I remember a small handful of occasions sitting in sacrament meeting as a teenager and listening to a talk where the speaker mentioned that they had requested that their child be excused from reading some book or another in class. That always struck me as foreign and frankly weird. Throughout my childhood, my parents had literally never prevented me from reading something, whether it was a book I grabbed from the library or a book my English teacher assigned. If I wanted to read it and I could find it at the library (or, as I got a little older, the bookstore), it was mine to read.
While I thought poorly of parents who wouldn’t let their kids read things, though, in retrospect, that was a far better move than the trend sweeping some states today: banning books in libraries and at schools. There are parents and legislators making unprecedented moves to block children’s access to titles they deem inappropriate or uncomfortable or, well, for other utterly inscrutable reasons. Rather than protecting their kids from ideas they dislike, this new trend wants to prevent all children from accessing these titles.
And Mormons aren’t immune from the trend. Utah Parents United is working to ensure that children don’t have access to books the organization and its founders and members dislike. In response, others have pushed bans on the Bible and Book of Mormon.
So this is the thing: book bans are deeply un-Mormon. We, as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints should not only avoid pushing for them, but we should actively fight against them. Why? There are plenty of reasons, but I’m going to highlight three.
(1) People Who Ban Books Are Never Remembered As the Good Guys.
Think through history. What do we think of people and organizations that ban books? At best, we remember them as misguided and absurd. At worst? Fascists and totalitarians. Honestly, I don’t want future generations to remember me, to remember Utah, or to remember the LDS Church as fascists and totalitarians. And I also don’t want any of us to actually be fascists or totalitarians.
It’s also worth noting that the First Amendment protects our right to read. And, to the extent that we in the U.S. profess to value the Constitution and our constitutional rights, this gross imposition strikes me as inappropriate.
(2) We Believe in Moral Agency
In 2010, Elder Hales explained that our agency “was an essential element of [God’s] plan.” He went on to acknowledge that agency is risky—it allows us to make mistakes. It allows us to sin. It potentially allows us to be cut off from God. But this agency was so critical to our development and to God’s plan that instead of eliminating it, God provided an atonement for us to reconcile with HIm.
Do book banners sincerely think the books they are banning are harmful? I mean, some probably do. (Some are just trying to exercise power and eliminate ideas they don’t like.) But even those with sincere objections to books’ content are eliminating others’ agency to choose for themselves. They’re eliminating those students’ access to experience that will allow them to grow, to understand experiences and perspectives other than their own.[fn1]
(3) The Mormon Creed
In 1842, William Smith, editor of the Wasp, published what he termed the “Mormon Creed”: “To mind their own business, and let every body else, do likewise. PUBLISH this, ye Editors, who boast of equal rights and privileges.”
We would do well, in this case of book banning, to follow Smith’s advice. If you don’t want your child reading something, that’s your business. I may well think it’s a terrible idea, but I’m not responsible for parenting your children.
But I didn’t delegate authority to you to decide what my children can read, what they can experience, and how they exercise their agency. Like my parents with me, I’ve never forbidden my children from reading anything. I want them to experience ideas I don’t have; I have my experience and my background to share, but I’m decades older than them and frankly haven’t followed young adult literature that closely. But librarians and teachers have helped them discover books that they truly love, books that have expanded their worldview and their experience, books that I, as their father, couldn’t have introduced them to because I haven’t read them.
So book banners: even if you don’t mind being remembered as the villain in history, even if you don’t take moral agency our our constitutional rights seriously, mind your own business. Let others mind theirs.
[fn1] In fact, one of the powers of books is that they allow us to experience things vicariously. I can learn about the consequences of actions without having to take those actions. I can learn what it is like to be in somebody else’s skin, for good and for bad.
Photo by San José Public Library. CC BY-SA 2.0