04 I love that. The backstory always makes things so interesting. And to know that backdrop for section 89 is wonderful. Let’s jump into the actual verses here. What would you like us to see here? What can we talk about?

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 00:15:18 I’m wondering if we should talk about principles. The first one that stands out to me is something that I think is easily overlooked, which is that we should expect revelation to rebuke our bad behavior from time to time. So, the Doctrine and Covenants, as we know, is a compilation of revelation and each revelation has its own history. It has its own Genesis, what brings us about. And I think we tend to imagine that many of these questions that generate the revelations are intellectual questions. Think, for example, of Joseph and Sidney pondering John five, and that results in Doctrine and Covenants 76 or Joseph asking what happened to John the beloved? And you get D&C seven. Or Joseph, once again, Joseph and Oliver pondering [inaudible 00:16:15] 11, and the meaning of priesthood and out of that comes D&C 13 in the words from John the Baptist and so on.

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 00:16:23 But there is another kind of revelation. And this one is one of those. And that is, the saints are doing something that is harmful and they don’t recognize the harm and they need the Lord’s voice to correct them. And so in this revelation, this is much like D&C 50, where there’s an excess of spiritual gifts, and the saints are not practicing soundly in this area of spiritual gifts. So, we shouldn’t be surprised if the prophet calls out our behavior today. This is a point that really stands out to me. The prophet is there to help reel us back in against our worst instincts.

Hank Smith: 00:17:05 We shouldn’t assume we’re doing everything correctly.

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 00:17:08 That’s right. Now, I would add though, another point that stands out to me in this section is that we can rebuke without rebuking. We can rebuke without rebuking. And here’s what I mean by this. The individuals who are offending here are not called out. The revelation doesn’t condemn chewing and spitting. It doesn’t talk about the people who are smoking pipes. It doesn’t rebuke Emma for complaining. What it does simply is it says tobacco is not good, or alcohol is not for the use of man. And so that is a gentle rebuke without condemning the specifics of the behavior. It’s like saying anger is not good, when really what we’re trying to say is don’t pull your sister’s hair. The Lord doesn’t have to say, don’t pull your sister’s hair to make …

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 00:18:03 … the Lord doesn’t have to say don’t pull your sister’s hair to make the point. And so the level of generalization here, I think, is instructive for us. We can teach correct principles without directly condemning offending behavior. And Zebedee Coltrane, who was one of the participants in the school, said that when Joseph read the revelation to the men, many of them immediately broke their pipes and threw them into the fire. So they recognized the behavior that was being condemned, even though it wasn’t directly spoken of. There was no mention of pipes in the revelation, but they were able to discern, this is what needs to come. This change in behavior needs to come out of the implications of the revelation.

Hank Smith: 00:18:51 That’s fantastic.

John Bytheway: 00:18:53 Yeah. That’s an application of a principle, right? Here’s the general principle and they’re applying it.

Hank Smith: 00:19:00 And it teaches me how to be a better parent.

John Bytheway: 00:19:04 Yeah. The rebuking without rebuking. Let’s glorify the principle instead of that was a bad behavior.

Hank Smith: 00:19:10 Let’s not harp on the behavior. Let’s teach these principles. And the Lord is very… I’ve noticed the Lord doesn’t get really emotional when people do things wrong, right? Like I do as a parent. Sometimes I parent out of emotion. But the Lord seems very calm and collected here. He’s just, let me give you some advice. Let me give you some counsel.

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 00:19:32 Right. Well, I think we learned something from that, Hank. Revelation requires trust. It doesn’t necessarily require scaring. And this is true of parenting as well. When I looked into the temperance literature in the 1820s and 30s, what I found was a lot of scary stories. There were a lot of horror stories where the object of the writer is to scare people into changing. To terrify them that this could happen to them. Like if you were an addict, dot dot dot, you’re going to turn into a wife beater or your home will be destroyed. But all of that is absent in D&C 89. There’s no attempt to scare the reader into changing his behavior or her behavior. The document is incredibly confident and self-assured. It just says, this is not good. And I love that about it. I love the simplicity of it and the lack of larding down with, here are all the reasons why you should do what I’m saying.

John Bytheway: 00:20:40 I have a question about just the phrase. It’s become so much of our jargon now, we don’t think about it, but word of wisdom. Is that like… Because he says not by way of commandment. So is it like, well, here’s a word to the wise? Because now it’s become its own noun. The word of wisdom. But was that a common phrase back then? Or is that what it meant? A word to the wise?

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 00:21:06 Right. Well, it’s a good question. I think it would require us to search for that phrase I admire about the revelation. I call it the spandex principle. So spandex adjusts for the size and shape of the moment. Constricts or expands, right? We all know this from our experience. Fills the space. Okay. I’ve got the funny men laughing. That’s a good sign.

