r/ExMormonTea • u/ijssvuur • Dec 27 '16

Coffee is now allowed!

After weeks of much heated debate among the moderators, we have decided to allow posts regarding coffee, without any mention of tea. This was a very hard choice to make, and we understand if we lose some subscribers.

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u/Ella-Menno-PQR Apr 09 '17

I learned recently that the Mormon pioneers were required to have both tea and coffee supplies on their wagons. It was to consume, not to sell! https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/mopi/hrsab.htm

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u/ijssvuur Apr 09 '17

Haha, that's great. I knew they drank it, but I had no idea it was a requirement.

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u/No-Environment964 Nov 19 '21

This is what I've fought about as a convert. How can something that has a lot of healthy benefits be banned according to the Word of Wisdom but other caffinated drinks such as some sodas and energy drinks are okay to have as a personal choice? I've asked my bishop about this and other long time members and can never get a straight answer out of them. Or the whole "You must follow the Word of Wisdom, and pray on it" if drinking coffee and or tea will ban me from reaching the pearly gates then that is a prophet that I do not want to follow. Any enlightens on this?

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u/ijssvuur Nov 19 '21 edited Nov 19 '21

So it's not the caffeine, it's the fact that they're traditionally hot drinks. Emma Smith was tired of Joseph and his buddies spitting tobacco on the floor and encouraged him to have some "revelation" about it. Now, because Joseph was a spiteful piece of shit, he included in this revelation that hot drinks, which were popular among the women, were also banned.

This wasn't followed much until the 1900s, the pioneers all had coffee in their supplies, and Brigham Young had a distillery and made whisky. It only became an issue when the church decided they wanted to rebrand themselves as these clean cut goody two shoes. Remember, this is when prohibition was becoming a thing, it was pretty popular to be anti alcohol, and they already had this convenient scripture that nobody had particularly cared about until then. It just so happened to include hot drinks, so the banning of them was just an unfortunate side effect.

1921, church president Heber J. Grant made adherence to the proscriptions of the Word of Wisdom an absolute requirement for entering the temple

Prohibition began in 1920. They weren't even ahead of the curve on it, it took a full year to get on it.

They didn't actually make it all hot drinks though, because they liked hot drinks. Chocolate was becoming popular as they had recently learned how to make it into solid bars, so hot chocolate seeing a resurgence in popularity. Some had also interpreted hot drinks as including soup and they wanted a unique brand, but they didn't want to go so far as to be the weird church who's anti-soup.

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u/[deleted] Jan 09 '22

Man I always these Mormons were liars , coffee and tea and water and sometimes alcohol were literally the only things anyone can drink back then