So I read on Slashdot this morning that the LDS Church is attempting to get WikiLeaks to remove copies of the “Church Handbook of Instruction” from its servers. Oddly enough, most people are crying foul over it.
Let’s assume that Tor (publisher of many, many books) has a secret manuscript of the last Wheel of Time book, and let’s assume that WikiLeaks somehow gets ahold of it and decides to publish it. I doubt anyone would be offended if Tor did everything in its power to get WikiLeaks to take down the document – they would be, after all, defending their copyrights and future profits (not to mention protecting people from premature spoilers).
The Church’s situation is slightly different (but only slightly). The difference is that the Church does not profit from this particular copyright. The rest is the same – the book is only given to those in leadership positions of the Church (Tor’s manuscript would only be given to select editors, for example). The book contains no doctrines not found elsewhere in publicly available documents. It is simply a handbook of instructions (hence its name) for church leaders to guide them in various situations that they may encounter. It does not contain anything damning in any way to the LDS Church.
In any case, much the same as McDonald’s chooses not to publish its managerial handbook(s), the Church does not want to publish this handbook.
Why, you ask? Simple – remember the Jews? In the Old Testament, they demanded laws and guidelines, which then evolved over time into a strict set of rules designed to prevent people from even approaching breaking the laws. This was called “fencing the Torah” – that is, they figured if they build a fence around the commandments so people couldn’t break less serious commandments, they couldn’t break the more serious ones. So, some groups of Jews would not take more than X steps on the sabbath (meaning they’d stay at home, probably).
What’s the problem with that? They lost sight of the whole point of the commandments – they were designed to point them to Christ so they would recognize Him when He came. They weren’t supposed to just follow the letter of the law; they were supposed to figure out the spirit of the law and follow that. So when Christ came he very carefully avoided “do”s and “don’t”s, instead teaching his followers things like “love they neighbor as thyself” and “become like a little child – meek, humble, etc”.
The LDS Church is likely trying to avoid a situation where members see a book full of “do”s and “don’t”s and then decide to see how close they can get to them without actually breaking the rules. When people start doing that, they’ve lost sight of the whole point for the commandments, just like the Jews did. Instead members should be studying the scriptures and drawing their own conclusions. That’s why there’s an eternally raging debate about caffeine among church members – the Word of Wisdom (http://scriptures.lds.org/dc/89) does not prohibit it, so some members feel it is not against the Word of Wisdom, while other members feel that the Word of Wisdom should be interpreted a bit more broadly, to encompass any substance that is addicting (which includes caffeine). Now most members would not attempt to say that the Word of Wisdom permits heroin use, but for some reason caffeine seems to be a sticky point. It’s exactly for the reason I’ve been discussing – members are trying to reduce “love thy neighbor” and “your body is a temple” and so on into a list of “do”s and “don’t”s.
There are other possibilities, of course. One is that the Church is simply avoiding a precedent of complacency regarding copyright violation. That theory goes, “If we don’t enforce this copyright, then people will feel they can infringe on other copyrights we own”, thus leading to other potentially damaging situations. I think this the most likely alternate theory.
Another is a bit more, dare I say it, devious. By demanding that the material be removed, the Church is drawing far more attention to it than it would otherwise have received. The result would be to get more people to read it by saying “We don’t want people reading this,” the goal being to get people to realize that the LDS Church is not hiding anything sinister, that the Church is not a crazy cult, and so on. It could be a brilliant move, taken in that light – showing people that we’re not sacrificing babies to the demon gods by making it look like we have something to hide.
This would also avoid another problem that might already exist. If an anti-Mormon says “The Mormons sacrifice babies to the demon gods, it says so on page 36 of the Church Handbook of Instructions,” then the anti-Mormon’s listeners have no way to verify whether or not this is true. Now, the Church could simply publish the CHI, but it would not solve the problem – anti-Mormons would simply accuse the Church of publishing a dumbed-down, censored version of the handbook for public viewing, leaving the demon-god-worship instructions in the secret version locked in Bishops’ desks. By letting it leak in this way, however, the material has an air of authenticity without having to prove that there isn’t some secret demonic version somewhere. Furthermore, by publicizing the leak in such a way, far more people are aware of it, so that when the anti-Mormon claims that “Mormons sacrifice babies to the demon gods, it says so on page 36 of the Church Handbook of Instructions”, his listeners can go to WikiLeaks and verify for themselves that Mormons do not, in fact, sacrifice babies at all.
One problem they might have with this is that two editions of the manual were leaked – 1968 and 1999, if memory serves. It is possible that the Church would prefer that people not compare their precise policies between the two editions, if only to keep people from trying to attack the Church based on policy changes. I can’t think of anything particularly damaging that could result, other than more fodder for the anti-Mormons’ cannons, but they (the anti-Mormons) have created so much already that I doubt it’s much of an issue.
The real reason may be a combination of all of the above – if they can get it taken down, great, but if not, there are other potential benefits. I tend to believe that the Church has smart enough people on the task that they realize they can’t actually get rid of it (I’m sure there are already dozens of torrents of it), so they’re probably aiming for something more beneficial in the long-term.