Hank Smith: 00:21:38 I love the spandex principle. Keep going.

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 00:21:40 Yeah. Okay. So the spandex principle has to do with these phrases we’ve been talking about. That something’s not good or it’s not for the body. Now, note that the Lord here does not use a more rigid language. Thou shalt not. And that’s important because this is a culture that really is not prepared for thou shalt not for the reasons we’ve already articulated. They don’t have many options. And if you say thou shall not, you’re really condemning people to sickness and probably early death. And yet, the flexibility in this language allows the saints to understand the word of wisdom in moderate terms. We know in the 19th century that the saints condemned drunkenness, so excess use of alcohol. But a moderate use, if you had a glass of wine or a glass of beer on occasion, was not condemned. And you were not prohibited from, say, serving in the church or going to the temple if you were a moderate drinker.

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 00:22:49 But when science caught up, the science was not up on how to purify water or milk or how to refrigerate. When science caught up, then the language became more strict. And the this is not good for you became more of a thou shalt not command. And that’s where we are today, essentially. Because we have many options available to us, we have refrigerators where we can keep different kinds of beverages, grape juice doesn’t have to turn into alcohol because we can keep it refrigerated, we now have a more strict standard. And so I love this about the revelation. I love the fact that the language allows for a 19th century more moderate interpretation, but it also allows for a more strict interpretation. And that couldn’t be the case. If the language was strict from the beginning.

Hank Smith: 00:23:49 That’s a beautiful idea. It reminds me of the parables. We mentioned this earlier before we started. The parables of Jesus are timeless because they’re so flexible in the principles they teach. And I love that section 89 lines right up with that same idea that this is not just a revelation for 1833, but it’s going to be useful in 2021 as well because of the way it’s going to be worded.

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 00:24:19 Right. And there’s another principle, I think, that comes out of this, Hank, based on what you just observed, and that is revelation can be anticipatory. So it’s not just the case that revelation is responding to the immediate context. So when you asked at the beginning, what is the context of this revelation? The assumption here is, tell me about the past. What is the immediate past? And that thinking is that the past informs the revelation. Well, but the future context can also inform why a revelation comes. And we see this in the phrase right at the beginning. And consequence of evils and designs which do and will exist in the hearts of conspiring men in the last days. A wonderful phrase.

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 00:25:05 I am confident that the saints had no idea who the conspiring men were in 1833. But by the late 20th century, it had become clear that tobacco companies knew that smoking caused cancer long before the US Surgeon General proclaimed such in, I think, 1963. And we learned from class action lawsuits that were carried out against these tobacco companies, it was revealed that they had known that smoking was harmful. And yet, they held it down. And so we sometimes limit revelation to answering the immediate problem. But sometimes the immediate problem is 100 years away, maybe 150 years away. 

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 00:26:04 Well, the main point I wanted to make is that the relevance of this idea of revelation as anticipatory is found in current advertising. So the Marlboro man, which was a thing when we were young, we know that iconic image of the cool hip cowboy who’s smoking Marlboros. That was designed to make smoking look like something everyone wanted to do. And so it minimized the risks by saying, well, if you want to be like this guy, then you should smoke. But today, we still see that in alcohol advertising. I can’t watch an NBA game without having to instruct my children, now, look what they’re doing here. They’re divorcing the consequence from the behavior. They want alcohol to look totally carefree. You can go on the beach and have a party and you can be forever young and your body-

Hank Smith: 00:27:20 You’re beautiful. Yeah.

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 00:27:23 So we see that this revelation is perpetually relevant. It’s not an 1833 document that is just confined to, say, a temperance problem in early America. It’s still with us. The problem is still with us. And so therefore, we should heed the document.

John Bytheway: 00:27:41 Oh, I love what you said. You call it an anticipatory. You look at two phrases in verse four, which do and will exist. That’s future. So I’ve warned you and forewarned you. Again, for the future. I marked both of those two saying, look, this is… What’d you call it? Anticipatory revelation?

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 00:28:02 Yes. The Lord loves alliteration. And for your editors who always want to cut your most beautiful alliterative phrases, you can just tell them, God is a lover of alliteration.

Hank Smith: 00:28:15 He likes alliteration.

John Bytheway: 00:28:17 Yeah. Point to that right there.

Hank Smith: 00:28:19 Treasure the truth. I don’t want to… Well, all of our listeners… 99% of our listeners agree with us on this. So I would just say the amount of damage alcohol has caused in this world is innumerable. It is vast. If you look at crime in the world, almost, I would say from what I’ve read, you’re definitely in the majority of crime exists… I shouldn’t say exists. Has something to do with alcohol. Somebody got drunk and made terrible decisions. And so this-

John Bytheway: 00:29:08 Hank, I think… I cut you off, but I’m going to back up your comment.

