LifeWay removes ‘questionable’ online titles

Posted: 2/05/07

LifeWay removes ‘questionable’ online titles

By Lonnie Wilkey

Tennessee Baptist & Reflector

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (ABP)—LifeWay Christian Resources has removed a number of pro-gay titles from its online store, LifeWaystores.com, after staffers became aware of the books’ availability.

EthicsDaily.com reported Jan. 29 that LifeWay had several authors listed on the site who promoted a “pro-homosexual” agenda. EthicsDaily is a news service of the Nashville-based Baptist Center for Ethics.

LifeWay was informed about the books and took prompt action to remove them, said Mark Scott, vice president of the Christian stores division of LifeWay.

“We checked out (the report) immediately and found that, in fact, several titles did appear on our third-party distributor’s list. We were unaware of these and removed the titles immediately,” Scott said in a prepared statement.

LifeWay is “enhancing its efforts to ensure that questionable books are filtered out of a massive list of titles available online through its third-party distributor,” he added.

The distributor makes available 130,000 titles to LifeWay and sometimes adds as many as 1,000 new titles each week, Scott said.

“LifeWaystores.com includes only about 100,000 of those titles, having eliminated nearly 25 percent of the books for a variety of reasons, most often because of inappropriate content,” he noted in the statement.

“In addition, LifeWay filters the titles electronically based on information from publishers and the reputation of authors and publishers for producing biblically-based material. Every week, dozens of inappropriate titles are removed successfully. And the electronic filtering and human-review processes are being improved to meet the high volume of new books hitting the Christian retail market.”

No mechanized filtering system is perfect, he noted, and a few inappropriate titles occasionally make it through the filtering system and onto the online list.

“When we become aware of these titles—often through an e-mail from a customer—we investigate them, and if we confirm them to be inappropriate, we remove them immediately,” Scott said in the statement.

LifeWay invites customers to contact the organization if they encounter books with messages that cause them concern, he added.

“Our customers place a high degree of trust in us to provide biblically sound resources,” he said. “We value that trust and strive to maintain it.”

LifeWaystores.com will also soon provide “Reading with Discernment” tags on certain titles that are requested for scholarly study but may not be appropriate for a broader Christian audience.