This will be old news for Bloggernaccle Mormons, but a relatively recent edition (1999) of the influential but much obscured Church Handbook of Instructions is available online via wikileaks. I can only say to this, “Hooray Internets!”
I have to post the link on principle, if nothing else. Transparency and open communication are two of my core values, and one of the areas that gave Jana and I the most grief in our struggles with the both the Church institution and its culture. There is a certain amount of power that comes from restricting information to leaders and limiting the access that rank and file members have to it–especially when that information can profoundly affect the happiness of those members and reaches into the most private aspects of their lives.
This culture of secrecy and selective sharing of information pervades the Church, from its slick PR operations, to its approach to its own controversial history (which, I am happy to say, seems to be opening up in the past couple of decades as academic interest grows), to its missionary program (milk before the meat, elder!), to its masonry-inspired temple ceremonies, to its leaders interaction with its members (including annotated records of disciplinary action and fringe group involvement that follow some members around and which can inform their leader’s opinions of them).
Because the LDS Church has an untrained, lay clergy, the Handbook serves as an important guide for Mormon Bishops and other pastoral and administrative leaders. It not only serves as a reference for Church policy, but also contains advice on how to counsel members in a variety of situations (such as asking adolescents about their personal sexual habits) and how to direct members to professional resources if necessary. Its guidance ranges from the mundane (the delineation of responsibilities for the various Church offices) to the extraordinary (e.g., policies towards elective sterilization, transsexuals, euthanasia and hypnosis).
I believe that airing these things out can only improve the situation of my sisters and brothers in the Church by bringing to light problematic policies and practices that should be phased out. Here’s one example from page 72, regarding the sealing (i.e. eternal marriage) of a husband and wife:
Sealing of a Husband and Wife
Living Women
A living woman may be sealed to only one husband. If she is sealed to a husband and later
divorced, she must receive a cancellation of that sealing from the First Presidency before she
may be sealed to another man in her lifetime (see “Applying for a Cancellation of Sealing or a
Sealing Clearance” on this page).…
Living Men
If a husband and wife have been sealed and the wife dies, the man may have another woman
sealed to him if she is not already sealed.
You catch that? The LDS Church still advocates polygyny. I’ve seen this policy impact relationships between Mormon men and women negatively in this world. Here’s a bit more:
Applying for a Cancellation of Sealing or a Sealing Clearance
When a woman has been sealed and divorced, she may apply for a cancellation of the previous
sealing. The bishop and stake president submit an Application to the First Presidency form to
seek this cancellation.
When a man has been divorced from a woman who was sealed to him and is worthy and
prepared to have another woman sealed to him, he may apply for a sealing clearance. The
bishop and stake president submit an Application to the First Presidency form to seek this
clearance.
Translated: men remain married (in the eternal, “sealed” sense) to the women they divorced. Women essentially have to apply for a spiritual divorce on top of the legal one. This can mean a period of ecclesiastical red tape and humiliating interviews that can cause stress in her relationship with her prospective eternal husband.
I doubt I’ll spend much more time reading this, but if any of you have a chance to read it (especially those of you who are looking at Mormonism from the outside), I’m very interested in your opinions.
19 responses so far ↓
1 amelia // May 28, 2008 at 10:10 am
i don’t particularly like these policies of the church (meaning the different policies for men and women re: sealing). and i don’t intend to defend them. but “advocate”? i think that’s a bit misleading. the church doesn’t advocate polygyny, even if it allows it or facilitates it in some sense. to advocate something is to actively promulgate its practice, and i just don’t see the church doing that with polygyny.
as to openness of the handbook–i can’t honestly say what the church’s argument for not publishing it is. i’m sure there is one, but i’m at a bit of a loss as to what it is. can you summarize that argument?
2 John // May 28, 2008 at 10:58 am
Agreed. ‘Advocate’ is over the top. I remember struggling with what word to use there, but forgot about it in the pressure to crank out the post quickly. It certainly doesn’t discourage spiritual polygyny. Maybe ‘adheres to’ is a better usage? Help me out, English PhD!