Hank Smith: 00:29:15 Go ahead. Back it up.

John Bytheway: 00:29:18 Hank, I think I’ve mentioned before on here that the guy in my ward that’s a addiction recovery missionary, and he’s taken me out to the prison a few times. And the first time I went and sat in a gym with a bunch of these inmates, before I gave my talk, I said, “Steve, why are they all here?” And his answer was, “95% of them are here for drug addiction, alcohol addiction, maybe prescription drug addiction, and crimes committed while under the influence.” And I just remember going, oh. So much happens when you’re under the influence. You’re not in your best mind. And so the abuse of some of these things is… And now all these guys… The reason I asked him the question, I’m looking out on some of these prisoners, these inmates, and they look like guys in your ward. And it like, “Steve, why are they here?” It was very interesting.

Hank Smith: 00:30:14 I did a fireside youth conference out in South Bend once, Indiana, and there was a man there who was a lawyer for the state, a prosecutioner. And he said that nine out of 10 of every crimes he has to, in this college town, nine out of 10 of every crime he has to prosecute has something to do with alcohol. A fight, a burglary, it had something to do with substance abuse and someone committing a crime while under the influence, or wanting to get money to become under the influence. So when the Lord says in consequences of evil designs, which do and will exist in the hearts of conspiring men, I just think, this is a landmark revelation that, if followed, would probably rid the world of a third or more of its problems.

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 00:31:20 So I’d like to make a comment on that, which is, the church is less than three years old at this time. And yet from a large macro level view, the ambition of this revelation is to announce that the church is a world religion. And let me explain what I mean by that. The revelation exposes a weakness in Christianity. Namely, there is no health code. There is no prohibition against alcohol. The Puritans loved alcohol. They called it the good creature of God. And now, they didn’t love drunkenness. Let me say that again. They didn’t love drunkenness, but alcohol was permitted, even among the Puritans. Now, Catholics, of course, allowed alcohol. You could give it away for Lent, or they had other reasons to not have it periodically, but it wasn’t prohibited.

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 00:32:19 And so the reform movement going on in America at this time was really coming into a vacuum that the Christian ministers and Christian doctrine was not filling. And so by announcing that alcohol is not good or strong drink is not good, our restored Christianity then, I will call it Mormonism, it becomes closer to other world religions that do have a prohibitory… Let me say that again. It becomes closer to other world religions that have a prohibition against alcohol, namely Islam. And Judaism has a health code. There are other Eastern religions. Sikhism, Hinduism prohibit alcohol to some degree and meat eating. So these other world religions have some kind of all encompassing code. That is, it’s not just about the spiritual, it’s the physical and the spiritual merge together.

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 00:33:25 But Christianity, as it came to Joseph Smith and the other early converts, it did not have this. It had been reduced to something like a sermon on Sunday and good behavior during the week, but it wasn’t all encompassing. So there’s a great ambition in the revelation that I admire and that marks us as coming onto a world stage.

Hank Smith: 00:33:51 I really like that. It reminds me of section 20, where the Lord gives all these instructions to a whole house full of members, as if it’s going to get bigger. Because he’s saying, I want you to visit the house of every member. And they’re saying, well, there’s six of us. It’s not that hard. We visit each other. But the Lord has something much bigger in mind, and so section 89 does seem to be ambitious in that way. I like that. We’ve got an anticipatory revelation, now an ambitious revelation.

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 00:34:23 And let me accent the ambitiousness of it by pointing out something in the very beginning. In the first verse, look at who is this revelation addressed to? It says for the benefit of the council of high priest. Now, that should not surprise us. Many revelations are addressed to the elders of my church or the high priests. But then it goes in a direction that is not often seen in the revelations. And the church, meaning the saints in Kirtland. And the church would include everyone, right? Men, women, and children. Even those who are not on the council of high priests, in other words. And the saints in Zion, meaning in Missouri. So you’ve got an attempt here to be all encompassing.

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 00:35:18 Then you go over to verse three. And what do you find? That it’s adapted to the weak, which is fascinating. You can ask yourself, who are the weak? Well, the weak would be children, the weak would be aged people, sick people. The Lord is saying this law can be lived by everyone. This is such an important point. No one is immune from this. No one can say I can’t live this. And so that’s part of the ambition. And not just that, oh, the restored gospel is now going to have a health code to it that Christianity didn’t have-

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 00:36:03 … health code to it that Christianity didn’t have, but rather we want everyone to be living this, the Lord is saying.

Hank Smith: 00:36:10 Yeah. Jed, I think it might surprise some of our listeners to find out that this was not a commandment in verse two in 1833, and yet it becomes what you would say as a commandment later on. What do we know about that process? And I think you alluded to it when you said, listen, if the Lord throws this as a commandment, they are not prepared for that. So it shows us how merciful the Lord is that he understands if I were to throw this out as a commandment, most of you would be condemned because you just couldn’t do it. So, do we know how it eventually becomes what we know today?

