Bible Censorship and Religious Freedom

TruthNews Commentary, February 1, 2002

It is no accident that two of the fundamental rights enshrined in the First Amendment are religious freedom and a free press. These rights are interdependent, and dictators as well as anti-religious bigots will often attack the Bible and other religious writings in order to stifle freedom of worship. This past week, three news stories from different parts of the world bear stark witness to continuing efforts to suppress the Bible.

The first of these events occurred in China. A Hong Kong businessman, Li Kwon-Keung , was sentenced to three years in prison for smuggling Bibles into China. The communist rulers of China are officially atheist, and Christianity is only tolerated in state-run churches. The concept of churches run by atheists might not seem unusual in America, where the pastors of many liberal congregations openly doubt the existence of God. But the Chinese Christians prefer to practice their faith in Bible-believing underground churches rather than the sterility of the state-sponsored religion.

As during the Dark Ages in Europe, the Chinese communists have found it convenient to suppress the Bible so that the Christians who make the mistake of attending the state-run church won't know they're being lied to. In the case of China, the state-sponsored churches use a watered-down Chinese translation that is unacceptable to many Chinese Christians.

Li was originally accused of crimes that would have gotten him the death penalty. It was only because of the personal intervention of President Bush (and the upcoming U.S. China summit meeting) that Li's sentence was reduced to three years.

Meanwhile, in the United States, Bible censorship of a different type is taking place. In response to the demands of political correctness, the International Bible Society is developing a revised version of its popular New International Version translation of the Bible. Among other changes, the New NIV will incorporate more gender-neutral language. This raises the question of how faithful a translator should be when rendering the Word of God in the vernacular. Both the Chinese communists and the NIV translators appear to take the view, "Hey, if you don't like it, change it." This amounts to suppression of the Bible by deception, presenting a corrupted text as the true Word of God.

Finally, in Europe, the Lithuanian government has returned thousands of Torah scrolls seized from synagogues when the Soviet Union invaded Lithuania in 1939. As in today's China, one of the communists' first acts after taking over was to get rid of the Bible. The Lithuanian Jews were subsequently murdered by the Nazis when Hitler invaded Russia.

It's interesting to observe that though Bible translators might take liberties to change the Bible to support whatever their political agendas might be, the Jewish Hebrew scrolls have served to preserve the accuracy of the Bible. The Apostle Paul says of the Jews, "Unto them was entrusted the oracles of God," and through the millennia, the Jewish scribes have maintained the Bible with remarkable accuracy. The accuracy of the Jewish manuscripts was confirmed by the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, dating from ca. 100 B.C. In fact, when the translators of the King James translation began their work, they turned, not to the corrupt Latin translation, but to the Jewish Masoretic text.

Liberty is fleetinq, and religious liberty perhaps more fragile than any other freedom. Whether under attack by tyrants or anti-religious bigots under the guise of political correctness, suppression of the Bible and other religious writings usually herald a greater oppression of religion in general.

One of the reasons that the Dark Ages were dark is because the Bible was suppressed. Similar repression might seem unlikely today. But the Dark Ages came only a few years after the height of the Roman Empire. Today, at the height of American power and pride, we must be on guard against Bible suppression, both overt and covert, lest we once again enter a dark age of ignorance and superstition.

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