In Canyon, a small city in the Texas Panhandle, the Independent School District temporarily pulled the Bible from library shelves after our legislature passed a new law mandating the removal of books with “explicit content,” according to The Guardian.
In a 9 December school board meeting, Canyon ISD parent Regina Kiehne said: “It seems absurd to me that the Good Book was thrown out with the bad books.”
“It just makes sense to have the Word of God in our school library,” she continued. “After all, it is the book of wisdom. It is the bestselling book of all time; it is historically accurate, scientifically sound, and most importantly, life-changing.”
State senator Kevin Sparks called the district’s Bible ban “misguided” in a 19 December post on Instagram. “The Bible is not educationally unsuitable, sexually explicit, or pervasively vulgar, making its removal legally and morally indefensible. …”
In the interests of truth and wisdom—and a more enlightened curriculum for the public schools—let’s take a look at these claims.
Teachers may have a big problem with this one. For one thing, what literalists don’t get is that some stories, such as the books of Job and Jonah, were never intended as history. Rather, they are fables with a moral, like the parables of Jesus. Trying to explain what kind of fish (or whale?) in the ancient Mediterranean could swallow a man whole is just as specious as the tourist trap Tomb of Jonah Mosque in Mosul (Nineveh), destroyed by ISIS militants. Surely it could have been turned into a rec center or something, but I digress.
Aside from that, so many of the legendary events in the Bible are unsupported or even contradicted by archeology. Just to pick one, the Egyptians left copious written records, yet no Pharaonic chronicle mentions the catastrophic events of Exodus.
But let’s suppose the literalists can explain that away. There’s the problem of contradictions within the text itself, which are legion. For example:
… In Exod. 9:1–7, Yahweh sends a pestilence upon all the livestock: horses, donkeys, camels, cattle, and sheep. Verse 6 tells us that “all the livestock of the Egyptians died.” Then the Priestly writer jumps in with the plague of boils (vv. 8–12), which afflict all the humans and animals. One assumes the text is referring about livestock, except that they’re all supposed to be dead.
The livestock is targeted again in the plague of hail and lightning. All livestock that is left in the field instead of being put into shelters is killed (vv. 19, 25). And finally, with the so-called tenth plague, all the firstborn of the livestock are killed (12:29). That’s three times the livestock of the Egyptians dies, if you’re keeping count.
Founding Father Thomas Paine enumerates Biblical inconsistencies at length in The Age of Reason, Part II.
So far, Paine hasn’t been banned by any Texas schools, unlike, say, Margaret Atwood and John Grisham.
Mrs. Sanchez, I’ve got a question. In 1 Samuel 17 it says David killed Goliath, but in 2 Samuel 21:19, it says some guy called Elhanan done it. How can both be true?
Now, just having the Bible in the library shouldn’t lead to such questions in class, except that the new state-incentivized curriculum is shoving Christianity down the throats of Texas students. So Biblical inerrancy and historicity are certain to come up. Maybe they should just get rid of the Bible itself and rely on canned stories in the curriculum. Destroy the evidence. Burn it, even.
There are lots of places you can go to read about the Creation and the Flood, so I won’t belabor those controversies. But the OT also claims that rabbits (or hares) chew their cud (Lev 11:6), and that mixing dirt with water can be used to induce an abortion (yes, the OT is sometimes pro-abortion—Num 5:11–28). If you take 1 Kings 7:23 (= 2 Chron 4:2) literally—which you shouldn’t, because the writer was probably rounding—then the value of pi is exactly 3. Not really a problem unless every word is supposed to be an infallible utterance of an omniscient God.
Mr. Thompson, Joshua 10:12–14 says the sun stood still for 24 hours. Why didn’t everybody die of heatstroke? If the Earth suddenly stopped rotating, wouldn’t objects go flying into space?
Now, such questions might form an interesting springboard for discussion, like “Is Hell exothermic or endothermic?”—but not if the teacher is forced to adopt literalism as his creed, even in science class. Better to just ban that damn Good Book.
I won’t dispute this one, except to observe that the lives changed aren’t always for the better, whether we’re talking about pedophile priests, women dying of sepsis in Catholic Texas hospitals, or Defense Secretary nominee Pete Hegseth.
Hoo-boy! Here’s the big one. And, sorry, Puritans, there’s a lot of adult content in the Bible. Some of it is R-rated or more.