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 00:36:57 We do know the basic outlines. And so, I’ll highlight some of those features. We know that if someone wanted to live the Word of Wisdom as it is currently live, that is with exactness, that they would be welcome to do so, and they would not be shunned. No one would say, oh, you’re being so austere. But that at the same time, if someone wanted to, this is… When I say someone I’m talking about in Kirtland, Missouri, the Nauvoo period. If someone wanted to live in a moderate way, it wouldn’t have stood out to the austere people. Oh, well, you’re not living it the way it should be lived. In other words, there was a lack of judgment for probably a generation. However, those who in our current language broke the Word of Wisdom, there was a sense that they could be doing better. So on the Trail West, coffee was had in the morning, but there are some indications that not everyone wanted to drink coffee.

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 00:38:03 And that this was something that a person could feel bad about drinking coffee, but it was not prohibited. See, in a voluntary organization, there are limits on what you can do. If someone is not keeping the commandments as taught by the leaders of the church, what can you do? What are the options? Well, you can say, you’re not going to be able to hold a calling or a high church calling. We’re not going to put you in a position of leadership. And most tellingly, it would be, we’re not going to allow you to attend the temple. So, you have to pass a worthiness interview. Now there were worthiness interviews in the 19th century, but they weren’t strict. And not until the Heber J. Grant administration about 1920 and 1921 did the loop close to a point where if you could not affirm that you were keeping the Word of Wisdom exactly, then you were capturing the temple. Prior to that time-

Hank Smith: 00:39:08 What year was that? What year did you-

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 00:39:12 1921.

Hank Smith: 00:39:13 Okay. I just wanted to make a note of that.

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 00:39:17 And prior to that time, when President Joseph F. Smith, who was President Grant’s predecessor was asked, he was asked this question once, if a little old man comes to the doors of the temple who has been faithful all of his adult life, has been a regular temple goer, but smells of tobacco, do we let him in? And he answered the question, yes, you let him in. But by the 1920s, that case had closed. So now, if the man was not keeping the Word of Wisdom exactly, he would be turned away from the temple doors. So again, this is something that makes sense how over time when the option’s multiplied for healthy drinking, by healthy drinking I mean non-alcoholic beverages, then you now have the ability to say, look, you really don’t have to drink. But there’s another point I’d like to make about this, and which is that I used the word austere earlier.

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 00:40:26 The fact that in the modern time, in the 20th century, and now the 21st century, Latter-day Saints have been identified with the Word of Wisdom. It creates a little distance between us and our fellows. But the point is that now the Word of Wisdom is a marker of division or of special covenant separation. And it wasn’t in the 19th century, but it is today, it’s taken the place of plural marriage in that regard. Plural marriage in the 19th century was the way that Saints were identified as being separate. When plural marriage receded, the Word of Wisdom arose to fill that space of boundary maintenance. So I happen to think that it’s totally inspired that I don’t think anyone plot it out. Oh, we need a new marker of boundary maintenance. What is that going to be? Let’s make it the Word of Wisdom. It didn’t work that way. But in actual fact, that has what has materialized is the Word of Wisdom has become the primary marker of separation of covenantal separation of the Latter-day Saints from the rest of the world.

Hank Smith: 00:41:44 The idea of Exodus I think, a peculiar people, right? A separated people.

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 00:41:54 Right. And in that respect though, it speaks to the failure of temperance reform. Temperance reform acted as a burst, really burst. The burst was 10 years. And if you had made a pledge in the 1820s or ’30s, you might’ve kept it into the 1850s. But the reality was that prohibition failed. I mean, in the 20th century, there was a period of about 15 years where alcohol was prohibited, but that failed. And now of course, we see alcohol is everywhere. It’s on college campuses to an alarming degree. And we are back to an alcoholic nation in a lot of respects, but because we have our dietary code and the alcohol prohibition rooted in revelation, that allows us to be grounded in something that is not just transitory. It’s not just a reform that comes and goes with people who are aggressive in their reform impulse, because we just have it in the text and it’s going to remain as a part of the fabric of who we are.

John Bytheway: 00:43:09 Yeah. This has been great talking about alcohol. And I wonder, could we talk about some of the other things in here like hot drinks? Like, what if you heat up your Dr Pepper? Can we talk about that? And I would love to hear some of the backdrop for that as well back in this time.

