As of late, it seems controversy regarding religion has become significantly more prominent in the media. While this topic of conversation generally stems from reports regarding religious intolerance of the LGBT community — most recently, Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act — the floor has recently opened to official state symbols.
On Thursday, the Tennessee Legislature shot down, 22 votes to nine, a bill that would make the Bible the official state book. According to The Tennessean, state Sen. Steve Southerland, the bill’s sponsor, argued “The Bible has great historical and cultural significance in the state of Tennessee.”
State Attorney General Herbert Slatery, Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam and multiple Republican senators, however, entirely opposed the bill because it would violate the state and federal constitutions. Lt. Governor Ron Ramsey agreed to kill the bill and send it back to committee, even though Ramsey is a practicing Christian.
“I am a Christian, but I am also a constitutionalist and a conservative. It would be fiscally irresponsible to put the state in a position to have to spend tax dollars defending a largely symbolic piece of legislation,” Ramsey said in a statement.
This isn’t the first time that a state has tried to make the Bible its official state book. In Jan. 2015, lawmakers in Mississippi proposed a bill that would do just that.
While state symbols may seem arbitrary and unnecessary to some, they do provide others with a sense of identity. The argument that the Bible is representative of Tennessee’s history and culture isn’t necessarily a bad one. According to The Huffington Post, Tennessee is 52 percent Christian. Although 52 percent is a significant portion of the population, it is important to recognize that this bill may result in the alienation of those who do not associate with this specific religious text, such as devout Jews, Muslims or others.
To this effect, making the state book the Bible could eventually become volatile in terms of federal government structure. While this rule may seem insignificant, simply establishing any religious text as a state book could create a detrimental snowball effect, entangling the U.S. Constitution with religious beliefs.
Ramsey’s statement, then, encompasses much of what is wrong with this piece of legislation. Constitutionally, this is an issue of separation of church and state.
There are realistically thousands of other books that Tennessee could consider for this honor. After all, many other stories out there have religious themes and morals, but aren’t so overtly religious that they may offend large groups or even threaten the law of the U.S. Constitution. This would allow an influence of religious identity in Tennessee without scrubbing it clean of cultural significance.
That being said, any book that represents an entire state may come with negative and potentially offensive implications. Perhaps the real issue here is not having to do with the Bible, but rather that it will always be problematic to have a book or narrative that represents an entire state. Other official state representatives, such as birds or flowers, bring little to no social or religious implications along with them. Imagine that Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mocking Bird,” for instance, was made the state book of Alabama. The novel comes with moral implications regarding race that many people today, though surprisingly, may still disagree with. There is, after all, a reason Lee penned it in the first place.
The decision not to pass this bill is ultimately the right one. Perhaps if religious documents and ideals were kept out of governmental decisions and practices, these issues regarding human rights and potential alienation would become few and far in between.
