For water will not do

For water will not do is a phrase drawn from a September 1856 sermon by Jedediah M. Grant, a prominent leader in the Mormon Reformation. It expresses the sermon’s claim that some sins could not be atoned for through ordinary religious means and instead required the sinner’s blood to be shed. The phrase’s force lies in how it turns a theological claim into a blunt measure of punishment—and, in the book’s structure, signals the violence that follows.

Origin and Meaning

The phrase appears in the account of the Reformation, a period of intense religious fervor that peaked in 1856 and 1857. Grant, Brigham Young’s popular second counselor, spearheaded the movement. The Saints affectionately called him “Jeddy, Brigham’s Sledge Hammer.” His September 1856 sermon presented bloodshed as the supposed means of atoning for particularly grave sins, setting blood against water as insufficient for that purpose.

The expression thus belongs to a wider campaign in which religious authority gave force to severe moral demands. Grant preached both blood atonement and the duty to marry plural wives; the chapter’s account places his words within a culture of fervent exhortation and escalating pressure on believers. The phrase is not merely a statement about ritual or repentance: in context, it makes violence imaginable as a religious remedy.

Chapter Function and Historical Context

The book uses the phrase as the title of the chapter that turns toward the Mountain Meadows massacre. Immediately before that chapter, it describes a Gentile wagon train traveling through a remote valley in southwestern Utah, a place later associated with one of the most chilling episodes in the history of the American West. The account characterizes the massacre as an example of the fanaticism and brutality that Dan Lafferty and other fundamentalists would later idealize.

That placement gives the phrase a framing role: Grant’s words precede an account of violence, linking the rhetoric of blood atonement to the book’s examination of the culture in which the massacre occurred. The phrase does not, on the evidence presented here, establish a direct command or a specific causal chain to the massacre. Instead, it concentrates a broader danger into a few words—the conversion of religious conviction into justification for bloodshed.