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 00:43:31 Yeah, sure. So one of the concerns at this time among Americans generally, mainly educated people was there was a concern that if you drank something that is hot, that it might lead you to be more susceptible to disease. So at this time cholera, which today is we don’t hear much about cholera, but it was a huge epidemic. And there were cholera outbreaks in Europe and around the world. And in 1831 and 32, there was a cholera epidemic in the United States. We know the Zion’s Camp ended with cholera, basically breaking up the camps. So it did affect the Saints in that way. But cholera was a scourge that reformers were trying to get rid of. And they argued that if you changed your diet and you ate well, and part of the plank was no meat and no hot drinks, that all would be well with you.

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 00:44:34 So this was something that the Saints would have been thinking about, but there was also a problem here. And that was that many reformers were putting forward coffee and tea as a substitute for alcohol. Many people don’t realize that coffee drinking had a beginning in this country. And it really took off in the 1830s as a substitute for alcohol. Now, tea drinking was out of favor because it was considered British. And the British were persona non grata in the 1830s, mainly because they had started two wars with us. And so tea wasn’t as popular, but coffee being a hot drink was ranted afoul of, well, if I don’t drink alcohol, what am I going to drink instead? Well, let’s drink coffee. Well here, the Lord basically rejects both. Now notice that hot drinks are not specified, so there’s no mention of coffee or tea.

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 00:45:37 And this, I think leads to another principle about revelation, which is that revelation demands more revelation, revelation demands clarification, interpretation. So by Nauvoo, Hyrum Smith defined hot drinks as tea and coffee. And it’s basically remained that to the current day. So, we should not be surprised back to the idea of the revelation being flexible. If there are going to be additions to it, we know harmful drugs has been added to it in the 20th century. There is some talk about other elements like energy drinks being added. I mean, not added, but discussed as being prohibited by the Word of Wisdom.

Hank Smith: 00:46:26 Jed, there’s an interesting set of verses 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, that talks about meat and meat eating. What did that mean to the Saints in the 1830s? What do you think it means for us today?

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 00:46:37 Well, as I mentioned earlier, there was a problem with bad meat, meat spoiling in this era. And it’s unclear to me whether people understood how long meat lasted. It may be the case that many people lack the education to know that what we had here was spoilage. I mean, we know that germs were not understood until really the 1870s and 1880s. So, there’s a lot of stuff that we know today that we can’t take for granted for this people. And so, there is the Lord coming to the rescue in a way in these verses. I love what the Lord says here. He uses the word sparingly about beasts and eating flesh. Now, today we automatically interpret sparingly in light of science. We say, well, red meat is bad for you because it adds cholesterol to your bloodstream and so on. And that’s great. That’s part of the flexibility, the spandex principle that I was talking about earlier.

Hank Smith: 00:47:41 I’m going to be quoting that principle for a long time. That’s been [crosstalk 00:47:46].

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 00:47:45 Great. Fantastic.

John Bytheway: 00:47:46 I’m not going to wear it, but I might talk about it. Yeah.

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 00:47:49 So, we’re like sparingly means different things to different people according to when they live. So in this era, sparingly would be, you can eat meat at a time when meat is safe, namely in the winter when there is cold. Once again, I’m not clear on whether they understood that meat actually preserved in the winter, but they did know that people didn’t get as sick from eating meat in the winter because they could observe that meat eaters were tended to be healthier in the winter than in the summer. So that’s why the Lord would be saying, you eat in times of winter or cold or famine, namely times when you need it, when you absolutely have to have meat, or when it can be preserved. Now, as I mentioned earlier about refrigeration, I think one of the reasons why we haven’t attended to this provision in the Word of Wisdom in the 20th century is because we do have the ability to refrigerate meat in times of summer, in times when it otherwise might spoil.

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 00:49:02 So there hasn’t been the impulse to limit flesh eating, but we do know that there are different kinds of meat that offer different health benefits and deficits. And so, not all meat is equal. And so, I think we’re just allowed to understand this passage in the revelation what we will. We should always be paying attention to how the brethren interpret the passage. And I think there could come a time when limitations on world’s supply of meat. I mean, I don’t know if you’ve been paying attention recently to cyber attacks on meat, but meat supply is down. So, it could be that this passage emerges as more of a point of discussion in the future.

Hank Smith: 00:49:54 I think this is a good time for me to mention Andy’s article. I just want people to be aware of it because I found it so interesting. Let me say in verse 14, right at the end, there’s a phrase that the Lord says, “And the fowls of heaven, and all the wild animals that run or creep on the earth; These hath God made for the use of man.” And he talks about only in times of famine and excess of hunger. Well, there’s an article written in 2018 by a friend of ours. His name is Andrew Hedges. The title of the article is called A Forbearance of Restraint, and then American Wildlife and the Word of Wisdom. It talks about… Basically the essence of Andy’s research, Dr. Hedges’ research here is what hunting looked like from 1560 to 1833. I mean, he did a lot of research for this article.

