“The beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom. Though it cost all you have, get understanding.” — Proverbs 4:7 (NIV)
Utah’s lawmakers built a state law designed to strip Stephen King’s novella collection Different Seasons — the book behind The Shawshank Redemption and Stand by Me — from the hands of every public school student in the state.
The machinery works like this: when three or more Utah school districts — or two districts and five charter schools — independently determine that a book contains “objective sensitive material” under state law, the Utah State Board of Education automatically removes it from every public school library in the state. No judicial proceeding. No parental petition. No librarian’s discretion. The trigger fires; the book disappears. Utah’s legislature designed this machinery, and in the first week of July 2026, four districts — Davis, Jordan, Tooele, and Washington — pulled Different Seasons from their shelves. The trigger fired. The book is gone.
The gap between that machinery and the Bible its defenders claim to honor is the real story. Proverbs 4:7 reads: “The beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom. Though it cost all you have, get understanding.” The Hebrew verb is imperative. The text commands pursuit — active, deliberate, costly. Not wait for wisdom to arrive pre-approved. Not let the authorities hand it to you in measured portions. Get it. Even if it costs everything you have. The plain language of the passage puts the reader in motion: go find it, go fetch it, pay whatever price wisdom requires. The captured operation’s reading — the reading Utah’s lawmakers have written into state statute — is the opposite: we will determine what you are allowed to seek, and we will build a mechanical trigger to ensure you never encounter the works we have decided you should not read. The chasm between what the text plainly says and what the operation built is not subtle. It is total.
The state law defines “objective sensitive material” as content that is “pornographic or indecent” or “harmful to minors.” Different Seasons — published in 1982, a collection of four novellas about childhood, incarceration, obsession, and storytelling — met that definition under the machinery’s logic. A story about a boy walking along railroad tracks to see a dead body. A story about a man who crawls through a sewer pipe to freedom. The state of Utah has decided these stories are too dangerous for a seventeen-year-old to read.
The board maintains a list of titles banned under this mechanism. As of mid-July 2026, the list holds at least thirty-five titles, and is still growing. Stephen King is already the most banned author in American public schools. The author who sells more books than almost any other living writer is now the author whose books the state cannot trust its students to read. The machinery is not slowing down.
I recognize this machinery. Those of us raised inside the tradition where the right book could save a child and the wrong one could destroy him — we believed it fiercely enough to hand the job to the state. The impulse was protection. The machinery it produced is suppression. The Bible we carried to Sunday school teaches a different lesson: seek wisdom actively, pursue it, pay for it. The machinery teaches the opposite — wait until the authorities decide what you may read, and trust the mechanical trigger to keep the dangerous books away.
In January, the ACLU of Utah filed suit on behalf of the estate of Kurt Vonnegut and several bestselling authors, arguing that Utah’s book bans violate the First and Fourteenth Amendments. The complaint calls the machinery what it is: state censorship operating under the cover of child protection. The case is pending. The machinery is not waiting for the courts.
This is not happening only in Utah. Texas’s state board voted to require Bible passages in public schools. Massachusetts has moved in the opposite direction, passing legislation that explicitly protects school libraries from this kind of automated removal — a recognition that the machinery is not the only way a state can respond to parental concern. The pattern is national. The machinery is the same everywhere it operates: a legal trigger designed to remove books automatically, operated by a state board, accountable to no one except the lawmakers who built it.
But the theological cost is the one that should unsettle every believer who still reads the Bible at a kitchen table on a Sunday morning. The book of Proverbs commands the pursuit of wisdom at any cost. The state of Utah has built a legal mechanism to make that pursuit impossible — to remove the books from the shelf before the child can reach them, to fire the trigger before the reader can decide for herself what wisdom is worth. The lawmakers who built this machinery are not protecting children from indecency. They are protecting themselves from readers. The machinery does not ask whether the book is wise or foolish, beautiful or obscene, true or false. The machinery removes it. Automatically. Mechanically. From every shelf in the state.
“The beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom.” Utah’s lawmakers have decided the beginning of wisdom is this: we will get it for you, and we will decide what you are allowed to have.
The books are on a list now. More than thirty-five of them. Locked behind a law, unavailable to every student in every public school in the state — not because a judge found them obscene, and not because a parent complained, but because a machine was built to remove them. The machinery is working exactly as its designers intended. The question the Bible poses to the reader is not whether the machinery is efficient. The question is whether the machinery is faithful. Proverbs 4:7 is not ambiguous. The command is to go get wisdom, and the machinery is built to stop you from going.