If book banners would actually read the book they claim to protect, the Bible, they would run across the account of Jehoiakim and Jeremiah. It’s in Jeremiah 36, if you care to follow along. Jeremiah was not a popular prophet. In fact, he was often in trouble for speaking what God told him to say. He wasn’t wearing a “Make Israel Great Again” cap. In fact, his message was that the kingdom of Judah had to fall in order to be restored. So in chapter 36 he dictates his message, straight from God, to Baruch, his secretary. Baruch reads the words in the temple and this comes to the notice of the royal staff. They arrange for a private reading and it scares them like a good horror novel. One of them reads the scroll to the king, Jehoiakim, who cuts off a few columns at a time and burns them in the fire.
My favorite part of this story has always been the coda: “Then took Jeremiah another roll, and gave it to Baruch the scribe, the son of Neriah; who wrote therein from the mouth of Jeremiah all the words of the book which Jehoiakim king of Judah had burned in the fire: and there were added besides unto them many like words.” Many like words. So we have book banners around the nation trying to stop children from reading. The hope is they will become unreading adults because reading expands your mind. Jehoiakim was a book banner—a book burner, in fact. But the response from God himself is to write the whole thing over and add many similar words.
The Bible has been, and still is, fairly constantly abused. What it seems to be is unread, at least by those who use it to stop other books from being read. I came to believe, while majoring in religion in a conservative college, that if literalism was truly from God there would be no way to stop it. I took a route unlike my classmates, who tended to go to the most conservative seminary they could find to have their minds further closed. I figured that if it was true then testing it by reason couldn’t hurt it. It’s pretty obvious the way that turned out. I don’t stand with book banners. This is Banned Book Week. Read a banned book. Stand up to those who do the banning. And if you need something to convince them that their tactics don’t meet with divine approval, point them to Jeremiah 36.
