First up from The God Machine this week is a fascinating NYT item about a reverse-faith-based initiative involving prisons and religious rights.
Apparently, the federal Bureau of Prisons has ordered prison chaplains to clear chapel libraries of any religious books, tapes, CDs, and videos that are not on a list of approved resources. Some prison libraries that had collected thousands of religious texts have been dismantled.
The conventional wisdom suggests that federal officials would want convicts to have more access to religious materials, not less, but this purge effort is apparently part of a counter-terrorism initiative.
Traci Billingsley, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Prisons, said the agency was 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 Sept. 11 attacks, to avoid becoming recruiting grounds for militant Islamic and other religious groups. The bureau, an agency of the Justice Department, 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.”
Ms. Billingsley said, “We really wanted consistently available information for all religious groups to assure reliable teachings as determined by reliable subject experts.”
But prison chaplains, and groups that minister to prisoners, say that an administration that put stock in religion-based approaches to social problems has effectively blocked prisoners’ access to religious and spiritual materials — all in the name of preventing terrorism.
“It’s swatting a fly with a sledgehammer,” said Mark Earley, president of Prison Fellowship, a Christian group. “There’s no need to get rid of literally hundreds of thousands of books that are fine simply because you have a problem with an isolated book or piece of literature that presents extremism.”
Federal officials are now also in the untenable position of deciding which religious books are “permissible,” and which need to be kept out of prison chapel libraries.
David Zwiebel, executive vice president for government and public affairs for Agudath Israel of America, an Orthodox Jewish group, asked, “Since when does the government, even with the assistance of chaplains, decide which are the most basic books in terms of religious study and practice?”
Other items from the God Machine this week:
* An anti-religion backlash is growing quickly in Europe: “Many Europeans are angry at demands to use taxpayer money to accommodate Islam, Europe’s fastest-growing religion, which now has as many as 20 million followers on the continent. Along with calls for prayer rooms in police stations, foot baths in public places and funding for Islamic schools and mosques, expensive legal battles have broken out over the niqab, the Muslim veil that covers all but the eyes, which some devout women seek to wear in classrooms and court. Christian fundamentalist groups who want to halt certain science research, reverse abortion and gay rights and teach creationism rather than evolution in schools are also angering people, according to Sanderson and others. ‘There is a feeling that religion is being forced on an unwilling public, and now people are beginning to speak out against what they see as rising Islamic and Christian militancy,’ said Terry Sanderson, president of the National Secular Society of Britain.”
* The National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools (NCBCPS) has been working for years to bring its religious-right curriculum to hundreds of public schools, though the group claims its materials are legal and appropriate for classrooms. Mark A. Chancey, associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, published a peer-reviewed piece in the September 2007 issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, and came to a different conclusion: “The overall impression the various editions convey is of an inability to differentiate between pseudoscience, urban legends, fringe theories, and mainstream scholarship as well as between faith claims and nonsectarian descriptions…. In short, students will leave this course with the understanding of the Bible apparently held by most members of the NCBCPS and with little awareness of views held by other religious groups or within the academic community.”
* Interesting court ruling: “The federal appeals court in San Francisco [Monday] upheld a death sentence from a jury that had consulted the Bible’s teachings on capital punishment. In a second decision on the role of religion in the criminal justice system, the same court ruled Friday that requiring a former prisoner on parole to attend meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous violated the First Amendment’s ban on government establishment of religion.”
* AP: “One in four people in the U.S. said in a recent poll that they would be less likely to support a presidential candidate who is Mormon, an ominous sign for Republican contender Mitt Romney. Yet the survey found two groups, atheists and Muslims, were even less likely to win votes. Sixty-one percent of those questioned said they would be less likely to support a presidential candidate who did not believe in God. Forty-five percent said the same for a Muslim contender.”
* And finally, remember those Christian fundamentalists who heckled a Hindu leader during a recent invocation at the U.S. Senate? The three appeared before a judge this week. As it turns out, the government agreed to drop the charges while the three protestors agreed to stay off the Capitol grounds for the next year. Former Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore, who said he would represent the three in court, did not show up.