Christopher Campbell is an English Honors student at Parker High School in Wisconsin, USA. On 7 December, 2007 he gave a speech to his class, reports The Humanist.

…his teacher had taped aphorisms by Ralph Waldo Emerson on the blackboard. Students were to select an aphorism of their choice, explain what they thought Emerson’s words meant, and relate it to a personal experience, accompanied with a visual aid.

Campbell picked, “So far as a man thinks, he is free”.

Campbell…lifted a copy of the Bible in his hand as he spoke:

“This book has halted the intellectual advancement of humankind for centuries. But now I am free from its grasp, so I am free to do this.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word became kindling. (At this point, Campbell starts to tear the pages.) This book is not holy. It was written by a bunch of old, smelly Mesopotamians with sand in their [expletive¹]“.

What next happened to Campbell is far more appalling than anything he might have done.

He was taken to in-school suspension and then sent home. A meeting with his parents was scheduled. The assistant principal, a police officer assigned to the high school and a social services worker attended, Campbell says, and he was barraged with questions unrelated to the actual incident: What do you do when you get angry? Are there problems at home?…and they ordered him to be examined by a psychiatrist before returning to school.

So a child has torn pages from a book. For this he is suspected of incipient criminality (the police officer), antisocial tendencies and living in a dysfunctional family (the social services worker) and of being mentally unstable (the psychiatrist).

He was suspended for a week for saying “ass”. For christs sake, if you applied that rule consistently, on a sliding scale from “ass” to “cunt”, you’d empty all the schools for a year. By Little Lunch.

One girl said she felt threatened! “I have never felt threatened like that in a classroom before … This boy got up and his visual aid was a Bible and a book. And he got up and started his speech by saying ‘Now, this piece of crap’ and pointed to the Bible.”

Threatened? By a boy tearing pages out of a book? Fuck me dead². If he had torn pages out of the telephone directory or even a Harry Potter book she would never have said she felt threatened.

It was never about the swearing. And it was never about tearing pages out of a book. It really was about the bible.

Now, we agree with the kid’s assessment of the bible, the way it constrains intellect and the fact that it has halted intellectual advancement for centuries. Maybe the kid was a bit of a dickhead and a show-off. Perhaps he was a bit immature. He was only a highschool kid for god’s sake. Maybe with our own many more decades of experience and “wisdom” we would have acted differently. We might have shown more respect for the humanity of the individuals in the audience but not for their beliefs, and we would not have been inclined to show any respect for the book itself (except the respect we have for books in general, and beyond perhaps the purely literary merit of the King James Version).

However, this is not the problem. The problem is that protecting people’s sensibilities about the bible beyond other books, or avoiding “offending” christians’ sensibilities, in particular, about their beliefs, is an admission of some sort of legitimacy of the book and the beliefs. It is an agreement that they are untouchable and unquestionable. It confers special rights on christians, their beliefs and their books which are unwarranted and to which they are not entitled. It is a capitulation to the religious that they and their superstitions hold some special right not to be offended. Self-censoring to avoid giving religious offence strangles debate, entrenches even deeper an archaic, anachronistic, primitive, irrelevant, superstitious, and, worst of all, deadly dangerous, worldview. It encourages a return to the days of the Inquisition of which, whatever else, this little episode in Winsconsin is a nasty little reflection.

In its Mission Statement, Parker High School claims to be committed to providing an environment which ensures “the intellectual…development of students” with “challenging and meaningful learning opportunities” to prepare them for “an ever-changing and diverse society”. Clearly this intellectual development ought not extend to asking meaningful questions, or to challenging religious orthodoxy. To do so means being accused of being to some degree violent, antisocial, criminal and insane. And apparently the school (terrified as it is of the bigoted, stupid parents of its more simple-minded students, would only be happy as long as the “ever-changing and diverse society” is more or less indistinguishable from the current one with all the horrors that religious bullshit causes and the physical, intellectual and emotional violence that the “righteous” visit endlessly (and gleefully) upon their unbelieving “neighbours”, despite the biblical exhortation to the contrary.

Whatever else, the Campbell kid showed courage, and here’s what Ralph Waldo Emerson said about that:

Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.

^{¹We are intrigued what the expletive may have been. Probably “ass”. Oh, dear me! We are more disgusted by the pietistic, pusillanimous, sanctimonious deletion of the expletive by “Les Dévots“.}

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