I can’t remember which thread it was on, but somebody posted an older message about white shirts and sacramental prayers and the first presidency explicitly condemning formalism.

Rules and regulations are the bane of all societies, organizations, countries, regions, nations, governments, etc. Everyone has to wrestle with them, everyone has to come to their own conclusions, and everyone will disagree to some point or another.

I think the days of privacy are largely coming to an end, and the Church will have to do something about the CHI. They’re going to have to address it at some point or another. I actually don’t think it’s that big a deal, because honestly, I just don’t take the CHI that seriously. Yes, it’s policy, procedure, you might even say doctrine.

But Nephi was commanded to kill, Hosea to marry a prostitute, and Eve knew she could only make it by partaking. I just don’t take the CHI seriously, because the Spirit is the best thing ever. EVER! So, yeah, they could publish it or not. But I say whatever. If it’s such a big secret, let it be, and just deal with life. No matter what you do, there will always be SOMETHING that isn’t right and needs to be corrected; you’ll find examples of such things throughout your entire life no matter what you’re reading.

Isn’t this more simple than we’re making it out to be? I don’t know. I mean, there’s a time and place for everything. I think I’m just suggesting that it’s not the worst thing on the planet that it’s not published. The Church has bigger fish to fry, as do we.

I very much agree.

But my point is that this is not really what the manual is about. I don’t think that it contains much in the way of policies that members are expected to follow. Rather, it mainly contains guidelines about what leaders are supposed to do. Almost all of these guidelines related to the way in which wards and stakes are organized. There simply isn’t much material in the manual that says something like, “Members are expected to do X, Y, and Z.” I agree that there are some problems with some of this stuff not being more widely available, although for some of the policies I think that having them in the obscurity of the CHI actually encourages a certain salutary desuetude.

Let me throw out another concern: Mormon doctrine and practice largely evolve through an oral tradition. To be sure, we write stuff down but the quintessential doctrinal document in the church remains the sermon. There are exceptions like the “The Father and the Son” or “The Family: A Proclamation to the World,” we don’t have a tradition comparable say to the encyclical letters that are circulated by popes from time to time. If we were to publish and official list of official positions we would change the way in which our doctrine develops. I’m not sure this would be a good idea. The oral nature of doctrinal development actually creates a great deal of flexibility and is a pretty good way of managing pluralism within a unified community. I’m not convinced that replacing it with a system of publicly promulgated rules, policies, and rights would be an improvement.

I find the term “publish” as it has been used in this discussion to be odd. If publish means to distribute publicly then the Church does not publish the CHI. But it seems to me the the the Church prints and (carefully) distributes the CHI, and the term “publish” seems to describe this activity.

In any case as has been mentioned the book has in fact been widely distributed online. Doesn’t that impact any arguments concerning liability?

I think the reason that they don’t want it make more public is that it is subject to changing over time and the Church is uncomfortable dealing with change. They’d rather that old policies and practices go away quietly than have the changes examined carefully.

Opening it up to the members and it becomes a law of Moses people start trying to live by. That’s not the purpose. But I’m sure people now often say, “that’s not in the handbook” or “the handbook says to do this”. We don’t need or want the members turning common place to a detailed handbook for guidance, the scriptures and the spirit should do that.

I’m not necessarily opposed to the handbook being public. I’m just trying to square up some justifications as to why it’s not distributed to everyone. If it was in everyone’s hands I wouldn’t really care either, but it should would get annoying to see even more people say, “the handbook says…”

We’d probably end up with the 5% of active member-busybody types reading it and over-magnifying it, and the rest of the church that rarely reads their scriptures let alone other materials would just ignore it anyway.

Now, if what you’re suggesting is we should have a basic handbook for individuals and families? Well we do have one of those. And it’s pretty short too:
http://www.lds.org/library/display/0,4945,28-1-1-1,00.html

Nate, it may not be the intent at the top to have the CHI act as a set of rules for members, but I would argue that that is often EXACTLY how it is applied at the local level. Most bishops I have known – good men, all – treat the CHI as explicitly stated Church policy that they are responsible to implement.

When I was an EQ president several years back, I asked my stake prez why the handbook is not distributed widely. His response (and he was a very devout guy) was telling: “Because there are things in there they don’t want everyone to know.”

To me, it’s one thing to control the distribution of things like procedures to handle sensitive situations. But if there are policies that members are expected to follow, they need to be widely distributed to members, or done away with.

My own – admittedly cynical – view is that making the CHI public would spell out something pretty clearly: That there are numerous expectations put upon LDS members that have no basis in scripture, or even modern revelation, but exist solely as a policy decision made by some anonymous committee sitting in Salt Lake.

It was worth wading through all of these comments just to read Swearing Elder swear. I love me a handle that delivers!

It was my understanding that it was an opt-in panel, rather than a survey. And available only to that subset of members who are comfortable with the internet. While of some value, that’s not a representative sample of church membership.