I spoke with the author of the decades-old project depicting the Bible using LEGO bricks

Aug 07, 2024

More than two decades ago, having read the Bible and realizing just how disturbing certain parts of it could be, Elbe Spurling began recreating its stories using LEGO bricks. She professionally photographed the scenes and created a website to showcase the work. It became so popular that it soon spawned a series of bestselling books called The Brick Bible (affiliate link). The Chicago Tribune once said the series “goes beyond remarkable; it borders on genius.”

(Follow above article link to view original article with photos/PDFs/video.)

What made the images so compelling wasn’t just that Spurling was so damn good at creating these scenes with basic building blocks; it was that the stories were accurate! They weren’t the sanitized versions you heard in Sunday School. They were sometimes violent. Sometimes sexual. Sometimes really sexual. They had to be because that’s what’s written in the Bible.

Spurling herself is an atheist. This was a work of art, not some attempt to win converts. But over the years, the images were so compelling—and the reasons they were created so peripheral—that they began to be used in actual Sunday School classes and church services. In fact, Spurling created The Brick Bible for Kids so that pastors could “display this website and share its stories as part of your religious services or education programs.” That series doesn’t include the gore or sex found in earlier iterations of the series. (It does have an illustration of Goliath’s decapitated LEGO head, but there’s no blood and that scene really is part of the biblical story!)

Spurling, who announced she was transgender in 2015, published her most recent Brick Bible book in 2018. I hadn’t heard much about the series since then. But this week, the entire series came to the attention of conservative commentator Allie Beth Stuckey.

Stuckey, a conspiracy theorist who thinks dinosaurs are a hoax, was shocked by what she learned. “I promise you will hate this Brick Bible,” she told the audience of her show Relatable.

… The problem is… it is actually explicit! It is extremely gory. It is not theologically accurate. And it seems that it is actually meant to shock and disturb. It was seemingly created for adults who almost want to make fun of the Bible and to show how maybe cruel and merciless God seems, rather than for children, to show them the beauty of scripture and the love of Christ… 

The irony of Stuckey’s comments is that The Brick Bible doesn’t take liberties with the text. It depicts the stories as they’re laid out in the book, which means, yes, there’s a lot of disturbing shit everywhere.

If that shocks and disturbs you, then your problem lies with the Bible, not the artist recreating the scenes.

Throughout the show, Stuckey misgendered Spurling, referring to her only as “quote-unquote” transgender. When reading a biography of Spurling, she noted that Spurling used to attend an Episcopal Church and “the Episcopalian denomination is extremely liberal.” Later on, she insisted Spurling must have some kind of “humiliation fetish” as a way of explaining her trans identity.

But the bigger question is: Why was Stuckey even talking about the series now, long after the most recent book was published?

Apparently someone sent her a screenshot from a private Facebook group where people share book reviews for Christian families. One commenter wrote that her son recently “won” the book at a LEGO-themed Vacation Bible School and he just couldn’t stop reading it.

We left for a 2 day road trip Monday and he read it for two days. He asked questions like what’s a eunuch? Not realizing there was images of characters cutting off their private parts and blood everywhere. We’ve had a talk about rape as he already read that in the Bible but this story was in there as well with a Lego raping another Lego. It jumped from one horrific story to another, never showing Gods love and grace. Even God was shown from the beginning as a mean, hateful character.

Obviously, this child received a copy of the original Brick Bible book, not the subsequent family-friendly kids’ version. Neither the Facebook post nor Stuckey’s commentary ever explains the difference between the two.

But that shouldn’t really matter because guess what? God is cruel and vindictive in the Bible, and that’s true from page one. This mom was mad because her kid read the Bible, warts and all, instead of the sanitized version spread by most youth pastors. It’s not Spurling’s fault that this kid was never exposed to the full text.

That never resonated with Stuckey, who insisted there must be a secret agenda at work with this series:

… There's nothing that indicates that it would be blasphemous, of course, because it wants Christians—and it especially wants unsuspecting kids—to read it. And they want these violent images to be stuck in their head so that, when they think about God and they think about Christianity, they are fearful and angry. But you don't get that at all when you are looking at the cover.

… It's so much like Satan to make a book like this that looks cheery and loving on the outside, that really, on the inside, is a poor depiction of what God is.

If kids read the Bible, in any form, and come away from it thinking God is malicious, whose fault is that? She seems upset that kids were given the text of the Bible without the kind of filters pastors usually prefer.

Within seconds of saying that, though, Stuckey changed course and explained how the Bible is absolutely gory in parts and that “it does talk about some really, really disturbing stuff.” But, she explained, that doesn’t mean that stuff is good!

No kidding! The Brick Bible doesn’t say that stuff is good! It just reveals what the Bible says.

Since Stuckey’s broadcast, the criticisms of the series have been posted on right-wing media outlets with headlines like “DEMONIC storybook Bible sold to KIDS by a transgender atheist” and “Parents and Kids Misled by Deceptive Storybook Bible.” But all of that suggests a level of duplicity that just doesn’t exist.

Earlier this week, I spoke with Spurling about the newfound interest (?!) in her series. She hadn’t seen Stuckey’s show until I brought it to her attention, but she was amused by the commentary (“ripped from the headlines of 2011,” she joked).

In some ways, Spurling said, this was a kind of throwback. She used to receive hate-mail when the series came out and those eventually morphed into one-star Amazon reviews. This was just a continuation of that by people who didn’t understand the goal of her project.

Spurling told me she had “some awareness” that the series was popular with Vacation Bible Schools and religious camps, but it was impossible to know whether copies of the book were bought by believers or skeptics.

There was some frustration that Stuckey (whom she jokingly called “Alfred” in order to hammer home how offensive it was to misgender someone) kept treating the “teen” versions of the books as if they were meant for children. They’re not. The Brick Bible’s listing on Amazon even includes a disclaimer about that even if it escapes the attention of some customers (and right-wing podcasters):

But Spurling took it all in stride. She’s been here before. There’s no secret agenda in play. There’s no deception. And “I do not have a humiliation fetish,” she said in response to Stuckey’s childish insult.

The good news is that this series isn’t the last we’ll hear from Spurling. Her series The Brick Book of Mormon remains ongoing and she just released a book that includes no LEGO bricks whatsoever: Salvation: From Ancient Judaism to Christianity Without a Historical Jesus.

If Stuckey ever read any of these books, she might actually learn something.