An angry parent has told us that the Gideons have visited her child’s school, where they contributed to an act of collective worship and gave every child a Bible. Most people have heard of Gideon Bibles being left in hotel rooms, but they distribute them in many other places too. On their website they say,

We are aware that many people in Britain have never seen a Bible and may be uncertain what it is.

Our aim is to give them the opportunity to read it for themselves, perhaps for the first time, and to discover God in a personal way.

The Gideons place Bibles or New Testaments in many areas including:

Hotels
Hospitals
Prisons
Student Accommodation
Care Homes
Medical Centres

Additionally we make personal presentations of God’s Word.

Each year we present personal copies of the New Testament and Psalms to children in thousands of British secondary schools and to many university and college students.

We make personal presentations to medical personnel and uniformed services – Armed Forces, Police, Ambulance and Fire.

We place New Testaments at hospital bedsides.

Quite apart from the fact that it isn’t appropriate to allow groups like this to proselytise in schools, the Bible isn’t a guide for life, as we reported earlier. When teachers allow this to happen, maybe they haven’t considered why they shouldn’t? Suffolk’s SACRE (Standing Advisory Council for Religious Education) has provided some guidelines for schools on visitors to RE lessons and assemblies. They say:

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