I decided not to touch church’s reasoning in this post, partly because others have looked at it recently. The “old news” link in my post takes you to BiV’s post on the topic, and “certain amount of power” links to a comment in a discussion on ZD specifically about “hiding the handbook.” I personally view it in the context of a larger culture that supports this kind of selective, strategic dissemination and withholding of information, for which a variety of explanations are used to defend the practices.
3 Elaine // May 28, 2008 at 11:01 am
I haven’t had time to read the whole thing, but something in the summary jumps out at me, as trivial as it might seem.
It states that members should not participated in hypnosis for “demonstration or entertainment” purposes. Right after I was baptized at age 16, I went to a youth conference that necessitated a bus ride of about three hours. On the way home, out of boredom, one of the youth from my ward who happened to know hypnotism put two others under hypnosis. Word got back to the bishop and from the reaction one would have thought someone had murdered someone on the bus ride home.
Now, I agree that hypnosis is likely not something that should be played around with by amateurs, but I’ve seen a few overreactions in my life, and that was one of them.
As far as the CHI in general, I believe that it should be fully open to the membership and to anyone else who wants to read it. Not to do so makes me think that there is something there that the leadership wants hidden…probably so that they are not held accountable for positions and procedures outlined within it.
4 xJane // May 28, 2008 at 7:36 pm
Full Disclosure: I haven’t read it & prolly won’t.
This disparity between men & women is not surprising. Not because I have a low opinion of LDS (from hanging out with the wrong crowd) but, honestly, because it’s codified religion. A large part of my atheism is informed by my feminism. I won’t countenance an organization that denigrates 51% of its members. And
mostmajor religions fall into that group.Regarding the hiding of it, Elaine hit it on the head: if there’s nothing in there to hide, why hide it? The Catholic Catechism (which seems comparable) is available online and no one reads that. The best way to generate interest is to deny something; contrawise, the best way to bury something is to make it public knowledge.
At the same time, John points out the other reason to keep it hidden: “we know more than you” is a classic power play. To me it just underscores the insecurity of the people in power in charge of the hiding.
5 Jana // May 28, 2008 at 10:46 pm
Interesting about they hypnosis. When I was a teen I went to a party at a bishopric member’s house (for one of his kids who was graduating from high school) and he’d hired a hypnotist to make kids bark like chickens and such. I thought it was pretty stoopid.
Also interesting to me is that my parents encouraged me to learn hypnosis for pain control when I was a tween. I guess that’s not expressly forbidden, but how would a lay member even know that the church had policies about hypnosis if they can’t access the CHI?
And don’t even get me started on teh church’s sexist policies…..
6 Elaine // May 29, 2008 at 7:48 am
Jana wrote:
“I guess that’s not expressly forbidden, but how would a lay member even know that the church had policies about hypnosis if they can’t access the CHI?”
That is exactly the point I made, I think it was in comment over on BiV’s blog. I think I compared it to not publishing the US Code and the Code of Federal Regulations but then holding people accountable to the laws and regulations there.
Perhaps the CHI isn’t strictly “church law”, but it still instructs leadership, as I understand it, on what to hold members accountable for. How is it right or fair to hold people accountable for things they have no way of knowing are considered wrong, especially things that are completely acceptable in the wider culture?
7 LegalGuy // May 30, 2008 at 7:13 am
Does this mean that you do not support US copyright law?
If you do not, will you be taking action if you ever do publish a SciFi novel and it is posted on line for free download?
I realize that this is a bit of apples and oranges with regard to content, but the legal aspect is the same.
For what it is worth, I don’t have a strong opinion either way about who has access to the handbook. I do however have strong opinions on the law.
8 Elaine // May 30, 2008 at 7:29 pm
I’m not sure that something like the CHI should be able to be copyrighted. It is a special case in that it was clearly not copyrighted to protect the income from sales of it. I think it is fairly obvious that the church copyrighted it in order to keep it out of circulation in their obsession with secrecy. If a case concerning the posting of the CHI online reached the courts, I’m sure that the attorneys arguing for free access to the CHI would be able to make very good arguments distinguishing the facts of that case from those of a writer’s science fiction novel being posted without her permission for free download.
