Six days a week, Mormon missionaries walk the streets and knock on doors, meeting or calling on strangers to explain the Mormon world view and to recruit new church members. Only on the seventh day, during their weekly "preparation day," are missionaries free to make contact with the outside world.
Preparation day is when a missionary buys his groceries, washes his laundry, or even visits the beach. It's the day they write letters to mothers, brothers, friends, and fellow missionaries at home and in far-off lands. Phone calls are not allowed except on Christmas and Mother's Day.
It can take weeks for a letter from a remote corner of South America or an island off the coast of Africa to reach its destination. Enter email?
Enter, and exit, email.
Although it is increasingly popular among missionaries, the medium is too instant and too much of a diversion for the missionary mind, the church has decided.
"It can be distracting to missionaries who we're asking to really focus on their work during that time period," explained church public affairs spokesman Dale Bills.
The Mormon Church announced the ban on email last month in a letter to its 50,000 missionaries and their supervisors. It was the first missionary rule to stipulate limitations on the use of electronic media.
"It's really the immediacy of email, much like the immediacy of the telephone," Bills said.
"The emphasis is that they focus on where they're at and not back home. That way, they're that much more committed to their work."
The new policy draws a line between the era of instant and nearly constant communication -- the here-and-everywhere era of networks, email, chat, and the Web -- and an age where true isolation from the outside world was easily attainable.
The Mormon mission depends on such isolation. The church -- which teaches goal-setting, discipline, and focus, along with religious precepts -- seeks to develop missionaries whose work supplants everyday concerns about loved ones and a life back home. "There was just a growing concern over the immediacy of that communication," Bills said. "There's [typically] not a lot of access to technology, so that was another factor -- they had to seek out libraries, acquaintances [for their email access]. Some had notebooks with them, but that was the exception to the rule."
The email ban does not represent an anti-technology sentiment among Latter Day Saints, according to Bills.
"We use computers in our daily work," Bills said. The church organization uses the Web and email. "A lot of members use computers in their home. There's some fairly high penetration of PCs. This is not an anti-technology culture."
Speaking from his own experience as a missionary to Spain 20 years ago, Bills said, "We didn't have faxes and email. ... I was glad to be focused on Spain and the wonderful people of that country."
Chris Bolton of Boise, Idaho, who served as a missionary in Denmark during the 1970s, said missionaries have taken to electronic media in the form of email as well as instant chat and Usenet discussion groups. Some had a habit of checking their email several times a day and that drew the church's attention.
How will missionaries who have tasted the fruit of instant communication respond to the ban? Quietly, if at all, Bolton said in an email. "Mormons don't generally protest policies from HQ. People like me will grumble, but there won't be any protests unless the missionaries' parents complain about foreign mail service."
Bills said the Salt Lake City, Utah-based church will make exceptions to the email ban in areas where postal service is poor or unavailable.
Swede Mikael Jageklint, who once served on a mission in England, said he sees obedience as the only right course of action for missionaries.
"It is what our leaders want the missionary to do -- a counsel that comes from the Lord," Jageklint said in an email. "We believe in sustaining our leaders. They speak the will of God. I wouldn't think that any one of the missionaries who serves the Lord would go against his counsel."
Barry Steinhardt, associate director of the American Civil Liberties Union said the rule is perfectly within the rights of the church, thanks to the free exercise clause of the First Amendment.
"Any religion can set out its requirements for members and followers who want to stay in good stead, provided this rule doesn't break some general societal law," Steinhardt said. "If there's a missionary who finds the rule unfair or onerous, I guess they'd have to appeal to the church hierarchy or leave the mission."
