Court Upholds Ban on Gideon Bible Distribution in Public Schools

One might imagine that allowing a religious organization enter public schools during the school day for the purpose of distributing Bibles would be recognized as an obvious violation of church/state separation, right? After all, it's not as though schools are likely to accord the same privileges to every organization that asks to use school time to distribute religious, political, or other ideological literature. Unfortunately, there is a long tradition in America of allowing the Gideons to do exactly this and it's a tradition that dying a hard, slow death.

Can you imagine the outcry if a freethought group even requested permission to distribute Freethought literature in public schools, much less were allowed to? What if communists asked to distribute the Communist Manifesto? What if Muslims asked to distribute copies of the Qur'an or a biography of Muhammad? Yet so many see absolutely no problem with Gideons distributing Bibles in the same manner.

Most recently, a federal appeals court upheld a lower court ruling prohibiting Gideons from distributing Bibles in a southern Missouri school district:

Parents of some students first raised concerns about the Bible distribution in 2005. That fall, the school board voted 4-3 to allow the distribution to continue, even though then-Superintendent Homer Lewis, at the urging of the district’s insurance carrier and attorney, suggested an end to the practice. A day after the vote, the Gideons came to the school and distributed Bibles to both fifth-grade classrooms.

The American Civil Liberties Union filed suit in February 2006 on behalf of four sets of parents, asking that the district be stopped “from further endorsement of religion.” All four sets of parents are Christian, said Tony Rothert, legal director of the ACLU office in St. Louis. “Their objection is they don’t want the school telling their children what their religious beliefs should be,” Rothert said. “They believe that should be done at home with the family.”

Source: Kansas City Star [emphasis added]

Note the important fact that it was Christians who challenged the practice of allowing Gideons to distribute Bibles, not godless atheists. It's easy and common for Christian Nationalists to frame any dispute between secularists and theocrats as a conflict between godless atheists and devout Christians, but the fact is that not every Christian is a theocrat and not every Christian supports government intrusion into religious affairs.

This is especially true when it comes to Bibles in public schools. One of the main reasons Catholics created their parochial schools is because they were not only denied the opportunity to allow Catholic students to use the Catholic version of the Bible during school Bible readings, but in fact Protestants rioted and killed Catholics for daring to make such a simple request. When public schools grant the Gideons the special privilege of distributing their version and translation of the Bible, they send the message to students that this Bible is favored and/or approved of by the government.

It's hardly surprising if Christians who use a different version or translation would object. It's other Christians, though, who are trying to use the power of the state to promote their ideas about proper scripture (and thus proper Christianity itself). This is a completely illegitimate use of government power because the government has no legitimate authority in such matters. As stated in the above article, such matters are best left to the home, the family, and one's church. How insecure must people be in their faith if they feel a need to get the state involved?