A Utah school district has banned the Bible from elementary and high school students after it was found to be “too vulgar” and “too violent” for younger readers.
The move came after a parent in the district became frustrated with other attempts to ban books in schools.
Officials in the Davis County — a 72,000-student district north of Salt Lake City — have removed the religious text from elementary and middle schools, but will keep it in high schools.
A committee with the district reviewed The Good Book after a complaint from a parent, and district officials say the committee is made up of parents, teachers and administrators.
There was also a complaint to remove the Book of Mormon from the libraries of younger students.
The Davis School District in Utah has banned the Bible in elementary and high school because some verses were “too violent.”
District spokesman Chris Williams confirmed that someone had filed a Book of Mormon revision request, but would not say why. Citing a school board’s privacy policy, he also declined to say whether it was from the same person who complained about the Bible.
Williams said the district does not discriminate between requests to review books and is not considering whether complaints can be filed as satire. The assessments are handled by a committee made up of teachers, parents and administrators in the largely conservative community.
The district has removed other titles, including Sherman Alexie’s “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” and John Green’s “Looking for Alaska,” following a 2022 state law requiring districts to include parents in decisions about what constitutes “sensitive material.’
The committee published its decision on the Bible in an online database of revision requests and did not comment on its reasoning or which passages it found overly violent or vulgar.
The decision comes as conservative parent activists, including state-based chapters of the group Parents United, descend on school boards and state houses across the United States, raising alarm over how sex and violence are being talked about in schools.
Due to the district’s privacy policy, it is not known who made the request to ban the Bible from Davis schools or if they are affiliated with a larger group.
A copy of the complaint obtained by The Salt Lake Tribune through a public records request shows that the parent noted that the Bible contains instances of incest, prostitution and rape. The complaint mocked a “bad faith process” and said the district relinquished “our children’s education, First Amendment rights, and library access” to Parents United.
“Utah Parents United has left out one of the most sex-ridden books: the Bible,” the parent’s complaint, dated Dec. 11, said. It later added, “You will no doubt find that the Bible (under state law) ‘has no serious values for minors’ because it is pornographic by our new definition.”
The review committee determined that the Bible does not meet Utah’s definition of what is pornographic or indecent, which is why it remains in high schools, Williams said. The committee can make its own decisions under the new 2022 state law and has applied different standards based on students’ ages in response to multiple challenges, he said.
An anonymous party filed an appeal on Wednesday.
The Bible has long been on the American Library Association’s list of most challenged books and was temporarily pulled from shelves in school districts in Texas and Missouri last year.
Concerns about new policies potentially getting in the way of the Bible have routinely arisen in state houses during debates over efforts to expand book-banning procedures. So is Arkansas — one of the states that enacted a law this year that penalizes librarians for providing “harmful” material to minors, and creates a new process for the public to request that material be moved in libraries .
“I don’t want people to be able to say, ‘I don’t want the Bible in the library,'” Arkansas Senator Linda Chesterfield said at a hearing.
Parents who have pushed for greater control over their children’s education and the curriculum and materials available in schools have argued that they should control how their children are taught about issues such as gender, sexuality and race.
EveryLibrary, a national political action committee, told The Associated Press last month it was tracking at least 121 different proposals introduced in the legislature this year that targeted libraries, librarians, educators and access to materials. The number of attempts to ban or restrict books in the US by 2022 was the highest in the past 20 years, according to the American Library Association.
“If people are outraged by the Bible being banned, they should be outraged by all the books being censored in our public schools,” said Kasey Meehan, who leads the Freedom to Read program at PEN America writers’ organization.