Secular leftists claim that conservatives want to ban books: is it true?

I found a very interesting article from January 2024 in The Free Press that sheds some light on the claims by the secular left that conservatives want to ban books. In the article, the author James Fishback looked a variety of school districts to see which conservative books they stock in their libraries. Then he compared those numbers with the numbers of liberal books.

Here’s the article from The Free Press:

Over the last couple years, the media have peddled a narrative of “book bans” sweeping the nation. Book bans (ostensibly by the right) are “eating away at democracy,” according to The Guardian, and are “taking an emotional toll,” warned CNN.

[…]So I decided to investigate just how one-sided things actually are. I surveyed the library catalogs of 35 of the largest public school districts in eight red states and six blue states, representing over 4,600 individual schools. All of these records are publicly available online. (Here are just three online catalogs I searched: Broward County, FL, Austin, TX, and Oklahoma City, OK.) What I discovered isn’t so much a problem of banned books. It’s that kids are often exposed to only one side of the story.

And here are the leftist books:

I looked up books written by some of the world’s most well-known progressive thinkers. Here is the percentage, out of the 35 school districts, that stock each book:

Title and Percentage of 35 Districts

The Communist Manifesto (Karl Marx) — 75%

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent (Isabel Wilkerson) — 60%

The 1619 Project (Nikole Hannah-Jones) — 54%

Stamped (Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi) — 71%

An African American and Latinx History of the U.S. (Paul Ortiz) — 40%

The New Jim Crow (Michelle Alexander) — 60%

Guide to Political Revolution (Bernie Sanders) — 40%

White Fragility (Robin DiAngelo) — 54%

So You Want to Talk About Race (Ijeoma Oluo) — 57%

This Book Is Anti-Racist (Tiffany Jewell) — 45%

White Rage (Carol Anderson) — 17%

And here are the conservative books:

Meanwhile, I looked up books written by some of the world’s most well-known conservative thinkers. Here is the percentage, out of the 35 school districts, that stock each book:

Capitalism and Freedom (Milton Friedman) — 8%

Created Equal (Dr. Ben Carson) — 5%

Woke Racism (John McWhorter) — 3%

Breaking History (Jared Kushner) — 2%

Social Justice Fallacies (Thomas Sowell) — 0%

The War on the West (Douglas Murray) — 0%

The 1619 Project: A Critique (Phillip W. Magness) — 0%

The Case Against Impeaching Trump (Alan Dershowitz) — 0%

Decades of Decadence (Marco Rubio) — 0%

The Diversity Delusion (Heather Mac Donald) — 0%

The Case for Trump (Victor Davis Hanson) — 0%

This is not surprising for anyone who understands the public school and library industries. These places are staffed and run by secular leftists. So of course they are going to cry about book banning, even when they are the ones banning the books.

Look:

It’s no secret that many school libraries have become reflections of politicized librarians. Take Emily Drabinski, president of the American Library Association and a self-proclaimed Marxist, who said during a socialism conference last September in Chicago that public education “needs to be a site of socialist organizing. I think libraries really do, too. We need to be on the agenda of socialist organizing.”

One last thing, I thought this was a very interesting quote from the article, especially since Christian parents and leaders seem to be fond of blaming men for the decline of dating and marriage:

And is it any surprise that 76 percent of Gen Z and millennial women wouldn’t date a Republican, according to a Change Research poll from September? They’ve likely never been exposed to conservative ideas, and thus, entirely dismiss conservatives as people.

Public schools should be a last resort for education the children of Christians and conservatives. They are not fair and balanced. They are biased. And they are dishonest. If I had children, I would never send them to public schools. I would make sure before marrying that we could afford to homeschool or send the kids to private schools. Government schools and libraries are child abuse.

