Can we really say that American pinch-mouths have banned the Bible for being pornographic? Newsweek tells us those headlines are not wholly inaccurate. Writing about a case in Utah, Tom Norton notes that “While the district did not outright ban the Bible from all its schools ... the book was reportedly removed from elementary and middle schools in the district due to vulgarity or violence”. The Bible is the new Lady Chatterley.
The story speaks to the ingenuity of those resisting growing waves of censoriousness and to the dangers of starting a book fire without considering what fuel your enemies might later add to the conflagration. You wouldn’t say there is much good news here. But buried deep in the yarn is a sense that someone still cares about the power of the quaint old book. Real books. Not information accessed from data clouds. Those cuboid gatherings of paper that can be used for killing wasps, propping up uneven table legs and, when balanced on the head, for instilling proper posture. True, the noisier participants to the conversation want these dangerous objects put at a distance from impressionable minds. But it’s nice that they give a hoot. It is a little like learning someone cares about the dangerous influence of the madrigal or the narrative tapestry.
The King James Bible is positively groaning with sex and violence. This is something filmmakers realised and gleefully exploited when the Hollywood production code still ruled
The Utah story, of course, hangs around a cunning act of creative facetiousness. Following the implementation of legislation prohibiting “pornographic or indecent” literature in Utah’s public schools, a complaint was lodged against The Old Testament and its less racy – but still occasionally outré – sequel. The New York Times noted the submission “dripped with sarcasm”. Quite so. “I thank the Utah Legislature and Utah Parents United for making this bad faith process so much easier,” it read. “Now we can all ban books and you don’t even need to read them or be accurate about it.”
That request, made in December, was followed up last week with another, again in Utah, against the Book of Mormon. Salt Lake City, capital of the state, is the world centre of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints – colloquially the Mormons – which holds that book as a sacred text. It is reported the authorities will “treat this request just like any other request”.
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Not raised anywhere near the Latter-day Saints, I am not in a position to comment on any – to use the pettifoggery of the hour – “inappropriate content” within the Book of Mormon, but the King James Bible is positively groaning with sex and violence. This is something filmmakers realised and gleefully exploited when the Hollywood production code still ruled. You would get into trouble for killing whole generations of babies or drowning multiple pursuing Egyptians in a contemporaneous drama, but take your text from Exodus and the authorities would wave it all through. Few wild parties were so decadent as the orgy that made Charlton Heston cross when he descended from Mount Sinai with the eponymous 10 commandments. The state of Gina Lollobrigida in Solomon and Sheba! You wouldn’t get away with gear like that in, say, sunny Bundoran of the late 1950s. But it’s all there in the saucy source material. “Thy belly is like an heap of wheat set about with lilies,” we read in Song of Solomon. “Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins.” Won’t somebody think of the children?
This is not occurring in the US alone. In April a library in Swords was confronted with a demonstration against “pornographic material that would be X-rated if it was a film”
The submission of the Bible as a cornucopia of filth – “one of the most sex-ridden books around” – does not constitute entirely original thinking. Every time these sour people set to making a new literary blaze, somebody points out that Christianity’s founding text is often NSFW (that’s “not safe for work”, internet innocents). Feeding the text into an inflexible censorship mechanism does, however, help tease out the accusers’ unexplored hypocrisies. Yes, context is important. True, raw detailing of content fails to touch on wider intentions. But these are precisely the counterarguments made when – as has been happening too often in recent months – sketchily informed protesters descend upon libraries or schools. This is not occurring in the US alone. In April a library in Swords was confronted with a demonstration against – language that is both quaint and concerning – “pornographic material that would be X-rated if it was a film”. Well, not if it were a film derived from the Bible (not even in the long-ago decades when the X certificate still existed). One thinks of Amy Madigan standing up against the censorious prig trying to ban books at a school meeting in Field of Dreams. The lady claims she lived through the 1960s. “No, I think you had two ‘50s and moved right on to the ‘70s,” Madigan’s character replies. That timeline doesn’t really work for Ireland. But you get the drift.
