1. there are circumstances in which it is necessary for an LDS Church member to approach his or her local Church leader, seeking something that only the leader can provide;¹ and
2. the Church rules governing such circumstances are usually unclear or unknown to the Church member.²

Situations like this are the norm in the LDS Church. Non-leaders are not supposed to have much (if any) access to the Church’s rules and procedures. The Church publishes a rulebook for select local leaders called the “Church Handbook of Instructions” (the “CHI”).

The CHI sets forth the Church’s official rules regarding a variety of topics, as well as the official Church doctrines under which many of those rules arise. For example, the CHI explains why Church members are disciplined by the Church³ for committing serious transgressions. The purpose of discipline is three-fold: “1. to save the souls of transgressors, 2. to protect the innocent, and 3. to safeguard the purity, integrity, and good name of the Church.”⁴ The CHI provides that formal discipline is mandatory for murder, incest, child abuse, apostasy, serious transgression while holding a prominent church position, a transgressor who is a predator, a pattern of serious transgressions, or a transgression that is widely known.⁵ Formal discipline is sometimes necessary for “serious transgression”, an abortion, or a transsexual operation.⁶ The concept of “serious transgression” is defined to mean “a deliberate and major offense against morality”, including, but not limited to, “attempted murder, rape, sexual abuse, spouse abuse, intentional serious physical injury of others, adultery, fornication, homosexual relations, deliberate abandonment of family responsibilities, robbery, burglary, theft, embezzlement, sale of illegal drugs, fraud, perjury, and false swearing.”⁷

When I was a 19 year-old missionary standing outside of that MTC classroom/confessional, fretting over my fate, it would have been nice to have known that “masturbation and/or viewing pornography in years past” was not included on the “serious transgressions” list. In fact, that bit of information would have probably spared me a sizeable portion of the angst and personal torment that hobbled my spirituality, not to mention my social life, during my teenage years.

But keeping Church members informed is not how the LDS Church uses the CHI. In fact, the Church zealously enforces its copyright with respect to the CHI when anybody attempts to distribute it to unauthorized recipients.⁸

I don’t know exactly why the Church keeps its rules such a big secret, but the effect of the secrecy is clear: (1) It gives local Church leaders an informational advantage over the rest of the flock, which creates or augments an aura of authority and wisdom; (2) it makes local Church leaders almost wholly unaccountable to the members they serve for the decisions they make, and for the quality of their leadership; and (3) the combination of 1 and 2 above leaves members in a position of subservience and vulnerability in nearly every interaction they have with local leaders (the higher-up the leader, the greater his dominance). It is a formula for maximum control over members of the Church by local leaders.

If those are the Church’s reasons for secrecy, then I get it. I just strongly disagree, on ethical grounds.⁹ Basic fairness demands that people be allowed to know the rules for which they are to be held accountable. Even if the Church’s policy in this regard has been adopted with the best intentions, it has the real-world effect of being unfair, oppressive, and enabling ecclesiastical abuse of powerless members of the Church (the very people the Church should be trying its hardest to protect). 

-PWM

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1. When I met with a counselor in the branch presidency, I was seeking a way to be forgiven of my sins; when my mom met with her bishop, she was seeking cancellation of her temple marriage
2. Neither my mom nor I had a clear idea of what kind of process to expect, or what would be required of us by our Church leaders in connection with our respective request.
3. i.e., put on probation, disfellowshipped, or excommunicated; see CHI p. 109
4. CHI p. 105
5. see CHI pp. 110-11
6. see CHI p. 111
7. CHI p. 110
8. A full copy of the latest (2006) CHI has been made available on Wikileaks, but to avoid a cease-and-desist letter from LDS Church attorneys, I won’t directly link to it. Just google it.
9. As an aside, the Church’s expectation that it is inappropriate for Church members to ever criticize a Church leader (even if the criticism is true) makes its policy of withholding the CHI from the members (and therefore removing a key means of formulating criticism) understandable, though cynical, unethical and self-serving.

As a new missionary, I was in the (common?) position of having never really leveled with my local bishop back home about grave sins like masturbation and/or looking at pornography. Before the MTC, I had convinced myself that looking at my dad’s erotic photography books (or Showtime: After Hours) in the privacy of my own bedroom (or mom’s TV room) and/or masturbating, was a victimless crime–if a crime at all, and certainly not something that required shouting from the rooftops, for goodness sake. After a couple of weeks in the MTC, however, I was convinced that I had to confess my adolescent sins to somebody with authority from God to make the sins go away. I tried to find an opportunity to discreetly meet with a member of my missionary branch presidency, and found that there was a line of male missionaries waiting, outside an empty classroom, for a meeting with him. I decided that I would just blend in with them and wait my turn.

While I stood there, my mind began racing. “What if I what I’ve done is actually really bad? Have I broken my temple covenants? What will happen to me? Can I be sent home from my mission for this? How will I face everybody back home? What will I do? Is confession worth it? I definitely won’t ever masturbate again–do I even need to confess? Should I just get up and leave?”

Too soon, it was my turn. I entered the classroom to find the first counselor in the branch presidency waiting for me. He was a tall skinny man with wire-rimmed glasses, completely bald on top. He seemed like a nice enough guy. He exuded confidence and wisdom. He seemed comfortable talking to me, but I was not comfortable. I was worried that my life was going to suddenly go sideways, spinning off in the wrong direction.

