In the USA, a school district in Utah has made the decision to take the King James Bible off library shelves, following a complaint from a parent who claimed that the religious text violated a newly enacted state law that prohibits inappropriate books.
After receiving the complaint in December 2022, the Davis County school district conducted a review of the Bible to determine if it contained any objectionable content. The committee responsible for the review acknowledged that the King James Bible did include elements of “vulgarity and violence,” but concluded that it did not explicitly violate a book ban law that was enacted in 2022.
On Thursday, the school district made an announcement stating that approximately eight schools in the district would no longer provide access to the Bible for middle and elementary school students. However, high school students would still be able to borrow copies of the Bible from the library.
Towards the end of last year, a concerned parent from Davis County raised objections about the suitability of the Bible in school. According to the parent, the book contained incest, onanism, bestiality, prostitution, genital mutilation, fellatio, dildos, rape, and even infanticide. The parent said in the complaint, “You’ll no doubt find that the Bible, under Utah Code Ann. 76-10-1227, has ‘no serious values for minors’ because it’s pornographic by our new definition.”
The mentioned Utah law passed in 2022, prohibits the presence of books with “pornographic or indecent” content in Utah schools, including both libraries and classrooms. According to the law, the material is considered indecent if it contains explicit depictions of sexual arousal, stimulation, masturbation, intercourse, sodomy, or fondling. However, another parent within the district has disputed the findings of the school board’s review and is currently attempting to have the Bible reinstated in schools throughout Davis County.
This is not the first incident in which the Bible has been banned in American schools. The Bible has consistently appeared on the American Library Association’s list of most challenged books, and there have been previous instances where it was temporarily removed from shelves in school districts in Texas and Missouri last year.
