Requirement and Exception: The Word of Wisdom and Modern Sealings
Two threads, read together: how a piece of optional 1833 health counsel became a binding gate to temple access by 1921, and how eternal marriage, the doctrine polygamy itself was built on, still permits a man, but not a woman, to be sealed to more than one spouse today. A single figure, Heber J. Grant, connects both: the last LDS Church president to have personally practiced polygamy, and the president who imposed the binding alcohol requirement.
Both threads turn on the same mechanism documented elsewhere on this site: a rule presented as timeless is, on inspection, dated, revisable, and applied unevenly by sex.
The Word of Wisdom shows a voluntary principle becoming mandatory. Modern plural sealing shows a mandatory principle becoming an exception, available to men, foreclosed to women, in the same church, at the same time.
The Word of Wisdom: from counsel to gate
Doctrine and Covenants 89, dictated in 1833, was received "not by commandment or constraint," its own text frames it as counsel. The revelation names "hot drinks" and "strong drinks" as harmful, but its earliest interpretation was considerably narrower than the rule known today.
Optional counsel; beer and wine permitted
The original text explicitly names "barley... for mild drinks" (D&C 89:17). Beer, lightly fermented wine, and cider were categorized as acceptable "mild drinks," not prohibited substances. Adherence was a matter of individual conscience.
Brigham Young raises the stakes, rhetorically
Young begins describing observance as a potential "test of fellowship," aspiration rather than enforced policy, and not yet reflected in his own documented conduct.
Brigham Young's own household
In the same period he speaks of observance as a coming test of fellowship, Young personally directs a six-ton shipment of tobacco, rum, whiskey, and brandy freighted across the plains for his own household, and Utah settlers under his leadership manufacture and sell alcohol commercially, including church-tithed wine stored and sold in bulk. A bottle of locally produced wine is later placed in the St. George Temple's cornerstone by Young and other leaders. The same year, the Willie and Martin handcart companies depart dangerously late for Utah and are caught by early winter storms; roughly 200 to 250 die. The church's traditional account holds Young had no advance knowledge of the companies' peril, a claim the most substantial independent scholarship on the episode directly disputes. See Brigham Young's Spirits and the Handcart Disaster for the full record and an assessment of that traditional defense.
First institutional consequence
President Joseph F. Smith instructs stake presidents to refuse temple recommends to "flagrant violators." The same year, Smith closes the church-affiliated Saltair saloon, a move explicitly aimed at winning Protestant clergy approval during a period of national temperance politics.
Binding temple requirement
President Heber J. Grant, a committed Prohibition advocate, makes complete abstinence from alcohol, tobacco, coffee, and tea a formal prerequisite for a temple recommend. Grant frames the shift as revelation rather than policy, teaching the Word of Wisdom "as a commandment, not as a guideline."
The church's own history department records that a young Grant, seeking a life insurance policy to provide for his widowed mother, was denied coverage because of his slight build. His physician prescribed "four glasses of beer daily" to help him gain weight; the regimen became a habit. A fuller account of the episode, drawn from his own journals, has Grant confessing "I wanted some [beer] so bad that I drank it again" before he finally broke the habit and stopped patronizing the saloons and breweries he had been buying from. Grant had his own family history with the substance: his stepfather and uncle, George Grant, fell into alcoholism, and Grant's mother divorced him over it. The man who made abstinence a binding temple requirement in 1921 was resolving, institutionally, a struggle he had first resolved personally decades earlier.
The 1921 shift does not occur in isolation from American politics. The Eighteenth Amendment, national Prohibition, took effect in January 1920, one year before Grant's directive. Church members had already greeted the amendment's passage as, in the church's own later telling, "a great victory for humankind." The Word of Wisdom's move from optional counsel to binding law tracks the same arc as national alcohol policy, with church enforcement following the federal law by roughly a year rather than preceding or driving it. This is the same civic-overlay pattern already documented for polygamy and the Morrill Act, see Full Chronology, a doctrine's practical enforcement moving in step with surrounding American law rather than independent of it.
