- Why folks in Louisiana are obsessed with placing Bibles in every classroom;
- The books Utah is banning from all classrooms;
- How JD Vance’s shifting religious beliefs have aligned to the ancient authorities;
- And short items.
When I was growing up, “weird” wasn’t such the calumny as was the word “weirdo.” A couple of my friends on Facebook have taken the accusation of being “weird” as a badge of honor.
Slate, Madeline Zehnder, 7 Aug 2024: Bibles for Everyone, subtitled “Why Oklahoma’s plan to put a copy of the Good Book in every classroom matters.”
Why are they so obsessed by this? As other commentators have pointed out, having posted the Ten Commandments, or anything else, doesn’t have much impact on students of those ages.
The first clue is that the state superintendent of public instruction in Oklahoma, Ryan Walters, included among his supporting documentation:
…three Bibles, including a copy of The Founders’ Bible, which interleaves the religious text with Christian nationalist writings by discredited “historian” David Barton. As visual aids to Walters’ announcement, these volumes spoke volumes.
The piece goes on pointing out other historically inaccurate claims. (For some Christians, it seems, it’s all about promoting their story, never mind actual history.) And describes earlier evangelical groups, for example:
At the forefront of this anxious politics was the Sunday-School Union, which argued that secular books including “novels” were “sweet poison” for children. For the union, whose leaders viewed the Bible as “essential to the proper training of the young,” the solution lay in publishing vast quantities of religious children’s texts and introducing them into schools—including schools unaffiliated with the organization. By doing so, union leaders believed they could “force out of circulation those [books] which tend to mislead the mind.”
The article goes on with further examples, but the gist of the strategy seems to be that if you fill the classrooms with Bibles, your crowd out all the other books. And indeed, I suspect that’s a primary motivation of Christian home-schoolers.
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Meanwhile, Utah seems to be the first state that has formally *banned* books from all pubic schools.
NY Times, 6 Aug 2024: Utah Bans 13 Books From All Public Schools, subtitled “This is the first time titles have been prohibited statewide, according to a free speech organization. The list includes books by Judy Blume and Margaret Atwood.”
The state of Utah has ordered schools to remove 13 books from classrooms and libraries, including books by Margaret Atwood and Judy Blume, because they have content considered pornographic or indecent under a new state law.
These books, aside from those by prominent writers like Margaret Atwood and Judy Bloom, include the four four books by the popular fantasy writer Sarah J. Maas, which titles I’ve been tracking on my weekly bestsellers page on Locus Online (for example, here, in the paperback section) for a year, or two, or three.
The first response many of us have to accusations of pornography or indecency is, have you read your Bible?
A second thought is, do these kinds of bans actually work? Perhaps they do. Yet there is always the Streisand Effect: prohibit something, and you attract all sort of people who want to see what you’re trying to prohibit. The smart high school students, should they encounter lists like this, will seek those books out.
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Latest items about politics, and the predictable Republican responses.
Slate, Molly Olmstead, 8 Aug 2024: J.D. Vance Used to Be an Atheist. What He Believes Now Is Telling., subtitled “He’s not an evangelical Christian. He’s a Catholic—of a very specific type.”
Apparently JD Vance has switched back and forth among various religious beliefs, even including atheism, over the years. This piece addresses his latest conversion.
In 2021, when J.D. Vance was asked at a conference why he had converted to Catholicism just two years earlier, he had a fairly simple answer.
“I really liked that the Catholic Church was just really old,” he said.
This anti-modern worldview is key to understanding Vance. In a party long dominated by anti-intellectual evangelical Christians with a hearty distrust of institutions, Vance stands out among its leaders for having embraced a church with a complex social doctrine built off the work of ancient philosophers. His enthusiasm for a particular and relatively obscure kind of contemporary Catholic political thought shows up in his politics—his longing for Americans to build robust nuclear families, his comments about banning porn, his scorn for childless cat ladies. It’s tempting to see these stances as old ones from the Christian right, familiar to anyone who has followed the evolution of the GOP in the past couple of decades, but Vance’s past comments indicate that they’re motivated by something newer, and more radical, than that.
Here against is the essence of MAGA, and of the general psychological bias to think that the past was better than the present. It’s mostly selective thinking, the bias toward remembering the good things and forgetting the bad things. But it’s also this weird deference to the past — that the ancients must have known more, been wiser, than anyone today possibly could. Despite the evidence history that knowledge, and even wisdom, has grown over the centuries…
The idea is powerful:
This longing for an imagined simple past, Millies said, is something that has drawn cultural reactionaries to the faith for decades. “You gaze at stained-glass windows and Gothic architecture and you look at the orderliness of a 2,000-year-old tradition, and it looks like a rock to cling to in the torrents of modern life,” he said. “The present is disturbing to people. They feel unprepared for it, overwhelmed by it.”
This is also the Sunk cost fallacy.
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Conservatives detect conspiracies everywhere. Name any candidate, and the right will find some baseless conspiracy theory to attack them.
Salon, 8 Aug 2024: Former Trump aide Stephen Miller spouts conspiracy theory about Kamala Harris and human trafficking, subtitled “Stephan Miller, a former speechwriter for Donald Trump, falsely claimed the vice president is a human trafficker”
And conservatives are always so certain about how other people should behave.
JMG, 8 Aug 2024: Jesse Watters: Walz Hugs His Wife In A “Weird” Way
