Wit & Attitude Quote by Joseph Smith, Jr.

Hell, for Joseph Smith, is less a furnace than a neighborhood. The shock of the line is how quickly it moves damnation from cosmic spectacle to social consequence: you do not just suffer; you are sorted. “To go with that society” turns the afterlife into a moral logistics problem, and that’s exactly the point. Smith is building a religious community in real time, and he frames obedience as the only passport into the right company.

The intent is pastoral and disciplinary at once. By redefining hell as involuntary association with “those who have not obeyed His commands,” Smith makes sin feel immediately undesirable, not because of abstract pain but because of proximity to the disobedient. It weaponizes taste and belonging. Heaven becomes aspirational not only as communion with God but as access to a superior social world; hell becomes the ultimate downgrade in peers.

Subtext: obedience is a social technology. In a young movement that demanded visible commitments (new rituals, new authority structures, new norms), the threat that matters most is estrangement from the righteous in both this life and the next. The line also subtly shifts emphasis from God’s wrath to God’s order. Punishment is not mere revenge; it’s placement.

Contextually, Smith’s America was thick with revivalist urgency and competing sects. By making “society” the core of damnation, he speaks to a culture where community defines identity, and to converts deciding whether to break with their old networks. The sting is clear: choose wrongly now, and you’ll live with it forever.