By the 1940s, according to the church's own historical materials, the open question among members was no longer whether to observe the Word of Wisdom but how strictly. President David O. McKay, by contrast, took a more relaxed line personally, reportedly indifferent to a Coca-Cola logo on a cup, so long as the cup contained something else. The modern, complete-abstinence standard is Grant's, not Joseph Smith's or Brigham Young's; the original 1833 text permitted exactly the "mild drinks" the modern church prohibits outright, and the church's second president personally dealt in the harder substances that standard would later forbid entirely.
Modern sealing to more than one wife
Current LDS Church policy no longer sanctions plural marriage among living spouses. It does permit, and has repeatedly exercised, eternal sealing to a second wife after the first wife's death, provided First Presidency permission is obtained. The asymmetry is explicit and current: a widowed or divorced man may be resealed to a new wife with that permission; a widowed or divorced woman may not be sealed to a new husband without first obtaining a formal cancellation of her original sealing from the First Presidency.
The stated doctrine
Both marriages, if solemnized in the temple, are taught to endure into eternity as long as those involved remain worthy, meaning a man sealed to two wives in succession is taught to be eternally married to both simultaneously in the next life. No equivalent teaching exists, or could exist under current policy, for a woman sealed to two husbands in succession.
This is not a hypothetical or historical-only situation. It describes the marital history of the church's seventeenth president and its current, eighteenth president.
Dallin H. Oaks is the sitting president and prophet of the LDS Church, having assumed the office on October 14, 2025 following Russell M. Nelson's death. Both men's modern eternal sealings to a second wife, following the identical widower's path, under identical church procedure, place two consecutive church presidents in a doctrinal position their own church's teaching does not permit to a widow or divorcée in the same circumstance.
One man, two closing doors
Heber J. Grant is not simply a parallel case to the polygamy material elsewhere on this site. He is the single hinge figure connecting both threads. Grant was the last LDS Church president to have personally practiced polygamy, and the same president who, three years into his tenure, made complete alcohol abstinence a binding temple requirement.
The presidential succession, 1918–1951
Heber J. Grant (president 1918–1945) married three wives; by the time he became president in 1918, only his second wife, Augusta Winters, was still living. He is the last LDS Church president to have practiced polygamy as a lived reality, not merely a historical fact about the institution. In 1921, three years into his presidency, he made the Word of Wisdom's complete-abstinence standard a binding prerequisite for a temple recommend.
George Albert Smith (president 1945–1951), Grant's successor, married once, to Lucy Emily Woodruff, from 1892 until her death in 1937, and is identified by independent scholarship as the first LDS Church president who was never a polygamist. The presidency of the church passed, in a single transition, from a man for whom plural marriage was personal biography to a man for whom it was not.
Read together, the two closing dates are close but not identical: the church stopped authorizing new plural marriages in 1904, and the last president who had personally practiced it left office in 1945, a 41-year gap between the institutional end of the practice and its disappearance from the lived experience of the church's own highest office. The binding alcohol requirement, by contrast, arrived in the middle of that gap, in 1921, imposed by the very man whose household still embodied the older practice the church was otherwise moving away from.
Reading the two threads together
Both threads describe the same underlying mechanism from opposite directions. The Word of Wisdom moved from optional counsel toward a fixed, binding standard, a principle tightening over time, in step with American civic politics, until it became indistinguishable in practice from original commandment. Modern eternal sealing moved the opposite way: the church's own founding revelation on marriage, Section 132, already documented on this site's Two Canons and Polygamy and the Temple entries, authorized simultaneous plural marriage among the living. That authorization was withdrawn in 1890, but a narrower version survives, structurally identical in its outcome (one man, potentially multiple eternal wives) and available specifically, and only, to widowed or divorced men.
