Bible Banned in Elementary and Middle Schools for Being Vulgar and Violent.

Literature in the News

6-13-23

The AP is reporting that a Utah school district has been convinced by an unknown group or person to ban the bible because of scenes of violence and sexual content, like incest and rape. Someone has submitted a similar request against the Book of Mormon.

The committee decided the Bible didn’t meet “Utah’s definition of what’s pornographic or indecent, which is why it remains in high schools.” But it “applied different standards based on students’ age” for lower grades.

The AP reports that American Library Association finds the Bible as one of the “most challenged books and was temporarily pulled off shelves last year in school districts in Texas and Missouri.” So far there’s been “121 different proposals introduced in legislatures this year targeting libraries, librarians, educators and access to materials.” 2022 is currently the highest attempts to ban books in the last 20 years according to the American Library Association.

The Bible and public schools have a long problematic history in the U.S. dealing with the separation of church and state. To a lesser extent, the same evidently can apply to public libraries, which explains challenges and legislative efforts. We conducted an online Google search about the Bible and U.S. legal traditions as it relates to public schools, and this is what Bard came back with (which appears to be hallucination free)…

“The Supreme Court has ruled that public schools may teach students about the Bible as long as such teaching is ‘presented objectively as part of a secular program of education.’ The Court has also held that religious groups may not teach religious courses on school premises during the school day.

The Court has ruled that Bible reading in schools is unconstitutional. In 1962, the Supreme Court ruled in Engel v. Vitale that school-sponsored prayer in public schools violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment. In 1963, the Supreme Court ruled in Abington School District v. Schempp that school-sponsored Bible reading and the recitation of the Lord's Prayer in public schools in the United States was unconstitutional.

Currently, there are 7 states that mandate Bible courses in public schools: Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas.”

For us at the Joseph Street Digest, this continues to echo the dystopian realties in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

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