He made an attempt at small talk. He asked how I was doing, whether I was used to the schedule, learning a new language, getting along with my companion. I played along. After a minute, he asked me why I wanted to meet with him. Was there anything he could do for me?

I was brave. I didn’t cry or anything. I confessed to (most of the) bad stuff. He asked me how often I had masturbated. I told him. He asked me if the pornography and the masturbation had ever happened at the same time. I told him yes. I braced for the consequences of my awful deeds.

He smiled and told me that he was glad I had confessed. He told me that he generally considered habitual masturbation or pornography viewing to be sins requiring confession to a church leader. He told me that when masturbation happened while viewing pornography, that was a sin that must be confessed, even if it happened only once. He told me that my repentance was now underway, and that the next step was to never do it again. I told him I was already there.

I walked out of the meeting feeling light and happy. I wasn’t going to be sent home, humiliated. In fact, I was now actually worthy of the companionship of the Holy Ghost. It was now possible for me to be a decent missionary. I would never masturbate again.

(And I didn’t do it even once for the balance of my mission. Two+ years of perfect sexual “purity”. Been there, done that.)

-PWM

1. God (a.k.a. “Heavenly Father”) exists.
2. Jesus Christ is the son of God and the savior of humankind.
3. The LDS Church is Jesus Christ’s one true church, comprising his only authorized franchise for teaching people the essential doctrines and administering the rituals (commonly called the “ordinances”) necessary for salvation in the highest kingdom of heaven. (These doctrines and ordinances are collectively referred to as “the fullness of the Gospel of Jesus Christ”.)
4. Joseph Smith was a prophet, chosen personally by Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ to be given the authority to act and speak on behalf of God (the “priesthood”) and with that authority to restore Christ’s true church and the fullness of the Gospel, all of which were briefly in the possession of the early Christian Church after the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, but were lost shortly thereafter (in an event and period of time called “The Great Apostasy”).
5. The current head of the LDS Church is a prophet of God–a legitimate successor of Joseph Smith’s priesthood authority.

While the above facts form the minimum foundation for a testimony that an orthodox member of the Church must profess to have, a Mormon can have a testimony of a lot more facts than that, including (but not limited to) any of the following:

• My life has a purpose.
• I am a child of God, who loves me.
• God wants me to take a certain course of action (i.e., take a this job, move to this city, invest in this cousin’s multi-level marketing company, marry this person, have another baby, etc.).
• Drinking caffeinated soda is forbidden.
• Drinking caffeinated soda is not forbidden.
• Paying 10% of my gross (rather than net) income to the LDS Church is the correct tithe.
• Pornography is bad.
• Evolution is a false theory of men–God created Earth and everything on it in a period of six thousand years or so.
• Evolution is the mechanism by which God created Earth and everything on it over a period of billions of years.
• A member of the LDS priesthood can anoint my head with consecrated extra virgin olive oil and pronounce a special prayer to heal me from any illness.
• Birth control is wrong.
• Birth control is right.
• God wants me to go visit this person.
• God wants me to say this.
• Gay people should not be getting married to each other.
• Polygamy is a true principle of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
• Events described in the Holy Bible literally happened, for the most part.
• The Book of Mormon is the most correct book on Earth, and everything described therein literally happened.
• People of Semitic descent populated all of North and South America for a thousand years, from around 600 B.C. to around 400 A.D.
• People of Semitic descent lived in a very limited geographical area somewhere in South or Central America for a thousand years, from around 600 B.C. to around 400 A.D.

The list could go on and on. You will note that some of the items on the list are contradictory, which might cause you to conclude that a testimony is a strictly subjective thing, unrelated to objective reality. You would be wrong, however. In Mormonism, a testimony is actually considered to be a means of confirming and understanding objective truth–a shortcut for those who can’t (or don’t want to) make the observations and tests necessary to establish a fact. In fact, a testimony is considered to be even more accurate or essentially True than scientific observations made through the five senses.²

With that in mind, the inconsistencies in the list above can be explained by differences in people’s capacity to read or understand communication from the Holy Ghost. A person who is accurately receiving and understanding the Holy Ghost’s messages is said to be “in tune”. Theoretically, if everybody were truly in tune with the Holy Ghost, there would be no contradictions on the list.

-PWM

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1. Apostle Gordon B. Hinckley said: “I would like to say to you, that is the strength of this cause, the individual testimony that lies in the hearts of the people. The strength of this church is not in its buildings, in its chapels, in its offices, in its schools; it is not in its programs or its publications. They are important, but they are only a means to an end, and that the end is the building of the testimony – a conviction that will weather every storm and stand up to every crisis in the hearts and lives of the membership.” (Gordon B. Hinckley, Area Conference Report, August 1971, Manchester, England, pp. 160-161. As quoted in Testimony, pp. 8-9)
2. “Remember that faith and doubt cannot exist in the same mind at the same time, for one will dispel the other…Should doubt knock at your doorway, just say to those skeptical, disturbing, rebellious thoughts: ‘I propose to stay with my faith, with the faith of my people. I know that happiness and contentment are there, and I forbid you, agnostic, doubting thoughts to destroy the house of my faith. I acknowledge that I do not understand the processes of creation, but I accept the fact of it. I grant that I cannot explain the miracles of the Bible, and I do not attempt to do so, but I accept God’s word. I wasn’t with Joseph, but I believe him. My faith did not come to me through science, and I will not permit so-called science to destroy it.” (Thomas S. Monson, “The Lighthouse of the Lord,” New Era, February 2001, p. 4)