Two presidents in immediate succession, Nelson and now Oaks, hold that exception personally. Neither church statement on either man's remarriage frames it as continuous with Section 132 or with the doctrine of plural eternal marriage; both are described in official and biographical materials simply as a second marriage, a second sealing, a private and personal decision. The doctrinal throughline, that the mechanism enabling one man to be eternally sealed to two women is the same mechanism 1890 was supposed to have closed, is present in the church's own Handbook language, but not stated by either man in his own account of his remarriage.
Sources
- LDS Living, "How Our View of the Word of Wisdom Has Changed from 1833 to Now."
- Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, "Word of Wisdom (D&C 89)," churchofjesuschrist.org/study/history/topics.
- Thomas G. Alexander, "The Word of Wisdom: From Principle to Requirement," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 14, no. 3 (1981).
- Scripture Central, "Why Do Latter-day Saints Obey the Word of Wisdom?"
- FAIR, "Word of Wisdom/History and implementation" and "Word of Wisdom implementation over time."
- Saints Unscripted, "How Has the LDS Interpretation of the Word of Wisdom Changed Over Time?"
- exmormon.org forum post, "Current LDS Apostles sealed to more than one wife?!" citing Dallin H. Oaks, BYU devotional, January 29, 2002, and contemporaneous reporting on Russell M. Nelson's 2006 remarriage.
- Ask Gramps, "If one remarries after the death of a spouse, what happens in the afterlife?"
- BYU Religious Studies Center, "Dallin H. Oaks" biographical note, on June Dixon Oaks's death and his August 25, 2000 marriage to Kristen McMain.
- LDS Living, "How President Oaks's Daughters Helped Him Find His Wife Kristen," citing Oaks, "Life's Lessons Learned," April 2018.
- Church News, "President Russell M. Nelson: Prophet and Apostle," November 2025, on Nelson's death, tenure as 17th president, and second marriage.
- Church News, "Timeline of President Russell M. Nelson's Life and Ministry."
- The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Newsroom, "President Oaks: New First Presidency," October 14, 2025, on Oaks's accession as 18th president.
- Wikipedia, "Dallin H. Oaks" and "Russell M. Nelson," infobox dates for tenure and marriages.
- Institute for Religious Research, "Why Are We Still Talking about Polygamy?" on George Albert Smith as the first non-polygamist LDS Church president.
- Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, "Heber J. Grant," churchofjesuschrist.org/study/history/topics, on the life-insurance episode and the prescribed "four glasses of beer daily."
- "Heber J Grant's alcohol problems," The Board (forum), citing Young Heber J. Grant's Years of Passage, on Grant's own journal confession.
- Wikipedia, "Heber J. Grant," on his three marriages, Augusta Winters as his surviving wife at the time of his presidency, and his stepfather George Grant's alcoholism.
- Wikipedia, "George Albert Smith," on his 1892 marriage to Lucy Emily Woodruff and her 1937 death.
- The Salt Lake Tribune, "Living history: LDS disapproval of alcohol was not always absolute," 2014.
- Whisky Magazine, "Young was once a distiller," May 2023, citing Caleb Green and, in turn, Stanley P. Hirshson's The Lion of the Lord: A Biography of Brigham Young (Knopf, 1969), on Brigham Young's 1856 personal shipment. Hirshson's book is a secondary, non-Mormon source; contemporary reviews in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought and BYU Studies document minimal archival research and a documented preference for hostile, non-Mormon material, a limitation this entry's citation carries forward from the underlying source.
- The Salt Lake Tribune, "Brigham Young's southern Utah wine mission fueled LDS profits, prophecy and alcoholism," September 25, 2023.
- David Roberts, Devil's Gate: Brigham Young and the Great Mormon Handcart Tragedy (Simon & Schuster, 2008), full treatment and sourcing at Brigham Young's Spirits and the Handcart Disaster.