By John Archibald
I counted billboards on the way home from Nashville this week.
Coming Soon! – Jesus.
Lock and Load! – gun stores.
Call Me! – Alexander Shunnarah.
I tried to keep score, but those things come at you fast. At a certain point Shunnarah starts to blend into the Alabama landscape like a longleaf pine.
I’m pretty sure guns beat out Jesus in the long run, but it was close. By the time I got home I was sure of only one thing:
The end is freaking nigh.
This is a state where, on Friday, coaches at Lakewood Elementary School in Phenix City took fifth graders from PE class and ushered them into a room to receive Bibles handed out by Gideons. More people than not will shrug and say “Great.” But not all parents were pleased.
“Several kids started giving my child a really hard time about not grabbing a Bible and whether or not they believed in Jesus,” one Phenix City parent said, asking to remain anonymous to protect her child from further retaliation.
Nathan Walters, who has run the Phenix City system since the superintendent agreed to retire for health reasons, told that parent that no student was “required” to receive one of the Bibles. “This was strictly optional,” he said in an email forwarded to AL.com.
Optional, perhaps, but still likely unconstitutional, as courts have ruled. And potentially coercive.
But hey, I know what’s up. This is a country where the president sells $1,000 autographed Bibles, where he tells supporters he needs $15 donations to further his unlikely bid to get into Heaven. It’s a country where separation of church and state is under threat.
This is a state where yoga only recently became legal in schools, and only with English names for the poses, where a bill to force students to hear a Judeo-Christian prayer each morning failed this year only by a — well, by a prayer.
But it’s also a state where politicians who once wore blackface have limited the study and discussion of history itself to keep children from feeling guilty or uncomfortable, where Moms For (the Misunderstanding) of Liberty have bent backwards to keep books off shelves so parents could have more control over what their children see.
This is a state that has changed curriculums and ended careers in the name of avoiding divisive concepts. Yet sending a line of kids to pick up Bibles after gym class without parental permission is not, using Alabama’s brand of mental yoga, uncomfortable or divisive at all.
Walters, reached later for comment, insisted that no one was bullied at the school.
“It was strictly voluntary,” he said. “It was a table with Gideon Bibles on it … we’ve done this several years in a row.”
Walters said the school never got any complaints until the one this year.
“I’ve heard so many people thanking us for it, to be honest,” he said.
But of course religious freedom is not supposed to hinge on majority rule.
Courts have been pretty clear that handing out Bibles in public schools is problematic, and not just because of separation of church and state issues. Courts have pointed out that it interferes with parents’ ability to raise children according to their own beliefs.
Which, incidentally, was the same concern those politicians and moms claimed when they began their crusade against books they didn’t like or classes that made their children feel guilt for the sins of the past.
Truth is, I’m not 100% sure these people actually read the Bible before they thump it any more than they read the library books they want to ban.
If that part in Genesis where Lot’s daughters got their dad drunk and slept with him didn’t give them the willies, the Sermon on the Mount would do it.