Are Books Being Banned?

It’s Banned Book Week! As an author, every year during October, my feed is flooded with posts about banned books. The vast majority of the books highlighted in the posts are books an avid reader may have read.

Books like these are often prominently displayed as “banned books”

• Charlotte’s Web
• Harry Potter
• The Lord of the Rings
• 1984
• Animal Farm
• The Catcher in the Rye
• The Color Purple
• Their Eyes Were Watching God
• The Hunger Games
• The Giver
• The Handmaid’s Tale
• A Wrinkle in Time
• To Kill a Mockingbird

I’ve read every one of those books. When we see those books, we are supposed to have a strong reaction to the post. Based on the responses I’ve read, these types of posts tend to be very effective.

As an author, I stand against book banning. I’ve lived outside of the United States since 2000 and have lived in countries where banning of information is very common. What’s more, I’ve met people who’ve lived in oppressive communist regimes where it was illegal to possess any book except the very few sanctioned by the government.

In one country, I owned a book publishing company. Every book we published had to be sent to the government censor board. If it passed the board successfully, we were given stickers to put on our books, showing they were legal to sell. Again, this applied to every book.

In that same country, there was a law that said it was illegal to insult the culture of the country. During my time there, many authors, including the two most widely read authors from that country were given criminal charges for things their fictional characters said in novels. All it took was a complaint from a reader to open a case like this.

Even in an environment like this, where access to websites like YouTube were banned for years at a time, the overall list of banned books remained low. In 2017, 300,000 books were gathered up by that country’s government and destroyed, but that was mostly about politics and the connection of those books to one group.

Behavior like this is common around the world. There are still many countries where the government tightly controls all book publishing. The most common books banned from sale and distribution are the Bible (In atheistic regimes and some Muslim countries) and the Satanic Verses (only Muslim countries). These books are truly banned in those countries, illegal for publication, sale and distribution. It is a criminal offense to be found with one of those books.

This fits the definition of book banning: “banned books are books or other printed works such as essays or plays which are prohibited by law or to which free access is not permitted by other means.” As you can probably guess, this is not the type of book banning highlighted by Banned Book week in the United States.

In fact, I’ve never seen anyone complain about the true book bans taking place in countries around the world during this week where we’re supposed to be so concerned with book bans. Curious. Isn’t it a crisis that far more people than the entire population of the United States live in countries where their governments are preventing them from reading most things freely? Because these situations involve government censorship, they are much more effective than bans of old. Some of the countries provide only a limited internet to their citizens to prevent them from accessing any restricted material.

The American Library Association runs a website of what they called banned and challenged books. They are the #1 supporter of Banned Books Week, though many participate now. Their website has been my go to resource for information on book restrictions. When you go through their lists of challenged books, that is usually what you find, restrictions. Even though the words “ban and banned” are used prominently in all the promotional materials, they list few books that have actually faced bans and none that meet the definition listed above.

As you probably know, most attempts at challenging or restricting books come from parents. They usually fall in one of three categories:

• I think the book is not appropriate for a school or public library and access to it should be restricted according to age or parental permission (in years past, this is by far the most common type listed).
• I think the book is not appropriate for a school or public library and it should be removed. (the closest thing to a ban as it would remove the book from all circulation in one specific library)
• I think the book should not be on a required or suggested reading list because I feel it is inappropriate.

In schools, these requests usually go through the school board meetings or other public venues for the public school. In communities, it is not uncommon for the locals to act poorly and threaten their local library’s funding if the library is not responsive to the request.

Every one of the books that I saw listed on a list or meme are available for sale on Amazon, the largest book retailer in the world. The vast majority of the books can still be obtained for free by joining one of the many libraries making their catalogs available to people outside of their normal jurisdiction.

Regardless about how you feel about all of this, I’m in favor of an honest conversation regarding the issue. It is not truthful to promote books as being banned when they are only being restricted. Wide scale bans carried out by governments and powerful book publishing companies are much more dangerous than what is being promoted during this week.

In general, I’m in favor of local conversations about these issues. Reasonable, rational conversations. If a parent wants to have a say in what their minor child reads, I believe they should have that say. As a Christian, I don’t think I have the right to force minors to read Christian material if their parent doesn’t want them reading it. I wouldn’t want my children reading things against my value system without my knowledge and respect other parents’ right to hold to their standards for their children.

The closer these conversations happen to the books and the children, the better they will be. If a book is being restricted, not much ground is gained by an angry, national campaign based on misinformation. It would be much better for an advocate of that book to engage in face-to-face conversation about the merits of the book.

Just a note, I did find one example of a book ban in the US in recent years. Amazon has banned one book permanently from sale on its website. I was able to find the book from another source when I listened to it this summer, so even that is not truly a banned book. What is it? When Harry Became Sally by Ryan Anderson. I bet that book won’t be showing up on any of the lists you see this year or in the future.

Originally published at http://seeinggodclearly.com on October 11, 2024.