In an age in which technology has made the spread of information and culture easier and wider than ever before, it would be difficult to imagine a more futile tactic to control political debate and thought than the banning of books in schools. Almost every student, including many of very limited means, has access to a smart phone and/or a laptop, as well as Wi-Fi. Any book that book-banners want to target, especially older ones that are more likely to be in the public domain, is available on the Internet. That fact, combined with the reality that banning children from doing anything is the proverbial red cape in front of a bull, all but guarantees that the act of banning a book is perhaps one of the best ways to market it.
And perhaps that's a source of comfort in contemplating, as we unfortunately must, the current wave of efforts to do exactly that. If book-banning is the worst thing they can throw at the rest of us, maybe democracy is in better shape than we think. Perhaps there's a silver lining in this particular crowd: by advocating the banning of books, they forfeit the moral authority to complain about what they decry as "cancel culture" coming from the left. After all, lacking that authority won't stop them from whining about it.
But, in a way, that's the problem. It's not the tactics they put into practice. It's the sheer stupidity that lies behind their world view AND permeates the way they act on it.
What made me reflect on this just now was a Twitter post I saw several weeks back that contained a photograph of a newspaper clipping. The clipping showed part of an article that listed books currently being targeted for school bans. The usual suspects can be found on it: "Of Mice And Men," "I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings," and that legendary target of targets, "To Kill A Mockingbird." The reference to the latter, however predictable, was at least punctuated with a ludicrous misspelling of its author's name as "Lee Harper." Isn't it nice when your opponents go out of their way to advertise their lack of credentials?
But that's not even the worst of it. At the bottom of the list, at least what I could see of it from the posted photograph, was the title and author's name of a book I could not ever have imagined being on anyone's list for banning.
"The Hiding Place," by Corrie ten Boom.
If you are not a fundamentalist Christian, as I was in a former life, the odds are that you have never heard of this book, or the film version of it what was made by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association in the 1970s. Nor is it likely that you have ever heard of Corrie ten Boom, or know anything about the remarkable life that she lived, or read any of the other books that she wrote.
But dwell on this thought for a moment: most if not all of the folks behind these bans are fundamentalist Christians. If they are at all like the ones I was associated with during the decade or so that I spent in that corner of reality, it is literally impossible for them to not know about the life of Corrie ten Boom, and especially the chapter in that life memorialized in "The Hiding Place." Even if they had never read the book. And in that world, the folks I know would have wanted to brag about reading it as much as they would brag about the time they spent reading their Bibles.
In "The Hiding Place," Ms. ten Boom relates the story of how she, her sister, and her father used space hidden by their father's timepiece shop to hide Jews in Holland fleeing persecution from the Nazis. In the process of doing so, they saved many lives, but that effort came at a cost to the ten Boom family. They were eventually discovered and taken to a German work camp, where Corrie's father and sister died. She herself only survived as a result of a clerical error made by one of the camp's staff members.
As a record of one of the darkest chapters in human history, "The Hiding Place" contains some passages that might make for rough reading for teenagers, and perhaps a few adults. But it is both morally and intellectually outrageous to suggest that the contents of the book are such that schools and students should somehow be "protected" from them. All the more so because the book is, and was intended to be, a tribute to the core, sacrificial spirit of true Christianity. For a believer to walk in Jesus' steps, that should include a willingness to include the willingness to walk in all of those steps, even the ones that require acting against our interests to give unto others.
Or so I was told, back in the day.
Maybe fundamentalist Christianity isn't what it used to be. Or rather, what it used to aspire to. As it has morphed from a faith based on the Bible to one that is based increasingly on white supremacy, maybe making sacrifices for people "not like you" is a message that frightens fundamentalists.
Maybe they have decided that the ten Booms were out of step with G-d. Somehow, up in Heaven, I think the ten Booms, and the people they sacrificed to saved, are having the last laugh on that point.
But the rank hypocrisy of their fundamentalists that this exposes, combined with the racism that has infected the faith they claim to follow, just adds two more reasons to the list that all of us ought to have: the list of reasons to fight the banning of books, and the attack on the human spirit that these bans represent.
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