Is the Bible dangerous?

Can a book be dangerous? Can it carry Covid-19 on its pages? Can it provide fuel to start a forest fire? Can you hit someone over the head with it?

The Bible may be dangerous in these ways – it’s certainly a big book if you use it to bash someone on the head – but that’s probably not the way most people think of it as a dangerous book. In one way, it’s more like The Communist Manifesto. That’s a dangerous book. It tells us that a spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Communism. And that through class struggle, we can have a revolution, and freedom. Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!

In return, on the other side, Animal Farm by George Orwell is also a dangerous book. Animal Farm was such a biting satire – or exposé – on what life was like under actual Communism, that it was banned as a dangerous and subversive book in the Stalinist USSR.