Hank Smith: 00:50:57 And he says that the idea that Joseph Smith is bringing up here is very counter to the time. I’ll just read this quote. “Joseph Smith recorded the Word of Wisdom at a significant point in the history of American wildlife. For over 200 years, colonists, settlers and citizens had shot, trapped, ensnared an incredible variety of wild birds and mammals in their midst. They had used them as regular easily obtained sources of food, both for themselves and their animals, as well as sources for clothing and trade items. Americans has also pursued them as pests, hunted them for recreation. Hunting had been largely unregulated with the result that incredible numbers of some species appear to have been regularly killed.” He talks about how in the 1500s, explorers talk about the North America and the vast amount of wildlife that’s just unbelievable in their journals. And by Joseph Smith’s day, at least on the Eastern side of the country, they’re rarely see, rarely around.

Hank Smith: 00:52:07 And the idea Andy says is that people said, well, when we run out here, we’ll just keep moving west. There’s always more out to the west. The article isn’t anti-hunting by any means, but he does say that Joseph Smith comes up with this idea of almost the idea of stewardship over the earth and the wild animals of the earth, that this is kind of a counter-cultural idea that God has made these for the use of man, but it’s supposed to be in moderation, right? The Lord uses the word sparingly like you said, Jed. So again, anybody who wants to read the article, you can find it online for free, Andrew Hedges. He also did a ‎Y Religion podcast on it that I would recommend called Wildlife & The Word of Wisdom in August of 2020. Anyway, I just want to give a shout out to Andrew Hedges and the incredible work he did there. And I find it really fascinating that he’s looked at something that really hasn’t been looked at before.

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 00:53:16 Well, an afterthought on what you’re saying there, Hank, I think on the issue of meat, the Doctrine and Covenants 89 really is a moderate view, I think you used that word. The popular reform plank at that time was vegetarianism. So no eating of meat and that if you ate meat at any time, that would disturb your bowels and upset your ability to withstand illness. And of course, the non-reformed plank would be, you can just kill as many animals as you want and eat meat 24/7, and not even worry about it. We now know scientifically that’s untenable not only for your…

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 00:54:03 … untenable, not only for the standpoint of your, the health of your own body, but the worldwide economy could not sustain that kind of [inaudible 00:54:12]. This is a moderate view, to use the word sparingly, and to say that yes, meat is ordained for the use of humankind, but to be done sparingly.

Hank Smith: 00:54:27 When we talked about … I think in our second episode with Steve Harper about Joseph Smith’s leg surgery, I think we’ve got this idea somehow that Joseph Smith lived the Word of Wisdom like we do today, even before he knew about it. When he was seven years old, he refused to drink alcohol. Then we find out later that Joseph Smith actually, from what I understand, occasionally drank wine in the Nauvoo period, and that can really rock people’s faith because they were told that Joseph Smith lived it like we do. Him refusing alcohol as a child, that didn’t have anything to do with the Word of Wisdom.

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 00:55:13 Well, so it’s helpful to make a distinction that Latter Day Saints don’t really make, because we’re not part of a drinking culture, but there is a distinction that is made in this period between hard and mild. Hard alcohol would be whiskey, mainly, something that has a higher proof, much higher proof, and a mild alcohol would be like beer or wine. When he refused the alcohol, it’s not just alcohol. You have to make the distinction. It was whiskey. Whiskey was used because it had such a high proof that it would help dull the pain. If you tried beer on that, I mean, that wouldn’t work. You would have almost no effect. Some people would never drink whiskey, but they might drink a glass of wine.

John Bytheway: 00:56:11 So maybe in verse seven, strong drinks could be like you said, hard liquor as opposed to, more mild?

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 00:56:18 Well, this is part of the spandex, because what is strong? See, it’s noteworthy that the word is not hard. If it were hard, that would give the saints an out clause, “Oh, it’s just talking about whiskey or maybe rum.”

John Bytheway: 00:56:33 It just talks about whiskey.

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 00:56:34 But the fact that it’s strong suggests it’s really probably including anything that has an alcoholic effect. So that allows flexibility in the 19th century. But then in the modern era, we understand what strong means. This is anything that produces an alcoholic buzz.

Hank Smith: 00:56:58 Right. I like how you said earlier, let’s listen to what our modern day, our current prophets and apostles are saying about the Word of Wisdom. I mean, we have a medical doctor, a very good medical doctor as the head of the church right now. If anybody’s mind is prepared to teach us more about the Word of Wisdom, I would say it’s President Nelson.

