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Surely the cause of May's riots in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Indonesia, and India is more complex than a brief phrase in Newsweek. Allegations of Qur'an desecration by U.S. military officials and interrogators have often been reported since 9/11 (though almost all remain unconfirmed), but without the violent reaction that left at least 15 people dead.

Still, Newsweek's now-retracted report that Guantanamo Bay "interrogators, in an attempt to rattle suspects, flushed a Qur'an down a toilet" left the Muslim world enraged. The riots, in turn, left Americans perplexed and disdainful. Even for those of us who love our own sacred book, it is beyond comprehension. We winced when we heard that Palestinians holed up in Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity in 2002 had used Bibles as toilet paper. But we didn't riot.

As writer Dale Hanson Bourke noted, "I toss my Bible into the car pretty much like I toss other books. I set it on the floor during Bible studies and drop it occasionally off my lap without much guilt." And that's from an evangelical whose Bible isn't simply sitting on the shelf.

Too often we think that the greatest threat to Scripture is an outright ban. Thus we are quick to rally to the woman fighting for a JOHN316 personalized license plate and the parent or child fighting to read a Bible passage in class. When a Canadian hospital removed Bibles from its rooms, citing infection control, some pastors decried the move as censorship.

We squirm when Scripture is ridiculed: Some of the most frequently quoted Scriptures in newspaper letters-to-the-editor pages are Levitical laws calling for capital punishment against rebellious sons and those who work on the Sabbath. (These letters are frequently drawn from a widely circulated e-mail message with such farcical questions as, "I know from Lev 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?")

To the Christian, it's clear that such ridicule is ignorant of the whole counsel of Scripture. But therein lies the plank in our own eyes. If Leviticus or 2 Chronicles or Jude suddenly disappeared from our Bibles, how long would it take us to notice?

This magazine has frequently lamented the loss of biblical literacy, so results of a recent Gallup survey should come as little surprise: only one in three American teens know who asked, "Am I my brother's keeper?" More than a quarter (28 percent) don't know who Moses was, but almost 10 percent thought he was one of Jesus' disciples. Less than half know what happened at the wedding in Cana. Born-again students only scored better than others (44 percent vs. 37 percent) when asked to identify a passage from the Sermon on the Mount ("Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of God") from a choice of four quotations.

But biblical literacy is more than being able to name all 12 apostles or put the Ten Commandments in order. When the early church fathers spoke and wrote, they breathed the language of Scripture. They could not greet each other without quoting Jesus and Paul. They used Scripture not just to refer to God, but to describe their interpersonal relationships, their daily tasks, their entire world. To ask them to speak without reference to Scripture would be like asking us to speak without using words with the letter e—or without such pop culture references as "D'oh!" and "the full monty."

When the Sadducees came to trick Jesus with their own version of the football glove question, Jesus' reply began cuttingly. "Your problem," he said, "is that you do not know the Scriptures, and you do not know the power of God."

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July 2005, Vol. 49, No. 7