We’re in the middle of Banned Books Week — an observance that is troublingly appropriate this year.
“The attempts to censor, restrict or ban books in 2024 in the United States continued to surpass pre-pandemic levels, while books with LGBTQ-plus themes dominate the most-challenged list, advocacy groups said in reports released Monday, just as Banned Books Week began,” reports the Washington Post. “The annual event, which will run through Saturday nationwide, seeks to spotlight the value of free and open access to information.”
We at the Freedom From Religion Foundation are deeply familiar with the awful history of censorship. As Heinrich Heine famously observed, “Where they burn books, they will end in burning human beings.” And the scourge of book suppression currently seems phenomenally robust.
“More than 10,000 books were removed, at least temporarily, in U.S. public schools during the 2023-24 school year, according to preliminary data from PEN America,” states the Post. “This figure is nearly three times higher than the number from the previous school year, it said.”
A huge propellant of these bans, as the Post points out, are statehouses and right-wing, often Christian nationalist advocacy groups. Examples range from Utah, South Carolina and Tennessee recently to Iowa and Florida a bit further back.
FFRF advocates, above all, for freedom of thought. We oppose banning books from public schools and libraries. There’s no true freedom of thought, conscience or even religion, unless our government and its public schools and libraries are free from religion and its control over thought.
FFRF is right to be concerned. The American Library Association has come out with some numbers confirming the state/church watchdog’s fears.
“Between Jan. 1 and Aug. 31, 2024, ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom tracked 414 attempts to censor library materials and services; in those cases, 1,128 unique titles were challenged,” it says. “In the same reporting period last year, ALA tracked 695 attempts with 1,915 unique titles challenged. Though the number of reports to date has declined in 2024, the number of documented attempts to censor books continues to far exceed the numbers prior to 2020.”
The book-banning sweeps are indiscriminate and overbearing, catching masterpieces in their net sometimes simply for referencing topics that censorious critics deem “immoral.” Among the top ten books banned in recent times is the Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison’s classic “The Bluest Eye.”
Jonna Perrillo, who is pulling together an entire book on these bans and their social effects, details in a piece for Slate the grim consequences.
“Mary teaches in an American high school, but like the other educators in this story, she asked me not to identify her because she fears retribution from her school or district administrator,” she writes. “Mary’s principal reprimanded her colleague for teaching Sherman Alexie poems anthologized in her district-approved textbook. Another elected not to teach Martin Luther King Jr.’s classic ‘Letter From a Birmingham Jail,’ convinced she would be unable to respond freely to student comments in class.”
As Perrillo points out, upward of 40 percent of book challenges in 2022 came from school officials themselves. “‘Parental rights’ has become a major rallying call for conservatives, but in many cases, parents have little to do with the process,” she writes.
Another major source is self-righteous grandstanders hostile to critical thinking, such as the Orwellian and hypocritically named Moms for Liberty. And the impetus isn’t protecting children, it’s about discouraging thought, especially thought that is antithetical to Christian nationalist ideology. True advocates for free speech must be dedicated to counter book bans at all levels.
“We urge everyone to join librarians in defending the freedom to read,” American Library Association President Cindy Hohl has recently said. “We know people don’t like being told what they are allowed to read, and we’ve seen communities come together to fight back and protect their libraries and schools from the censors.”
This Banned Books Week, do everything you can to push back against the pernicious trend of banning, such as letting your local school boards and representatives know that you are against book banning and censorship, donating books to Little Free Libraries in your neighborhood, and buying or checking out banned books.
We need to defend free expression to the utmost of our abilities.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with 40,000 members across the country. Our purposes are to protect the constitutional principle of separation between state and church, and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.
