Have you heard about the charter school in California which is purging all of the books in its library which have a Christian message of any kind, were written by an author who claims to be a Christian, or was published by a Christian publishing company? The reason they give is so predictable. The school superintendent said, “We are a public school, and as such, we are barred by law from purchasing sectarian curriculum materials with state funds. We only keep on our shelves the books that we are authorized to purchase with public funds.”
If this reply was not so serious it would be laughable. Obviously the superintendent doesn’t realize that there is no such thing as a book which does not have a foundation in some faith system. Her belief that she can have only “secular” material in the library represents massive ignorance of the very nature of human existence.
Most people who take this tack honestly believe that a point of view which excludes God is not religious. The only problem is, it is totally religious. It is a point of view which is built on the faith assumption that reality can be portrayed using only naturalistic descriptions. The only problem is, there is no empirical basis upon which to make that assumption. The belief itself is a religious belief. And it is the kind of religious belief which sees banning of “non-secular” books as proper and right.
This particular situation will be challenged in court and, as in nearly all cases like it, the book banning will be overturned. But we see this kind of ignorance about the nature of faith systems all the time. And the ignorance is not put forth by stupid people. These are people who have high levels of education. It is just that their education has a massive hole in it when it comes to understanding the nature of faith.
The failure in this arena is by Christians who have allowed a Naturalistic faith to supplant our Christian faith in the public square. The solution is to jump into the middle of the culture and debate back. A Christian worldview does not advocate banning books. It advocates getting the false beliefs out in the open and challenging them with the truth. Honestly, Christians need to get up to speed on this!