The whole Song of Solomon is as racy as some of the romance novels Texas cities have banned. Check out chapter 4, for just one juicy section. And it’s an interracial love affair (1:5–6), so the whole Bible should be banned on anti-CRT/DEI grounds, not just because of all the sex.
When I started reading the Bible at age 7, I was puzzled by many things, not least the references to “male cult prostitutes” (e.g. 1 Kings 14:24, 15:12). I figured, whatever they were, I didn’t want to know. But I felt then, as I feel now, that this discussion probably could wait till kids are a little, er, a lot older.
Parents insisting that the Bible needs to be resurrected probably aren’t thinking about all the incest, rape, and polygamy it describes, often without disapproval.
Mr. Abdullah, in 1 Samuel 19–20 David and Jonathan take their clothes off and kiss. Isn’t that gay? But David is married to Jonathan’s sister. Can somebody like both men and women?
That’s exactly the kind of discussion Canyon’s parents want to prevent, and exactly why the school district thought the Bible met the terms of the book ban.
I like how the senator said “pervasively.” There, he’s correct, but the Bible does have its moments.
I could also file this one under “sexually explicit,” but my personal favorite is Judges 19–20. Really, just go read the whole thing, but it concerns a Levite (sort of a civil servant) and his concubine (on-and-off live-in girlfriend), whom he abandons to a gang of rapists rather than himself getting raped. Then, after a whole night of abuse, he finds her unresponsive body (maybe not all the way dead?) and hacks it into 12 pieces, sending one to each tribe of Israel. Mass killing ensues.
So, Canyon ISD had a point. Not suitable reading for kids, or anybody with a weak stomach.
I used to date a woman who was semi-Evangelical. She couldn’t stand horror stories or horror movies. I asked her how she could read the Bible, when it’s full of horror stories like Judges 19–20. She said, “I don’t read those parts.”
Concerned mom Regina Kiehne probably doesn’t know about those parts. They’re not the stuff of Sunday sermons. If she did, she might agree with her school district that kids shouldn’t have access to such vulgar material.
Look, I finished my AI art assignment! The prompt was “Whore of Babylon riding the beast with 10 horns.” Isn’t it fire? Maybe my brother Tiny will want to get a tattoo made out of it.
All of the above relates to educational suitability. The actual Bible, rather than the corny canned lessons based on it in Texas’ recommended curriculum, might stimulate discussions. But probably not discussions Baptists want public-school students to be having.
For example, a lesson on how concubinage, in a society constantly at war and with a chronic shortage of adult men, could be progressive in that context might be enlightening and provocative at the high-school level. An examination of why there were “male cult prostitutes”—perhaps they allowed gay men to get enough stimulation so they could impregnate their wives?—in my opinion, belongs more at the college level. The Levite-and-concubine story might be compared to frightening, yet exciting, episodes from our own history, such as the Christmas Massacre of 1883 (McDade, Texas), and how they relate to standards of civilized behavior and ideas of just war. But, considering the religious conflict that’s already roiling the schools, not to mention the endless school shootings, such lines of inquiry are best left unexplored outside of—wait for it—Sunday school. Texas has plenty of those.
The Bible could be discussed in public K–12 classes profitably, though I don’t believe it should be, and I hope I’ve made that case. But not if it has to be treated as the inerrant word of an infallible God. That amounts to a “shut up and don’t ask questions” attitude, which is commensurate with authoritarian principles, but contrary to any sort of pedagogy appropriate to raising independent citizens of a democracy. Which is, unfortunately, the point.
While American kids are wasting time on the same lessons already available in Sunday school, they’re going backwards fast in math, both compared to earlier cohorts and their peers in other countries. Presidential best bro Elon Musk considers our graduates “retarded.”
And here’s the problem with a memorize-and-regurgitate regime meant to turn public-school students into obedient, gaslit little consumers. That approach, ever tightening the screws over decades, has as intended produced a population too susceptible to propaganda, dismissive of expertise, functionally illiterate and innumerate, and easily manipulated. But such people, trained to avoid critical thinking, are increasingly unable to handle the responsibilities of keeping our existing society afloat, let alone guide it responsibly through a perilous future.
So, put the Good Book back on the shelf. And leave it there. Believers have many places to pursue questions of faith. The public schools, says the First Amendment, should not be in the religion business. Tom Paine would agree.
This post is published simultaneously at The Liberal Missionary.
© 2025 Lindsey D. Eck. All rights reserved to author.