The Bible has been removed from libraries in a Utah school district after being challenged by a person making a jab at book bans.
After a state law allowing school districts to pull “pornographic or indecent” books from schools was passed last year, someone in the Davis School District submitted a complaint about the King James Bible, arguing the text was “pornographic by our new definition”.
A school district committee determined that the Bible was not age-appropriate for elementary and middle-schoolers, though it ruled that the text does not contain the type of “sensitive material” the law seeks to keep out of schools.
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The Bible was pulled from seven or eight elementary and middle schools and will stay in high school libraries, Davis School District spokesman Chris Williams said via email. The decision has been appealed by another person in the district.
The Bible’s journey through the Davis School District review process, the semester after Utah’s new law made it one of the states with the most book removals, comes amid a national surge in efforts to restrict what students read. To supporters of the Utah law, the outcome was a signal of the system properly functioning; to opponents of book banning, it showed the flaws.
“It does illustrate how even a text of world historical importance can, through the current prism of how books are being evaluated, wind up in this prohibited pile of books,” said Jonathan Friedman, a director at the free-speech advocacy organisation PEN America.
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Books about LGBTQ people and people of colour are frequently the target of book bans in the US.
Lawmakers who’d backed the law didn’t strongly object to the removal, indicating that the ability to pull books was more important than the loss of the Bible from school library shelves. State Senator Todd Weiler, a Republican, who sponsored the bill in the Senate, said he hoped the district’s decision would be overturned, but he called the Bible’s removal a “fair trade” for the removal of other books containing what he described as “explicit X-rated content.”
“I don’t feel strongly either way about the Bible in a school library. I think there’s probably good arguments on both sides of that,” Weiler told The Washington Post, “but I think that this whole petition to remove it was an attempt to make a mockery of the statute that we passed in Utah”.
The challenge was one person’s tactic for protesting the type of book bans that have proliferated across the country since 2021, frequently targeting books by or about LGBTQ people and people of colour. Supporters of the policies say they are keeping children from seeing age-inappropriate material, while free-speech advocates say book challenges allow a minority to control the ideas others engage with and limits young people’s education.
The book challenges are part of a political and cultural battle playing out in school districts and state capitals over how schools instruct students on race, racism, history, sexuality and other issues, and how much power parent groups should have in influencing curriculum. The Education Department has said such removals could violate students’ civil rights.
In recent months, not only books but plays, movies and classroom curriculum – often dealing with LGBTQ, gender or racial themes – have been challenged by conservative groups, parents and politicians. In some cases, a single parent’s complaint can lead to a book disappearing from school shelves.
“In many places, it’s very clear that it is an effort to erase LGBTQ stories, an effort to curb conversations about American history and racism or, in other cases, to deny young people information about their bodies,” Friedman said.
In Utah, the school district reviews a parent complaint and decides whether to remove a book. Williams, the Davis district spokesman, declined to identify members of the committee charged with evaluating requests for books to be pulled from school library circulation. Under district policy, it must include a facilitator, an administrator, an English teacher, a school librarian and at least four parents.
From April 2022 to May 2023, the committee determined that 31 books had “no serious value for minors,” so it removed them from schools. The district kept 10 challenged books and allowed nine others for some ages. Forty-seven more challenges remain under review, according to a district database.
Steve Griffin/AP
The Bible has been banned at elementary and middle schools in the Davis School District north of Salt Lake City, after a review committee decided it wasn’t age appropriate “due to vulgarity or violence.” (Steve Griffin/The Salt Lake Tribune via AP)
About 150 books were removed from three Utah school districts, not including Davis, from July to December of last year, according to PEN America. Nationwide that semester, 874 titles were taken off school shelves, PEN America found, with Texas, Florida, Missouri, Utah and South Carolina logging the most instances.
The person who submitted the request for Davis School District to review the Bible accused the Utah legislature of facilitating a “bad faith process” for taking books out of schools, according to a copy of the December request obtained and published by the Salt Lake Tribune.
“Get this PORN out of our schools!,” wrote the person. “If the books that have been banned so far are any indication for way lesser offences, this should be a slam dunk.”
The complaint was anonymous; parents, students, district employees and school board members can challenge books, according to district policy.
State Representative Ken Ivory, a Republican, who sponsored the bill to remove “sensitive materials” from schools in the Utah house, praised the Davis committee for reviewing texts.
“We’re very grateful for the review committee to take time to thoroughly review materials to determine what is and what is not age-appropriate,” Ivory said. “We call upon schools to immediately review all materials [and] get those that are not age-appropriate out.”
Asked whether he agreed that the Bible was not appropriate for elementary and middle-schoolers, Ivory said he did not read it in elementary school. He argued that removals in Utah are not book bans because parents can independently purchase the books from stores – including the Bible, which he and Weiler noted many families in the district probably have at home.
Of Utah’s 3.4 million residents, 2.17 million are Mormons, meaning most residents adhere to a religion that uses the Bible.
Peter Bromberg, co-chair of the Utah Library Association’s advocacy committee, said his organisation had warned state legislators that books such as the Bible or “The Diary of Anne Frank” could be challenged under the law.
Lawmakers should “go back to the drawing board” and work with librarians and teachers to “fix this law,” Bromberg said.
“Teachers and librarians are being demonised in these conversations,” Bromberg said, “and unfortunately what that means is the legislators aren’t really working collaboratively with teachers and librarians to put in place laws that would work”.
A “very small” number of parents are often in support of such removals, he said, and one couple made 199 out of 205 challenges to books in the state’s Granite School District last year. A recent Post analysis of more than 1,000 book challenges found the majority were filed by 11 people.
“This is absolutely not representative of Americans’ or even parents’ views on these things,” Bromberg said.
