Should the Bible be our state book?
No matter who you are, where you’re from, what you think and believe, or how long you’ve called a place home, you can rally around a state flower or a state bird. Regionally selected and appreciated, these grow from the soil and rise above the land. They’re removed from our oft combative human concerns that are spoken and written.
State songs can be more complicated, same with slogans and flags — colonialism lends itself to enduring iconography sometimes threaded with darker repercussions.
But now we get to debate books. Despite its fierce trailblazing self-regard as a state that embodies independence, Texas has chosen to follow the leader and not be a bellwether in establishing an official state book. One that has nothing to do with the Texas portrayed in “Coronado’s Children” or “Lonesome Dove.”
It’s the Bible.
Do other states have state books? Not many.
As books go, the Bible’s canonization is fairly formidable. It’s filled with stories, thoughts and belief systems that have endured across centuries. Now it’s a text for a place that prides itself on independent thought and action?
When people discuss a need to create space between church and state, it’s not necessarily to protect the state. But culture wars have produced endless skirmishes. For what potential gain, I wonder, is this latest one, initiated by a state rep in Brownwood?
We’re asking a lot of the Bible here. We’ve simply put the Bible in a place where it rests vulnerable to assault, be it now or years from now. If one really cared about the Bible, why subject it to such abuse?
Your great-grandmother’s porcelain means more to you than the cheap ware at the all-you-can-eat place (we’ll call it Gilded Ranch to avoid further complaints). You’d never pack your heirloom plates for a visit to its buffet. This Bible contains boundlessness within its pages and thoughts and words handed down, but shouldn’t we recognize the vulnerability of printed text? The simple thought of inking the infinite creates vulnerability. To make it a totem for an entity like a state fences the infinite and cheapens it. Faith is faith is faith. It doesn’t require more, certainly not by ruffians whose work is more helpful and harmful than mine but just as transient.
I don’t have a wager on this horse. But I think past today. Consider the statue of some forgotten slave trader in England that was toppled and shoved into a river. Is that where you want a revered text when your grandchildren are our age?
Texas — like the states it lazily mimicked with this measure — remains overwhelmingly Christian: 77 percent according to a Pew Research Center “religious landscape” poll. The poll then offers some slight erosion. Sixty-nine percent — still a formidable number — expressed an absolute certain belief in God. Fortytwo percent said they attended church weekly. The number that grabbed my attention, though, is the response to the “frequency of feeling wonder about the universe.” Forty-eight percent weekly.
Which tells me the state should consider adopting a geology text as the state book. We should feel wonder all day, every day.
Earlier this year, I talked to Rick Bass, a writer who has penned many texts that could be candidates for a Texas state book. He’s a writer of fiction and nonfiction, but a writer nevertheless by trade. The son of a geologist, he also has a different familial perspective on wonder.
“What was cool about growing up in my household is that my father was drilling for oil and gas and he’d get these cross sections in a day,” he said. “He could see a million years in a day. And that was just my default normal. And I think it’s an accurate way to see the world. Start in the moment and look back. Time can do strange things. Reverse faults, older rocks on top of younger rocks. I think it’s as authentic a way of looking at the world as anything.”
Selecting a state text — even one crucial to so many — is just putting up another statue to suggest there is one path in a state that speaks out both sides of its mouth as far as being welcoming. A single Texas interstate spans nearly 900 miles — which makes a “my way or the highway” approach preposterous and logistically untenable.
If Texas wants to be welcoming — to expand its domain as a tech hub — there will naturally be an influx of people who might or might not appreciate the northern mockingbird and the bluebonnet. The parallel suggestion of a state book could prove more unwelcoming. And the evolving demographic makeup of the state is on an unalterable path. The border is a mess, and I don’t have solutions. But there are a lot of Christians at the gate. Does this idea for a state book apply to them or not?
And a state that routinely lands in the bottom third for public education — measured by multiple metrics — maybe shouldn’t be so fast to direct attention to its bookshelf, lest it seem to fill its shelves with books it never bothered to read.
If Texas wanted to blaze a trail, it might — instead of following a handful of other states that have adopted the Bible as state book — look to “Jesus of the East,” a book by Houston teacher and philosopher Phuc Luu, who offers a philosophy arranged around Christ’s teachings unburdened by the era initiated by Constantine, who was the original televangelist — an opportunist who saw a viable brand and exploited it.
“A lot of it is wanting to keep the status quo because it feels better when you don’t have to change,” he said. “But being uncomfortable is transformative and liberating. It’s life-giving. … We learn to appreciate each other more. We think about where we can be, where we should be as humans. What Aristotle called ‘flourishing.’ ”
Gemstones, insects, reptiles, birds and flowers … perhaps we can’t project flourishing upon them, but they precede us and will outlast us. Our relationship to texts is quaint by comparison, even this one that has great tenure in modern history that nevertheless pales compared to the history of the rocks of the Davis Mountains.