Tumblr ap. Works.
A student on the level 2 art and design course wants to burn the Bible. Not the whole thing, he was at pains to clarify, just pages from it. His idea is to alter the text in a variety of ways - writing on it and burning it are the two we briefly discussed. It’s art. Now, I’m a christian. I’m not a Sunday pew-warmer or a radical right winger, I’m not a raging liberal or a creepy pentecostal, I’m a disciple without labels (apart from Church of England Evangelical, but that’s only because it’s the place I go to worship and for fellowship.) I have the kind of living, evolving faith that is rooted in the Gospel, I wrestle with the sorts of issues that are deeply human, and accept the more supernatural aspects of my faith as a result of personal experience. I’m fairly academic, fairly liberal, fairly normal, fairly balanced (there’s a couple of subjective statements.)
I found myself listening to this student with complete detachment. Part of me felt like I should be reacting with disaproval, or even simply reactionary, and part of me wanted to approach the project from a distance. On the one hand the bloke was talking about my holy book, the word of God; more than simply a book of rules and history and fact, The Bible is a book which is alive with direct communication from God. On the other hand the bible is simply a book of words on pages.
”No one really knows how many copies of the Bible have been printed, sold, or distributed. The Bible Society’s attempt to calculate the number printed between 1816 and 1975 produced the figure of 2,458,000,000. A more recent survey, for the years up to 1992, put it closer to 6,000,000,000 in more than 2,000 languages and dialects. Whatever the precise figure, the Bible is by far the bestselling book of all time.” The Top 10 of Everything, 1997 (DK Pub., 1996, pp 112-113.)
One level 2 student of art and design defaces pages from the bible, 5,999,999,999 other copies exist in the world for our use. I’ve got the bible ap, so I can access it in a less flamable format in 12 different translations. So what is the issue? Should I be offended? My biggest objection to the student was the fact that his reasoning was a little flaky. He was attempting to do something that he recognised as being shocking, offensive and anti-establishment. He went to a church primary school and was, as he put it, “forced to pray”. He is challenging accepted notions of religion in society and reacting to radical “christian” ministers who do stupid things like burn the Quran. He wants to say “these are your words, not mine. You can’t tell me what is right and wrong any more because I control my own life. Education does not mean indoctrination.” He wants to say those things, but, unfortunately, he does not know how. He has not intellectual capacity (yet) to articulate those sentiments, he only has the frustration left by his upbringing and education, and some half-formed ideas about the oppression of state-sanctioned religion. Because he does not have the words, the art work would have been his way of expressing it - a notebook of singed and defaced pages from the bible, with his explanations of why he has chosen those particular passages. For that reason do not think it is a particularly good idea - something so inflammatory as setting fire to a religious book needs a strong, articulate argument to justify the act. Even then I’m not sure it’s worth it, I’m not even sure he is the first artist to have done it, and I’m certain that there are other more creative ways of expressing his frustration and disappointment.