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 00:57:26 So getting back to meat, there is some controversy about verse 13. Let me read it to you. “It is pleasing unto me that they should not be used only in times of winter or of cold or of famine.” Now, the way that reads, with a comma after used, the comma restricts the meaning to you should only eat meat in winter, cold, or famine. Now let’s say you take out the comma, let me read it in a different way. “And it is pleasing unto me that they should not be used only in times of winter or of cold or of famine.” That makes it sound like someone is saying that you can only eat meat in these times, but I’m here to tell you, you can eat meat at any time.

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 00:58:22 Now what’s interesting is we read it in the restricted way with the comma, but the comma hasn’t always been there. It entered the text in 1921 when James Talmage was a head of a committee to revise the doctrine and covenants. According to Joseph Fielding Smith, when he saw the comma in there, he said, “Who put that in there?” Now this comes from T. Edgar Lyon. T. Edgar Lyon was a great historian and institute teacher at the University of Utah. So take that for what you will, but if you take the comma out, it’s more liberal in its view of meat eating than if the comma is inserted.

Hank Smith: 00:59:04 Yeah, that’s fun. That’s a fun … the comma controversy, we could call it.

John Bytheway: 00:59:10 There are some barbecue where I don’t want the comma and …

Hank Smith: 00:59:14 Sometimes I do want the comma.

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 00:59:17 Right. I think when we go to John, by the way’s house, we’ll bring the 1876 edition of the doctrine of covenants and he’ll have it open to …

John Bytheway: 00:59:28 Put it on the grill, all of it.

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 00:59:29 Yeah, the verse that doesn’t have the meat eating comma.

Hank Smith: 00:59:33 The meat eating comma. We’ve got some great phrases today. The spandex principle and the meat eating comma.

John Bytheway: 00:59:40 Who says punctuation isn’t powerful? This is a meat eating company.

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 00:59:44 Yeah, or we can call it the meat lover’s comma.

John Bytheway: 00:59:47 Yeah.

Hank Smith: 00:59:48 That’s fantastic. Someone might say, “Well, which one is it?” Then I love how you said that, “Hey, read it as you will. This is one’s up to you.” I like the Lord’s emphasis here. Not just, “Don’t do these things, but do eat these things.”

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 01:00:06 Right. I’d like to comment about that, which is we pay so much attention to the prohibitions in verses five to nine, but we forget about the affirmations. There’s actually a lot more affirmation in the revelation than there is prohibition. Verses 10 and 11 praise herbs, and then there’s the hedging on the meat. It’s an endorsement of meat but with some reservations and in 12 and 13. Then a full five verses go back to affirmations of grain and fruit and so on. I think that’s telling that there’s a lot more affirming here and especially grain. There’s more said of grain in DNC 89 than any other substance, so we should attend to that.

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 01:00:54 There’s a great phrase in verse 17, that oats are for the horse. When I read this, I think of Samuel Johnson who wrote the first dictionary of the English language dating to 1755, famously defining oats as a grain, which in England is generally given to horses but in Scotland supports the people. This is taken as a slight against the Scottish.

Hank Smith: 01:01:18 Okay. I heard that in there. I was like, “Oh.”

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 01:01:23 So the Lord is saying oats are for horses, which is part of the dictionary definition. But of course in the modern era, we found ways of using all of these grains for human consumption.

Hank Smith: 01:01:37 Let’s look at the promise, the last four verses. Because to me the promise, the last four verses change this from, it’s not just a health code. It’s not just a temporal law. This is a very spiritual thing. Tell us about the last four verses. Tell us about the promise. Promises.

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 01:01:57 Well, I have two points to make about the promises. The first is that keeping the revelation offers real blessings in the here and now. The way people respond to what I just said would be, “Well duh, of course. You gain blessings here now for keeping commandments.” But it’s actually more profound, I think, than we may realize. Namely, in this way. Christianity typically has been a religion that reserved its blessings for the afterlife. If you think about The Beatitudes, Jesus really suggests that being a Christian is hard. You know, “Blessed are those who are persecuted for my sake,” for example, or … so the idea there is that you can be persecuted for Jesus in this life, but in the afterlife, the Lord will make it all up to you and that all will be made right in the next life.

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 01:02:55 But DNC 89 has a different ethic. The ethic is that the blessings come now. You can count on these blessings now. I mean, look at something like, “Run and not be weary.” This is not an afterlife promise. This is here and now in this life. “Wisdom and great treasures of knowledge,” what use is wisdom and great treasures of knowledge in the afterlife? Yeah, of course we all want that, but we can have those things here and now by keeping the Word of Wisdom. So there’s this worldly component instead of an otherworldly component that I really love about these promises.

