U.S. Prisons Purging Books on Faith From Libraries

Behind the walls of U.S. federal prisons nationwide, chaplains have been quietly carrying out a systematic purge of religious books and materials that were once available to prisoners in chapel libraries. The chaplains were directed by the Bureau of Prisons, an agency the Justice Department, to clear the shelves of any books, tapes, CDs and videos that are not on a list of approved resources. In some prisons, the chaplains have recently dismantled libraries that had thousands of texts collected over decades, bought by the prisons, or donated by churches and religious groups. The Bureau defended its effort, which it calls the ‘Standardized Chapel Library Project’, as a way of barring access to materials that could, in its words, “discriminate, disparage, advocate violence or radicalize.”

The Bureau’s actions clearly violate the rights of its prisoners to the free exercise of religion as guaranteed by the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

The Bureau says that the agency is acting in response to a 2004 report by the Office of the Inspector General in the Justice Department. The report recommended steps that prisons should take, in light of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, to avoid becoming recruiting grounds for militant Islamic and other radical religious groups.

I can appreciate the concerns the Bureau of Prisons has with respect to prisoners being incited to commit acts of terrorism if they read religious text that advocates murder and even genocide but is the Bureau completely oblivious to the scriptures in Old Testament of the Bible that advocated genocide and murder?

Here are just two examples where the Bible states that God ordered his believers to commit genocide.

“When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you may nations...then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them and show them no mercy." Deuteronomy 7:1-2, "...do not leave alive anything that breaths. Completely destroy them...as the Lord your God has commanded you..." Deuteronomy 20:16,

The Bible also talks about the conquest of Canaan, in which God ordered the Hebrews to completely exterminate the Canaanite people --- from the elderly to newborns and fetuses. This is described throughout the book of Joshua.

There are 600 passages of explicit violence in the Hebrew Bible [a.k.a. Old Testament], 1,000 verses where God's own violent actions of punishment are described, 100 passages where God expressly commands others to kill people, and several stories where God irrationally kills or tries to kill for no apparent reason.

Does it not follow that if various religious texts found in many of the writings of religious scholars can be purged, then will the Christian Bible also have to be removed from the shelves? I doubt that the Bureau will risk the wrath of millions of Christians and I might add, those of the Hebrew faith and Muslims also who hold the Old Testament as gospel.

I can accept the premise that the prison chapel libraries shouldn’t have contemporary religious books that might advocate genocide, murder or terrorism but I doubt that any such books would be written but if they were, it’s unlikely that they would slip by the chaplains in the prisons.

On May 10, 1933 - an event unseen since the Middle Ages occurred as German students from universities formerly regarded as among the finest in the world, gather in Berlin and other German cities to burn books with "unGerman" ideas.

Modern Germany looks back at that event with shame. What is happening in the federal prisons in the United States with respect to the purging of religious books from their libraries is just as shameful. I am convinced that those who follow us will look back at that event in the same manner we looked back at the event that occurred on May 10, 1933 ---- with disgust.