Normally the Christian Right would be apoplectic over any retailer banning the Bible, but in this case it's just one version of the Bible that's been banned and that seems to be OK. So what's wrong with this version of the Bible? It's too honest -- it's "The Brick Bible," a visual retelling of the Old Testament with Lego figures.
The problem isn't that the use of Legos makes The Brick Bible disrespectful; the problem is that Brendan Smith is too faithful to the original stories, retelling them complete with all the explicit violence and sex. This made The Brick Bible inappropriate, according to Sam's Club and whichever Christians complained.
But will Sam's Club ban other versions of the Bible -- books that have the exact same stories, but with words instead of images? Of course not. Does this make Sam's Club and the complaining Christians hypocrites? You bet.
On his Web site, Smith's Brick Testament contains a series of interpretations of sexually suggestive passages of the Bible, but in the latest book version, those sections were removed.
"I have just been informed that Sam's Club is pulling 'The Brick Bible' from the shelves of all of their retail locations nationwide due to the complaints of a handful of people that it is vulgar and violent," Smith wrote on his Facebook page on Monday. "This despite the book containing only straightforward illustrations of Bible stories using direct quotes from scripture."
In response to a request for comment from CNET, a Sam's Club spokesperson said, "We offered the print version only of 'The Brick Bible' in our clubs....Sam's Club received numerous concerns from our members and parents about the mature content in what is perceived as a children's book. Accordingly, Sam's Club made a business decision to discontinue sales." ...
Smith explained to CNET that his publisher, Skyhorse Publishing, had told him that Sam's Club had originally ordered 12,000 copies of "The Brick Bible" and that in just its first two weeks on the shelves, the book had sold 2,000 copies.
He also addressed the fact that "it was reps from Walmart/Sam's Club who had seen an advance version of the book and said they were very interested to place a large order of the book for their stores, but only if we were willing to remove or replace a dozen of the Old Testament illustrations--out of 1,400 total--that showed Lego people in sexual poses. So there are no illustrations of the Bible's sex content in the book."
Source: C-Net
So Brendan Smith already censored his version of the Bible to remove all the sex -- sex that he didn't introduce to the text, but which was always already there and he simply showed. That, however, wasn't enough for some Christians and for the management at Sam's Club.
I wonder what, exactly, these Christians and managers are thinking when they contemplating the stories that exist in both traditional Bibles and in Brendan Smith's Brick Bible. Do they realize that the "vulgar" and "violent" stories in The Brick Bible are also in the other Bibles or have they spent their entire lives skipping over those bits? Or do they think that stories of murder and sex are acceptable so long as they remain in text form but become unacceptable once depicted visually?
Regardless of what their actual reasoning is -- assuming that their thoughts are coherent enough to qualify as "reasoning" -- there aren't going to be any justifications that will be able to avoid accusation of hypocrisy and even plain stupidity. If you think that the biblical stories of sex and violence make the book too objectionable for a retailer to carry, then you should take the position with all versions of the Bible that include those stories, not just a new version that happens to depict the old stories in a new visual manner.
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