Image by Jill Wellington from Pixabay
Over the last couple weeks, a number of family and friends have renewed their temple recommends over Zoom.
You may remember that about a year ago (in the pre-pandemic days!), the church updated the temple recommend questions. For these friends and family, then, this was the first time they were asked the new questions. Out of curiosity (both over their experience and my upcoming renewal), I took a quick look at the new questions, and something struck my eye: Question 5. According to the church’s website, question 5 now reads:
The Lord has said that all things are to be “done in cleanliness” before Him (Doctrine and Covenants 42:41).
Do you strive for moral cleanliness in your thoughts and behavior?
Do you obey the law of chastity?
Now on the one hand, this is nothing new. The temple recommend interview has always asked about living the law of chastity. On the other, though, I don’t remember it having had a scripture attached to it before. So I took a look at D&C 42:41.
The verse is short and simple. It says, “And let all things be done in cleanliness before me.”
But does cleanliness here have a law-of-chastity implication? In the first instance, it is clearly possible that it does. Using “clean” to mean “morally pure” would not have been anachronistic—Webster’s 1828 dictionary included, as its 4th definition for the word clean, “Free from moral impurity; innocent.”
Still, that didn’t strike me as the connotation being used in D&C 42. (A quick interjection that shouldn’t be necessary, but I’ve been blogging long enough to know that it is: none of what follows is to even suggest that the church can’t or shouldn’t condition temple entrance on obeying the law of chastity. This is purely an exploration of D&C 42:41 and the church’s use of that verse in the temple recommend interview.)
The first reason is structural. See, D&C 42 does talk about the law of chastity. In verses 18-29 (or so), the section reaffirms the Ten Commandments. Verses 22-26 explicitly discuss adultery and lust. And then? We get another ten verses or so of consecration. And then we get to cleanliness.
And, in fact, cleanliness is the second of three injunctions that come between consecration and healing: simple dress, cleanliness, and lack of idleness. Given the textual distance between morality[fn1] and cleanliness and the fact that cleanliness is listed right next to other physical attributes, its use makes more sense literally. That is, given its place in the text, cleanliness probably means being physically clean.
To back that up: Grant Underwood writes that these were common ideals in communitarian societies. And, while I’m no expert in communitarian societies (and he doesn’t provide a citation for that assertion), it makes sense. The early 19th century was right around the beginnings of a hygienic movement. Richard and Claudia Bushman write that between 1750 and 1900, “washing went from being an occasional and haphazard routine of a small segment of the population to a regular practice of the large bulk of the people.” They point to some religious motivation toward personal cleanliness—sanitary reformers, for instance, wanted to teach the poor to stay clean and taught that there was a religion to cleanliness. And Quakers were apparently well-known for their physical cleanliness. But for most Protestants, cleanliness was only one of many parts of the respectability they hoped to achieve. Rather, the primary impetus underlying the move to cleanliness was class-aspirational.
Still, it’s worth pointing out that the Shakers, another communitarian religious group, venerated cleanliness. They wanted to create Heaven on Earth, and believed that clean, sanitary living conditions contributed to good health. (Later, Baptist Sunday School missionaries went to Native Americans to teach “cleanliness, industry, temperance, and purity.”)
And Mormonism cared about physical cleanliness, too. An 1830s article from the Messenger and Advocate titled “Cleanliness Necessary for Salvation” asks rhetorically “if the immortal part of man must be washed and be made clean, why not the mortal also! we have samples enough to prove this fact.”
The 1840s manuscript history of the church includes correspondence from the Boston Bee that had been quoted in the Times and Seasons.[fn2] The author writes:
for it never occurred to me that clean hands, in administering before the Lord, as mentioned in the Scripture, meant any thing more than a good conscience, and I had never supposed but that a man could worship God just as acceptably, all covered with dirt, and filth and slime, as though he had bathed in Siloam every hour, until I heard the Mormon prophet lecturing his people on the subject of neatness and cleanliness, teaching them that all was clean in Heaven, and that Jesus was going to make the place of his feet glorious, and if the Mormons did not keep their feet out of the ashes they could not stand with him on Mount Zion.
I had no thought before but that dirty people could get to Heaven, as well as clean ones; and that if the priests offered sacrifice with polluted hands, the fire would cleanse both the offering and the hands that offered it.
So apparently, Joseph Smith taught that physical cleanliness was critical to getting into heaven.
This idea of the necessity of physical cleanliness carried through the early Utah period. In 1856, Jedediah M. Grant preached a sermon emphasizing physical cleanliness. He explained that “I actually suppose that in the instructions which an angel of God would give, the very first lesson would be to teach cleanliness to the filthy, and then instruct them to keep themselves cleanly all the time.” He mentioned that the Provo River had plenty of water to keep people clean, and decried filth, with its “nauseous and unhealthy odors.”
A year later, President D.H. Wells told the Saints
be cleanly in our persons and in our habitations; for the Holy Ghost will not dwell in unholy temples. It is an insult to the Holy Spirit for us to be filthy, and it may be grieved away if we do not observe cleanliness.
(I’m going to be honest: looking at this history of cleanliness in the church has helped me immeasurably in understanding Joseph F. Smith’s dream in which he’s told he’s late, and responds, “Yes, but I am clean—I am clean!”)
So why did the church use D&C 42:41 in the temple recommend question about the law of chastity? No idea.[fn3] While we’re clearly under divine injunction to be moral, the verse is talking about physical cleanliness.
[fn1] I’m going to use morality in this post to mean not having sex with anyone who is not your spouse. That’s not the only, or even the best, connotation, but it’s a common enough one in Mormonism, and it’s a lot more efficient than any other circumlocution I can quickly come up with.
[fn2] In fact, I’d cite to Times and Seasons, but BYU’s scanning only includes the odd-numbered pages, and I need page 200.
[fn3] Okay, one idea: I suspect someone was doing a text search for “clean” and didn’t bother looking at the context.