The Word of Wisdom: why your Latter-day Saint client orders water

The code is section 89 of the Doctrine and Covenants, a book of revelations that members hold to be scripture. Joseph Smith recorded it in Kirtland, Ohio, on February 27, 1833. It counsels against wine and strong drink, against tobacco, and against "hot drinks", which the Church teaches means tea and coffee. It says meat should be eaten sparingly and that grain is the staff of life. It promises, in the Church's summary, "increased health, wisdom, knowledge, and protection" to those who keep it. For its first nine decades it was counsel rather than commandment. In 1921 Church president Heber J. Grant made compliance a condition of entering a temple, and it has stayed one since. The temple recommend interview published by Russell M. Nelson on October 6, 2019, asks it as question eleven: "Do you understand and obey the Word of Wisdom?"

The edges have been filled in over time, usually in response to whatever teenagers were doing. The Church's youth magazine ran a piece in August 2019 stating that vaping is out because the pods contain nicotine, that iced coffee and any drink ending in "-ccino" is coffee, that green tea and black tea come from the same plant and both count, and that marijuana and opioids are for use under a physician's care only. The Church now lists vaping, prescription-drug misuse and recreational marijuana alongside the original four.

Caffeine. The revelation never mentions it, and for decades members argued about cola. In 2012, during Mitt Romney's presidential campaign, the Church issued a statement that the revelation "does not mention the use of caffeine", and it has no position on caffeinated soft drinks or energy drinks. Church spokesman Eric Hawkins told the Salt Lake Tribune what the rule is for: "It's a symbol of willingness to live in obedience to the standards God has revealed through his prophets." So a Diet Coke on the table is nothing to read into. A latte is.

Strictly enough that the answer to the interview question decides whether a member can enter a temple, and loosely enough that surveys find a generational split. The Salt Lake Tribune's survey reporting found that 76 percent of members from the Baby Boom and Silent generations considered abstaining from alcohol essential to being a good member, against 40 percent of millennials; on coffee and tea, 51 percent of the older group said you could drink them and still be a good member, against 31 percent of millennials who thought you could not. A 2019 study cited by Wikipedia found that between a quarter and a half of American members interpret the code differently from the official line in some way. The Tribune's own conclusion was that the code functions today more as a marker of identity than as a health regimen, and that enforcement varies around the world: tea in Japan, maté in Argentina and coffee in Belgium are social rituals that observant members skip, sometimes at a cost.

"A symbol of willingness to live in obedience to the standards God has revealed." Eric Hawkins, Church spokesman

About 55 percent of Utahns belong to the Church, and the state's alcohol rules are the most visible place the code leaks into public life. Utah has been a control state since 1935, two years after Prohibition ended, with the state holding a monopoly on wholesale and on retail of spirits and wine. From 2009 to 2017 restaurants had to mix drinks behind frosted partitions, the Zion curtains, so that diners could not watch a cocktail being made; Governor Jon Huntsman Jr. signed a 2009 law that let existing restaurants take them down, and a 2017 bill, HB 442, scrapped the requirement in favor of a ten-foot gap between the bar and tables where minors sit. On December 30, 2018, Utah became the first state to set the drink-driving limit at 0.05 percent blood alcohol. Grocery beer was capped at 3.2 percent alcohol by weight until November 1, 2019, when a law passed that March raised it to 5 percent by volume. From January 1, 2026, a 2025 law, HB 437, requires an identity check on every alcohol purchase regardless of the buyer's age. None of this stops you from drinking in Utah. It does mean the bar closes earlier, the pour is measured, and the wine list at a business dinner may be shorter than in Denver.

The study that gets quoted is a 14-year project by James E. Enstrom, an epidemiologist at UCLA, that followed about 10,000 observant members in California through 1987. It found death rates roughly half those of the general population and a life expectancy eight to eleven years longer than white Americans overall, with lower rates of cancer and cardiovascular disease. The finding gets repeated in every article on the subject, and it deserves the caveat its author would give it: the sample was self-selected for people who already did not smoke or drink, and the study measured the whole package of behavior, not the code as such. No one has separated the coffee from the cigarettes.

The oldest business case study on the code belongs to the Marriotts. J. Willard Marriott's first three hotels were in places where he did not have to decide about liquor. The Philadelphia City Line hotel of the 1960s was the first in a state that allowed it, so he went to Church president David O. McKay for counsel. McKay's answer, as the family recounted it in 2019, was that if liquor was "an essential part of the service that the hotel and restaurant industry offers", the Marriotts were obliged to sell it, that selling it did not mean approving of drinking, and that the family's Hot Shoppes restaurants should stay dry. The hotel got a bar; the coffee shops did not. Bill Marriott, who was bishop of a Washington congregation from 1975 to 1977 while running the company, inherited the arrangement, and Marriott hotels serve alcohol to this day.

City Creek Center, the Church-owned mall in Salt Lake City, drew the line in the same place when it opened on March 22, 2012: no storefront sells alcohol, restaurants may, and on opening day only two of them did. For your own dinner, the practical rules are short. Order what you like; the code binds members, not their guests. Do not offer to buy a round or press a coffee on someone who declined once. Water, juice and soft drinks are all fine, and so is a dessert. The deal does not get slower for the lack of a bottle. If anything, the check is smaller.