Old English's status in the Middle Ages is interesting compared to other lay languages. Latin of course was king and would remain so until shortly after the Enlightenment, but often monks would eschew their native tongue entirely for it. In England however there was a royal program to translate many texts into English to better educate the scholars who aren't very good at some language from a distant land. After all inhabitants of the British Isles were not as fortunate as those from France or Italy: They didn't speak a Romance language. Ælfric of Eynsham was a 10th century scholar who was one of these translators, and his preface to the book of Genesis is fascinating because he explains his hesitation to do so:

Once I knew some priest, who was my teacher at the time, and he had the book of Genesis and could understand the Latin in part; then he said the patriarch Jacob had four wives — two sisters and their two handmaids. He spoke very truthfully, but he did not know, nor did I yet, how much difference is between the old law and the new. In the beginning of this world the brother took his sister as his wife, and sometimes the father begat with his own daughter, and many also had more than one wife, and in the beginning one could not take a wife except from his siblings. If anyone wants to live after Christ’s coming just as men lived before Moses' law or under Moses' law, this person is not a Christian, nor is he even worthy of being able to eat with any Christian. Then uneducated priests, if they understand only a little of their Latin books, then would immediately think that they could be great teachers; but they did not know the spiritual meaning there however, and how the old law was a sign of coming things, or how the New Testament after Christ's incarnation was a fulfillment of the what the Old Testament signaled about Christ and his chosen.

If you look at the Old Testament, there is some pretty fucked up shit in there. Leviticus, Numbers, or Deuteronomy explains in detail laws laid down by God that any modern person would think is terrible. From very early on Christians tried to grapple with the dichotomy between what was socially acceptable for Jews in ancient times and what they would consider just in their own time. Some sects like Marcionism rejected the Old Testament outright and didn't add it to their canon. However its power placed it in mainstream Christianity, but most church fathers agreed that the laws stated no longer applied because Jesus created a new law that overrode the old. As the centuries passed theologians would see many of the crazy rules as either an allegory or sign of Jesus' coming. St. Barnabas in particular loved doing that; he believe that Abraham had 318 servants (Gen. 14:14) was a spelling for "Jesus."

But if you tell people that scripture is sacred, they're going to believe everything in it is. That's what Ælfric was worried about: If uneducated people start reading the Bible, then you're going to get a bunch of crazy people practicing polygamy or fucking their daughters or what have you. Part of the reason why the Catholic Church kept a very, very tight lid on the Bible and insisted it be read in Latin was to retain their power, don't get me wrong, but it was also a legitimate worry. Because what happened when the Protestant Reformation happened? There's only one Catholic Church, but there are many, many, many, many Protestant sects. Instead of leaving interpretation to the professionals, anyone who has a different reading can leave their church and set up a new one with followers. And occasionally Protestant sects did exactly what Ælfric warned about by taking the literal interpretation and running with it: execution for minor infractions, polygamy, etc. But even more it tore Europe apart in very, very violent ways.

When you look at Wikileaks or Edward Snowden, you have to ask: Is all this information worth it? Consider Europe in the 1500s and 1600s. By allowing anyone to read the Bible, not only were Catholics and Protestants killing one another, Protestants were also slaughtering their own when another sect's interpretation didn't match up with theirs. However it allowed Christianity to develop in new and interesting ways that would otherwise be impossible. Surprisingly our modern information dumps weren't particularly influential — US policy remained completely unchanged regardless of how much Assange tried — but that doesn't mean another tectonic shift isn't on the horizon.