In a radio interview on Tuesday, Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin linked the recent violence at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, to the removal of Bible study from public schools, saying that the removal of “things that are biblically taught from society” is correlated with “the kind of mayhem” we saw in Charlottesville.
Bevin spoke on Tuesday with West Virginia radio host Tom Roten about the Charlottesville violence and efforts to remove Confederate monuments from public lands, which Bevin said was a “sanitization of history” that he “absolutely” disagrees with.
Bevin said that removing these monuments sets “a dangerous precedent” that we’re “not allowed to talk about certain elements of our history” and amounts to “revisionist history.”
He then appeared to allude to efforts to remove statues of Roger Taney, the Supreme Court justice who wrote the Dred Scott decision, as part of a slippery slope set by removing Confederate memorials. (Although Bevin did not name names, a statue of Taney was recently removed in Annapolis, Maryland.)
“At what point—If somebody happened to have been a judge and something was erected in their honor but they happened to have one ruling one time that somebody’s offended by, is that worthy of them being removed from pretending they ever existed?” he asked.
Later in the interview, Roten asked Bevin about a “Bible literacy” bill he signed in June that encourages public schools to offer nominally secular Bible courses.
Bevin linked the removal of religious education in public schools to the efforts to take down Confederate monuments, saying that taking the Bible out of schools is also a “dangerous” attempt to “scrub history” because “when you go back a couple of hundred years, in most instances the only textbooks that were in our public schools were the Bible .”
“And it’s interesting,” he added, referring to the discussion of Charlottesville, “the more we’ve removed any sense of spiritual obligation or moral higher authority or absolute right and wrong, the more we’ve removed things that are biblically taught from society, the more we’ve seen the kind of mayhem that we were just discussing.”