John Bytheway: 01:03:39 Hank, I want to back you up on the use of what Elder Holland said about the great scientific things we’ve made — antibiotics, drugs that are helpful. Alma 60:21 when Moroni is writing his letter to Pahoran, and he really hates thrones. He mentions thrones a few times. He doesn’t like those. Verse 21, “Do you suppose the Lord will still deliver us while we sit upon our thrones?” That’s a third time he mentioned … he mentioned thrones three times in this, but listen to this phrase. “Do not make use of the means which the Lord has provided for us.” I’ve used that before to talk about, you know, you’re giving somebody a blessing who is sick, “No, I don’t believe in taking a pill.” Well, shouldn’t we make use of the things the Lord has provided for us? I like that principle there.

Hank Smith: 01:04:28 Yeah. So do I. Just to be very clear, I can see some … I don’t want anyone to stop listening saying, “They’re trying to take away my diet Coke.” We are going to leave this in your hands. All of you listeners, this is up to you. I’ve tried to take a … we have a wonderful member of our team, the great Lisa Spice, who, if you try to take away her Diet Coke, she turns into Gollum from Lord of the Rings, right? Like, “My precious, they’re trying to take it from us.” We are not trying to take it from you.

John Bytheway: 01:05:03 I really think … Hank, you’re right. We don’t want this to become a diet podcast, but we do want people to see these principles and then adapt as spandex does.

Hank Smith: 01:05:15 Yeah. I don’t know how to say this delicately, but me and my sweet tooth really need to think through section 89. Just because it’s not alcohol, it’s not coffee or tea, but it could definitely be an excess of sugar that I personally take in because I’ve got a sweet tooth. I think the Lord would say, “Are you being careful there?” But again, I don’t want to steal anybody’s chocolate either. We’re going to lose half our listeners here, John, if we take away [crosstalk 01:05:49]

John Bytheway: 01:05:50 When President Hunter’s biography came out, Howard W. Hunter, and he talked about how they passed around a box of chocolates in the temple in their Quorum of the 12 meetings, and how the higher you rose and seniority, the more selection you had, finally got old enough that he got the milk chocolate ones instead of just the dark chocolate ones. I was so glad to hear they were eating chocolate in the temple, I can’t even tell you.

Hank Smith: 01:06:15 Is the David O. McKay story true about how someone served him a Coke or a glass, and he said, “I’m so sorry, it says Coca Cola on it,” And he said, “Well, I don’t care what it says on it. I just care if there’s Coke in it.” He wanted to drink a Coke.

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 01:06:28 That’s right. It’s in a … right, it’s in a reminiscence. He also drank [inaudible 01:06:33] when it was passed to him.

John Bytheway: 01:06:35 I remember reading Brigham Young owned taverns out here in the west prior to 1921.

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 01:06:42 Brigham Young?

John Bytheway: 01:06:44 Yeah. Did he own some bars or taverns?

Hank Smith: 01:06:47 Porter Rockwell.

John Bytheway: 01:06:47 Porter Rockwell did?

Hank Smith: 01:06:48 Yeah.

John Bytheway: 01:06:49 Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Jeb Woodwor…: 01:06:49 Porter Rockwell owned a tavern in Nauvoo. Yeah. In fact, he operated, he served liquor in Joseph Smith’s parlor in the Nauvoo house.

Hank Smith: 01:07:00 Before we wrap up our discussion on section 89 in the Word of Wisdom, I want to, I want to encourage the parents out there. As you teach to this, especially with your teenagers, open up the, for Strength of Youth pamphlet, there’s a link to it right in the Come Follow Me manual for this lesson, it says, “Modern prophets have also warned of harmful substances and behaviors beyond those mentioned in the Word of Wisdom.” You can click on that, read it with your children, and then answer this question. What are you prompted to do better to better care for your mind and body?” I think that’s an excellent supplement for our discussion today in people teaching at home.

John Bytheway: 01:07:42 Hank, I want to back you up on that. I think that a tendency today would be to stay in front of a screen. Maybe that’s an impression. I love this idea of running, of finding wisdom, treasures. There’s something just wonderful about being outside and being curious. What did one of our other podcasters say? One of our guests said that the cure for boredom is curiosity.

Hank Smith: 01:08:08 And there is no cure.

John Bytheway: 01:08:09 And there’s no cure for curiosity

Hank Smith: 01:08:12 The Strength of Youth pamphlet discusses exercise. It also discusses emotional health, which is something that’s not necessarily talked about in the Word of Wisdom but that is part of it. It says, “Your emotional health may affect your spiritual and physical wellbeing. Disappointment, occasional sadness are part of mortal life. However, if you have prolonged feelings of sadness, hopelessness, anxiety, or depression, talk with your parents and your bishop and seek help.” That’s another addition that is more of a 2021, maybe, topic, but it is definitely part of the Word of Wisdom, is taking care of your mental health. So we hope anybody out there struggling with any sort of mental health problem to talk to someone about these things, because that’s part of the Word of Wisdom. It’s part of seeking the best care.

Speaker 1: 01:09:04 Please join us for part two of this podcast.