Prison Officials Enforcing Religious Orthodoxy

In my church we pride ourselves on tolerance—on being able to agree to disagree without fragmenting the “body of Christ.” We’ve had families leave because they felt our pastors were too liberal, only to return when they learned their new, more conservative church had no tolerance for the non-conforming 10 percent of their belief system. Better to be where you’re accepted, even when you disagree.
Enforced orthodoxy has been a problem in the Christian Church from the beginning. It’s why the so-called Gnostic gospels were banned and burned. And once the Romans quit putting Christians to death, we started in on each other. It’s also why the pilgrims first came to America and why government establishment of an official religion was banned in the U.S. Constitution.
Unfortunately, the Federal Bureau of Prisons and the Justice Department have forgotten that history. The Bureau, which operates as part of the Justice Department, has recently established a list of up to 150 permitted books for each religion, while banning all others from our Federal Prisons. Bureau spokeswoman Traci Billingsley told the New York Times the goal was eliminate books that advocate violence, tend to radicalize, or encourage discrimination. But prison chaplains were already screening donated books for these types of extremism. Because the Bureau provided no money to buy the books on their list, many prisons have had their religious libraries stripped bare.
Although the Bureau denies it has become an advocate among competing views of Christianity, Ms. Billingsley's statement seems to belie that claim: “We really wanted consistently available information for all religious groups to assure reliable teachings as determined by reliable subject experts,” she said.
The Bureau has refused to release the list to the public but parts of it have leaked out anyway. As an example of the apparent bias, the list contains nine books by C.S. Lewis, a darling of the religious right, and none by the highly respected Reinhold Niebuhr, a progressive but mainstream pastor and theologian.
If the Bureau’s thinking had been applied 2,000 years ago, the Pharisees would have been in, and Jesus would have been out.