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When and why coffee matters

When and why coffee matters

Last updated on: September 7, 2026 at 10:41 pm by Dan Peterson

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When and why coffee matters 2026-09-07T22:41:00-06:00 Dan Peterson

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The Manti Utah Temple was dedicated in 1888 (LDS.org)

We drove back home today from Moab. Along the way, we stopped off in Hanksville for old time’s sake, pausing to grab a bite at Stan’s Burger Shak. (Yes, Obsession Boarders, I ate food yet again today, publicly and shamelessly and surrounded by a number of others who obviously share my addiction to daily eating.) We often stopped at Stan’s during the many years that my father-in-law maintained a houseboat at Bullfrog Marina on Lake Powell, to which the extended clan would gather for water skiing and jet-skiing and swimming and exploring and, yes, I confess it, for daily eating together. Incidentally, I was struck by the ethnic mix of the young women working behind the counter at Stan’s: Four African-Americans and two Asian-Americans, so far as I could see. Somehow, I can’t imagine that they’re representative of the historical or current demographics of Hanksville or Wayne County, and I wonder how they’ve found themselves there.

We drove thereafter through the splendor of Capitol Reef National Park, and through the towns of Torrey and Bicknell and Loa. Then northward on US 89, with a brief stop at the Manti Utah Temple (dedicated 1888), one of my lifelong favorites, and a tour of the nearby Ephraim Utah Temple (which is having its open house right now—see a video of the interior here —and which will be dedicated next month), and, after that, on home.

The soon-to-be dedicated Ephraim Utah Temple, located just north of Manti (fair use, I hope, from the temple’s Facebook page)

For all of my growing-up years, my intermittently semi-active Latter-day Saint mother (born and raised in St. George, Utah) and my nominally-Lutheran father (born to a Danish father and a Norwegian mother and raised in very rural North Dakota) drank coffee. Large quantities of it. On my father’s side, my relatives were almost entirely nominal Lutherans of Scandinavian background, and family gatherings consisted to a remarkable degree of seemingly endless games of Norwegian whist fueled by impressive quantities of black coffee.

For the record, my father did eventually join the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—I baptized him on the night that I was set apart as a missionary—and my parents did eventually go to the temple. But that’s another story. My point here is that I didn’t grow up condemning coffee-drinkers. They were my family, and I loved them.

Fruita, in Capitol Reef National Park (photo provenance unclear, from Capitol Reef Country website, fair use?)

I see no moral dimension, positive or negative, to the drinking of coffee by those who aren’t members of the Church. They’ve taken upon themselves no covenants that would entail, even indirectly, that they keep the Word of Wisdom. Even in my mother’s case, although (as my own commitment to the Church deepened) I regretted it as an impediment to her entering the temple, there seemed to me (for most of her life, anyway) no moral dimension to her coffee consumption. She had grown up in a marginally Latter-day Saint family, after all, and, although I never met my maternal grandfather and scarcely knew my maternal grandmother (she died in southern Utah when I, living in southern California, was five years old), I expect that they were coffee drinkers. All of my mother’s siblings were.

So my reaction to a recent development caused me some reflection: Someone whom I know very well, who grew up active in the Church, served a faithful mission, and married in the temple, has recently taken up coffee-drinking—and rather seriously so, seeking out brand and style recommendations from other, more experienced, coffee-drinkers. Since I never regarded the drinking of coffee as a deep sin or sign of depravity, why did I find this news so disheartening? After all, I had already known that this individual had lapsed into inactivity, and I had grieved over it. Why did the news that s/he is now a regular and serious coffee drinker depress me so?

It’s surely not because it’s the weightiest commandment in the law. Charity, love, kindness, honesty, integrity—these are surely much more important, in many senses, than whether coffee ever touches one’s lips. My mother, for example, though certainly not without her flaws, devoted her life to the service of others (both within her extended family and beyond) in a way that I’ve come to appreciate far more than I did when I was young and stupid and that I cannot even begin to approach.

In Utah’s Capitol Reef National Park (Wikimedia Commons public domain photo)

Some have wondered why a question about compliance with the Word of Wisdom is included in interviews to receive a temple recommend, while service and kindness and communion with God aren’t mentioned. Doesn’t that effectively make abstention from coffee more important than spirituality or loving others? I think not. I think that that question is included because avoidance of cigarettes, alcohol, and coffee can be easily declared or denied, whereas one’s spiritual state and one’s degree of benevolence are much more variable and much less easy to “quantify” or to describe. It should surely be kept in mind that a temple recommend isn’t a declaration of sainthood or a promise of immediate exaltation. It merely certifies that its bearer has met the minimum threshold requirements for admission to the earthly House of the Lord.

As Doctrine and Covenants 89:3 says of the Word of Wisdom, it is “adapted to the capacity of the weak and the weakest of all saints, who are or can be called saints”—which I take to mean that it’s a pretty simple, neat, and clear indicator of whether a person intends to try to keep the commandments and obligations that have been revealed in the Restored Church or doesn’t intend to try. Living a life of service and lovingkindness is a never-ending quest, but abstaining from coffee (or partaking of coffee) indicates, for a person who has once committed to living according to the Restored Gospel, a relatively simple but revealing decision.

The historic Gifford farm, in Fruita, Utah — a nineteenth-century Latter-day Saint pioneer ghost town that is located inside Capitol Reef National Park. (National Park Service public domain photograph) How I admire the faithfulness, the difficult sacrifices, and the covenant-keeping fidelity of those who built up the Church and Kingdom of God in the nineteenth century!

I think, upon reflection, that my reaction to a formerly committed Latter-day Saint taking up coffee drinking comes down to the objective clarity of what it says about that person’s new relationship to his or her prior commitments.

Drifting while still in youth from the teachings of one’s childhood, teachings that may never really have found deep root in the first place, is one thing. Abandoning covenants and commitments made in one’s mature adulthood is rather different. I’m reminded of the difference between two terms that we often use interchangeably but that I see as quite distinct: falling away and apostasy. The first indicates drift. The second derives from the ancient Greek word ἀποστασία (apostasía), which means “revolt,” “defection,” or “rebellion.” “Falling away” can indicate fatigue, or a simple loss of interest. “Apostasy”—in my mind, anyway—suggests rejection or renunciation, a deliberate and decisive turning of one’s back on the beliefs that one once espoused, on the commitments and covenants that one once solemnly took upon oneself.

I think, in this context, of a statement from Karl G. Maeser (1828-1901), the German-born teacher and convert to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who is revered as, effectively, the founder of Brigham Young University and of the Church Education System more generally. He is famous for a chalk-circle analogy that I believe to be relevant here:

I have been asked what I mean by “word of honor.” I will tell you. Place me behind prison walls—walls of stone ever so high, ever so thick, reaching ever so far into the ground—there is a possibility that in some way or another I might be able to escape; but stand me on the floor and draw a chalk line around me and have me give my word of honor never to cross it. Can I get out of that circle? No, never! I’d die first.

Some, I certainly understand, will justify their abandonment of prior covenants by declaring that they no longer believe in God (the putative covenant partner) and/or in the authority of the Church to offer such covenants. It scarcely needs to be said that such justification doesn’t make me feel any better about the statement being made.

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