Is the Bible a Banned Book?

What do you need in order to look at Medieval art, to understand Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, speeches—or Abraham Lincoln’s speeches—or to read Moby-Dick?

Regardless of your personal beliefs, your faith, or your lack of faith, you need a knowledge of the Bible.

So, in our high school, we teach a course for 10th graders called “The Bible as Literature.” Not that this matters, but, to give some perspective, the woman who teaches it happens to be a Jew who tutors local students in Hebrew for their Bar and Bat Mitzvahs. (She has also taught an elective course in Hebrew for our students, and she teaches another seminar on World Religions.)

Each spring, as a private school, we submit a list of the books we’ll be using the following year to local districts in New York State. The districts buy these books using the money of taxpayers—the parents of our students—and send the books to us. We use them and return them at the end of the year. Our students come from Massachusetts, New York, and Connecticut, but only New York has such a law or program. Students from Massachusetts and Connecticut private schools buy their own textbooks.

Maybe you can see where this is heading. We submit a list of dozens of books that includes, say, The Great Gatsby, Dante’s Inferno, Moby-Dick, The Color Purple, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, Algebra 2, and… the Bible.

And, a few days later, a nice person from the local district calls to say that they can’t order the Bible. It’s not her job to say why or why not a book may be ordered—the computer just won’t let her do it. Software for separation of church and state.

So, presumably, the way we’re asked to teach is this: “See that man wrapped up like a mummy in that painting by Giotto? Does anyone know who he is? Well, let me tell you about Lazarus… He’s a guy whose story is told in the Bible.” “Does anyone know to whom Lincoln is referring when he speaks of the ‘better angels’ of our nature? No? Well, let me tell you about Paul… He’s a guy who wrote letters that you can find in the Bible…” And on and on and on. Good humanities teachers—literature, history, philosophy, you name it—will necessarily reveal to their students that the world in which they live is full of allusions to a book that the district is not allowed to purchase for them.

Let’s hope against hope that they’re iconoclastic enough to look into it for themselves.

Our students buy their own Bibles.