I wrote recently about the fetish of book banning that has taken place across the US, and about attempts to do the same in Canada. Now the situation has taken on a different and rather surprising flavour.
It happened in Utah, with the Davis School District—the state’s second largest with 74,000 students—voting to remove the Bible from many bookshelves, although kept in the library. It follows a complaint from a parent who quoted various scriptural texts and stated that they included, "Incest, onanism, bestiality, prostitution, genital mutilation, fellatio, dildos, rape, and even infanticide." She argued that this made the Bible unacceptable under Utah’s new censorship code.
But while courageous enemies of “woke culture” are already writing editorials and taking to the airwaves, the story here is that the unidentified complainant is using irony to make a very good point. The context is that Utah, and numerous other states, cities, and towns across the US have banned books that deal with gender, sexuality, and race. They do so from a conservative and often Christian standpoint.
The complainant again: "I thank the Utah Legislature and Utah Parents United [a right-wing group that campaigned for a book ban] for making this bad faith process so much easier and way more efficient. Now we can all ban books and you don’t even need to read them or be accurate about it. Heck, you don’t even need to see the book!"
It’s uncertain whether the Bible ban will remain in place, but it does place the new generation of largely evangelical pressure groups in a difficult position. Their particular targets are books that try to explain same-sex relationships to children, or discuss what it might mean for a young person to feel uncomfortable on uncertain in their own body. The books are generally sensitive, gentle, and can do enormous good. But not in the eyes of those who see trans agendas around every paranoid corner. They claim that the books proselytize and offend, but that’s to misunderstand and fail to interpret them properly.
Which brings us back to the 774,000 words of the Bible — yes, I’ve read them all —the very book that so inspires these activists. I believe it to be inspired by God, but it’s not divine dictation. Believers are called to wrestle with the various books (Bible means library) and to understand that as well as moral guidance, biographies of the Messiah, and sublime poetry of love and faith, there are warnings, descriptions of dark failure, and accounts of dreadful brokenness. It’s a supreme literary gathering of wisdom and story, literal truth and swimming metaphors, and we should respond to it not as robotic followers but as gracious and intelligent people. We’re made and told to discern, not disown.
Yet almost every day I receive tweets and emails from Christians roaring that the Bible tells them to judge people, discriminate against those whose sexuality isn’t mainstream, and promising eternal damnation for anybody who supports abortion rights. They’re hysterical, intolerant, and angry. But that’s not the Bible that inspired Martin Luther King to stand against racism, William Wilberforce to devote his life to ending the slave trade, or Dutch priest Titus Brandsma to be martyred for rescuing Jewish victims of Nazism. Their examples can be multiplied beyond counting.
So, it all depends how we read and understand it. Through the gorgeous prism of the Gospels and the justice and grace vision of Jesus, or through the thick lens of the constantly provoked fundamentalist?
There’s a particular episode of the 1970s television series The Waltons that might surprise those who considered the show too sugary or complacent. Called The Fire Storm, the episode concerns the reactions of these rural Virginians to 1930s Nazi book-burning. The local church minister calls on German books to be burned, but the hero of it all, John Boy Walton, protests and says that if any book is incinerated, we destroy all thought and freedom. He then picks up one discarded book at the edge of the fire. It’s a German version of the Bible. The clergyman is ashamed, the point made.
It breaks my heart to see the Bible banned, even if it’s done to shine a light on dangerous foolishness, but I understand the motives behind this action — in Utah or anywhere else. But God willing, and I use the phrase advisedly, it will lead people to take back a sacred and vital text from people who are abusing it for their own ungodly politics.