In my opinion, keeping the church membership from being able to access the CHI would be like if the US copyrighted case law - the judicial decisions of the various federal courts in the nation in order to limit publication and thus limit access to it by interested parties such as those accused of crimes or those hoping to sue rich and powerful companies. That way, those individuals and their attorneys could not have access to what decisions had been made in the past and what standards are used to hold individuals and corporations to account, and what the reasoning was that was used to make the decisions on such cases in the past. That would allow courts to not have to follow stare decisis, which holds courts to previous precedents unless those decisions have explicitly been overturned or depublished in subsequent decisions.
Essentially, by keeping the CHI “eyes only”, that is what the church is doing…it is trying to keep the standards by which issues are evaluated and the guidelines for how decisions in specific cases are made unknown by the general membership of the church so that if similar cases are not decided in similar ways, no one can complain because no one knows what standards and guidelines were used to make the different decisions.
Of course, this is just my opinion, and your mileage may vary.
And, please, excuse my legal rant…I trained as a paralegal a long time ago and occasionally I become possessed by my inner paralegal. It isn’t a pretty thing.
9 LegalGuy // Jun 2, 2008 at 11:59 am
So does this mean that if you post pictures of your children and friends on your webpage that I am welcome to copy them and sell them or use them on a different web page? You clearly didn’t post them for profit.
Copyright has nothing to do with profit or income. It is all about protection of unique information. You legal views are not at all in harmony with the laws. Wikileaks in the US has already lost numerable copyright cases and been forced to remove content. The only reason the information is still available on line is because of weak protections in other countries.
As I said before, the content is not the issue here. The pathetic “situational ethics” employed by this organization I find disturbing.
10 xJane // Jun 2, 2008 at 4:02 pm
I agree with LegalGuy that Wikileaks has some ethical flaws. That said, keeping the CHI under lockdown makes just about as much sense as Oregon doing the same thing. If you want someone to do what you tell them, logic (not ethics) dictates that you tell them what to do. While lack of knowledge of a law is not an excuse when you break it, it may well be an excuse if the laws in question were secretive.
Whether the law in question is political, as in the case of Oregon, or spiritual, as in the case of CHI, it stands to reason that the enforcers of the law would need that law to be public knowledge in order to enforce it. Does that mean that I should be able to read the law? Not necessarily: I do not do any business in Oregon nor am I Mormon. I do not fall under these jurisdictions. But if I were to become Mormon or move to/plan to do business in Oregon, I would require access to these laws.
Breaking these idiotic copyright is at best civil disobedience exposing stupidity. It may be no more than that. But it may also wake people up to larger issues in similar arenæ.
11 John // Jun 2, 2008 at 4:13 pm
Just a quick comment–I like that xJane brought up civil disobedience. It highlights the point that laws and ethics don’t necessarily overlap, so we have to be careful not to conflate the two.
In the two minutes that I have to comment, my simplistic, unsophisticated response is to say that I’ll break the law for a good cause rather than use it to defend an oppressive one any day. I’ll try to qualify this when I have time later this evening.
12 LegalGuy // Jun 3, 2008 at 6:59 am
I think John’s answer is fair to some degree. I do have to say that from my understanding, the CHI is more of an instruction manual on how to run a Ward or a Stake. Not a manual on how to be a Mormon. I don’t know that there is anything in it at all that the average member could not find out by asking a simple question.
13 Quin // Jun 3, 2008 at 2:10 pm
It was getting my hands on this part of the CHI that did a fair portion of damage to my confidence in church authority. I struggled enough with polygamy, and the lip service paid to the notion that it isn’t part of the church any more was intolerable.
14 cool linkx « darwinian remiix // Jun 3, 2008 at 4:59 pm
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15 Soft Chairs // Jul 2, 2008 at 10:12 pm
As a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I find it interesting that so many people (including many quoted above) claim that the Church is sexist based on one or two things they have heard or read. If you look more closely, you’ll see that this is not the case.
