Political Correctness

I got an e-reader for Christmas from my son and his family. It came with 100 free books - those old books that have no copyright restrictions. One of the books I read was the Adventures of Tom Sawyer. It had been many, many years since I'd read it so I was a little shocked to see the word "nigger" (or rather the N word as we say today) in the text maybe 4 or 5 times. I don't recall how many times it was there, but not much.

That word was NEVER allowed to be spoken in our home even though I grew up in the South of the 50's before the days of Civil Rights. My parents believed the word was an unkind, derogatory expression and as such was unworthy to come from the lips of a Christ follower because God created ALL people and ALL races.

So it came as no surprise to me that I saw on the news just yesterday that someone is re-writing Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn to take that word out and use the word slave in it's place. But now I can't remember if the person referred to was actually a slave or not in the story. I guess calling someone a slave is less inflammatory today than using the N word.

But it is not just the social commentary fiction of Mark Twain that has recently jolted my brain with political correctness - or incorrectness as the case may be.

I downloaded an epub copy of the NIV Bible, published by Zondervan in 2010. As I started reading in Matthew, something kept gnawing at me as not right as I read the familiar stories. I finally figured out that it is the political correctness of the text. Because I normally read the English Standard Version and my printed copies of the NIV are older, I was not aware of the NIV removing the male pronouns and changing the text to the plural they, their, them. So a passage I am used to reading that says, "...if anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me" now reads "...whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me." (Matthew 16:24).

In all the years of reading the Bible as a child, I never doubted that God's word, God's promises, God's love, God's salvation was for me as a female even though the pronouns in the Bible were all pretty much male. And that made me wonder about the insecurities of our day that make people want to change all sorts of texts to make them feel better about themselves. Not that it's necessarily wrong just wondering why we feel the need to do it.