Once again, tyrants are keeping knowledge from those who need it the most

John Wycliffe produced translations of the Latin Bible in English.  Contemporary English historian Robert Tombs called it "by far the most important body of English prose since the [Norman] Conquest" in 1066. It "had a much wider circulation than any other English writings, for it "met a desire ... by lay people ... to lead a more active and autonomous religious life." In other words, to experience more "freedom of religion" than the Roman Catholic Church was willing to provide them.

But, making the Scriptures thus accessible to and understood by all was controversial. So, in 1401 heresy was made a capital offense and the 1409 "Oxford Constitution" forbade the translation into English of any Biblical passage or phrase without prior approval — two hundred years before the King James Version of the Bible was published — thereby making Wycliffe's works heresy. Eventually, the laws were changed.

If Ron DeSantis and his Republican minions in Florida and Republicans in other states had been among the powers that be in the 14th and 15th century England, you can bet they would have been among those forbidding such translations of the Latin Bible and other affected works.

The history of Western Civilization is littered with the pages of laws designed to keep selected human knowledge from those who most needed access to it. Ultimately, such laws were and are ignored, until repealed, but not before much mischief has been done and people have been killed by misguided zealots. Few things are more dangerous than ignorance in action. It's still so in our time.

Legislation in Alabama and a number of other states controlled by Republicans similarly motivated has recently been passed to prohibit the teaching of "critical race theory" (CRT) and other undefined subject matter content that might make a student "uncomfortable." Why? Because only "critical white race theory" (CWRT), that has dominated pedagogy in the South for more than a century, as the Latin version of the Bible once dominated European Christian religion, was and is to be tolerated, no matter how many millions it made and makes uncomfortable. Any treatment of the history of race in America that is more truthful and so more accessible (as Wyclif made the Bible) than CWRT was and is to be banished, its exponents treated as heretics.

"Critical race theory" is a historical and sociological theory, designed to understand better the persistence of racism in our land and taught in colleges and not K-12 public schools, and so shouldn't be banned. But, neither should honest, fact-centered teaching about race in our country be banned anywhere. After all, all knowledge makes some uncomfortable.

The faux debate about it in legislative halls is a smoke screen fired up by a few exponents of a return to something that never was — a "whites only" country, even before the Modern Civil Rights Movement, in which political and religious leaders dictated orthodoxy and punished "heretics."  That was an America, which many Evangelicals are effectively advocating wrongly, that once was a theocracy and should be again, they say. Before the Revolutionary War, there were free Blacks in America and millions of Native Americans throughout the colonies and "out West."

Many Evangelicals read the Scriptures literally, from a preferred translation of the many now available, and they don't countenance contrary readings of their "originalist" views, as some members of the Supreme Court of the United States now claim to read the U.S. Constitution, when it suits present purposes. If they ever get control of the Congress and the White House, as they think they now have control of the SCOTUS, with its six Catholic justices, many of them will try to effect that result via federal legislation, making this "a Christian nation" with even more restricted rights for members of the LGBTQ Community, minorities, and women. That despite the documented fact that less than half of Americans are now members of orthodox religious bodies or go to church, mosque, or synagoge on a regular basis.

For the last 800 or more years, the censorious among us have tried to make Western democracies (actually democratic republics), more and more like some Muslim nations, in which the barriers between "church" and "state" are non-existent. Thus do we go through these needless fights regarding the extent to which we'll permit religion and politics to be morphed into an autocracy run by the narrow-minded true believers of whatever "party" happens to control the processes of government with their claims of divine sanction and a monopoly on the truth, everything else being "fake news" (an old term). Today's politics seems to be offering us the same choice once again.

History teaches what to do about it: Resist, resist, resist. That's what a majority of voters did in 2020 and have just done again in the off-year elections. The contest continues, however, and so we must continue to resist, unless we want a few of the leaders of some of the 5,000-plus Protestant denominations or of other organized religions in America to gain control of our nation.

Dr. Jim Vickrey, Ph.D., J.D., is a retired college professor, lawyer, and former university president who writes from Montgomery and welcomes responses to jimvickrey@gmail.com.

This article originally appeared on Montgomery Advertiser: Once again, tyrants are keeping knowledge from those who need it most