Here’s an example: Have you ever attended our Sunday meetings at one of our many chapels? You’ll see a “Visitors Welcome” sign in front of every building, so don’t hesitate to visit us one Sunday. As you walk through the hallways you’ll notice a lot of classrooms with metal folding chairs in them. As part of our Sunday meetings, we separate into different classes for Sunday School. If you check every classroom, you’ll find that one of the large rooms is full of nice, comfortable, apolstered folding chairs rather than stiff metal folding chairs like all the other classrooms. That’s the Relief Society room, set aside for the women for when they have their own meetings and classes. Women are the glue that holds our Church together, for without them we would certainly be lost. Therefore, we want to show them how much we love and appreciate them. Giving the women the “soft chairs” while we use the “hard chairs” is a simple gesture, but it reminds us all to respect women and hold them in the highest regard.
If you want to learn more about the Mormon Church, talk to a faithful member or the missionaries, not one of our critics. If you want to learn more about McDonalds, would you go to Burger King headquarters? Of course not.
In the New Testament we learn that we need to beware of false prophets and teachings, and that the best way to distinguish truth from error among ministers is “by their fruits.” Please consider the fruits of the Mormon Church. On the whole, we are good people who have a deep love for family and the Savior Jesus Christ.
16 John // Jul 3, 2008 at 5:48 am
Soft Chairs, I welcome your critique here, but you have inaccurately characterized the participants in this discussion:
I find it interesting that so many people (including many quoted above) claim that the Church is sexist based on one or two things they have heard or read.
Most of us in this discussion are members or former members who struggle with these issues. Combined, we probably represent more years of direct experience with the Church than you (not just people who “read a few lines” about the Church), so it’s not just a few lines of reading. The final straw that made me leave the Church was when I saw how differently my son and daughter’s experiences were in Young Men’s/Young Women’s. You could say that we weren’t finding the fruits very tasty.
Lastly, if I were to considering a big, big purchase, I’d listen not only to the salesperson, but I’d look at the reviews of people both satisfied and dissatisfied with the product. But that said, I agree that most Mormons are well-intentioned people who love their families. But so are most of the Baptists, Buddhists, gays and atheists I know well.
17 wren // Jul 3, 2008 at 9:33 am
“…for without them we would certainly be lost. Therefore, we want to show them how much we love and appreciate them. Giving the women the “soft chairs” while we use the “hard chairs” is a simple gesture, but it reminds us all to respect women and hold them in the highest regard. ”
Soft chairs…. as one of the women who was not held in the highest regard when I needed the support of the church most, I take issue with nearly everything you said. But sadly I know where you are coming from because I, too, used to buy into the same notions.
Your comment I quoted from above is sexist both towards men and women. If you think the church would be lost without women you are implying men are inept buffoons incapable of running anything on their own. We know this is not true because men excluded women from organizations and companies for many moons and some still do and they manage just fine. Don’t sell men short. Women are not better than men. Alternatively that statement could be seen as patronizing.
As for the rest of it, if you think a small gesture of soft chairs is holding someone in the highest regard… wow. Just wow. Such sweet platitudes might work for a fireside or charming discussion with one’s granddaughters who do not know that their primary purpose is to support the priesthood. It will not, however, sell people on something who seek to get information from all sources.
The truth is somewhere in the middle of the church and its critics, not in the fibers covering foam stuffed folding chair.
18 John // Jul 3, 2008 at 9:45 am
Wren: amen.
19 xJane // Jul 3, 2008 at 4:13 pm
Oh, wow. I’m sorry Soft Chairs, but that is the exact reason why you misunderstand the whole feminist complaint. Dittos to wren, but I couldn’t let this one go w/o my 2¢. Opening doors for women, standing up when they enter a room, these are holdovers from extraordinarily patriarchal societies. I love soft chairs, don’t get me wrong, but the reasoning behind why you’re giving them to the “fairer sex” is the exact reason why we call the Church (not just yours) misogynistic.
Women are the glue that hold your society together because they are the unpaid labor force that bears, raises, and educates your children. Women are the glue that hold your society together because they are the maids that cook and clean while the Men Of The House bring home the bacon.
There are many ways to argue that one Church or another is not misogynistic, but chairs is not the way to do it. Spend some time with FMH and come back with valid arguments for why women should stay in your Church.
And please do come back. Dissent is appreciated, as is dialogue. John is, as ever, the voice of reason & peacemaking. I’m the short fuse. But both of us enjoy the discussion and the points you can bring to the table.
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