J. Warner Wallace: I am not a Christian because it works for me

Some of my favorite Christians are the ones that start out as atheists, and do very well at life, but just change direction because they investigate the evidence. One person who had a fabulous career in law enforcement switched sides because of the evidence: J. Warner Wallace. And in a must-read post from Cold-Case Christianity, he explains his motive.

Excerpt:

Life on this side of my decision hasn’t always been easy. It’s been nearly seventeen years since I first trusted Jesus as Lord and Savior. I still struggle to submit my prideful will to what God would call me to do. Christianity is not easy. It doesn’t always “work” for me. There are times when I think it would be easier to do it the old way; easier to cut a corner or take a short cut. There are many times when doing the right thing means doing the most difficult thing possible. There are also times when it seems like non-Christians have it easier, or seem to be “winning”. It’s in times like these that I have to remind myself that I’m not a Christian because it serves my own selfish purposes. I’m not a Christian because it “works” for me. I had a life prior to Christianity that seemed to be working just fine, and my life as a Christian hasn’t always been easy.

I’m a Christian because it is true. I’m a Christian because I want to live in a way that reflects the truth. I’m a Christian because my high regard for the truth leaves me no alternative.

I think this is important. There are people who I know who claim to be Christian, but they are clearly believing that God is a mystical force who arranges everything in their lives in order to make them happy. They are not Christians because it’s true, but because of things like comfort and community. But people ought to become Christians because they think it’s true.

Truth doesn’t necessarily make you happy, though. Truth can impose intellectual obligations and moral obligations on you. Seeing God as he really is doesn’t help us to “win” at life, as the culture defines winning. But it does offer the opportunity for us to walk a similar path to the one Jesus walked. And that is very appealing for real Christians.

The Bible doesn’t promise that people who become Christians will be happier. Actually, it promises that Christians will suffer for doing the right things. Their autonomy will suffer, as they sacrifice their own interests and happiness in order to make God happy, by serving his interests.

Christianity isn’t something you add on to your before-God life in order to achieve your before-God goals. When you become a Christian, you get a new set of goals, based on God’s character and his design for you. And although you might be very successful in the world as part of serving God, there is no guarantee of that. Christianity is not life enhancement. I do think that Christians do well at not hurting themselves though, but because they eliminate selfish desires, not because God gives them stuff.

By the way, if you’re looking for a great speaker to invite to your university campus, J. Warner Wallace is the best, then Frank Turek is my number two choice. Wallace has the homicide detective background, and Turek is a former naval aviator. Two tough guys who are tough-minded about the Christian faith.

Stephen C. Meyer and Marcus Ross lecture on the Cambrian explosion

Cambrian Explosion

Access Research Network is a group that produces recordings  of lectures and debates related to intelligent design. I noticed that on their Youtube channel they are releasing some of their older lectures and debates for FREE. So I decided to write a summary of one that I really like on the Cambrian explosion. This lecture features Dr. Stephen C. Meyer and Dr. Marcus Ross.

The lecture is about two hours. There are really nice slides with lots of illustrations to help you understand what the speakers are saying, even if you are not a scientist.

Here is a summary of the lecture from ARN:

The Cambrian explosion is a term often heard in origins debates, but seldom completely understood by the non-specialist. This lecture by Meyer and Ross is one of the best overviews available on the topic and clearly presents in verbal and pictorial summary the latest fossil data (including the recent finds from Chengjiang China). This lecture is based on a paper recently published by Meyer, Ross, Nelson and Chien “The Cambrian Explosion: Biology’s Big Bang” in Darwinism, Design and Public Education(2003, Michigan State University Press). This 80-page article includes 127 references and the book includes two additional appendices with 63 references documenting the current state of knowledge on the Cambrian explosion data.

The term Cambrian explosion describes the geologically sudden appearance of animals in the fossil record during the Cambrian period of geologic time. During this event, at least nineteen, and perhaps as many as thirty-five (of forty total) phyla made their first appearance on earth. Phyla constitute the highest biological categories in the animal kingdom, with each phylum exhibiting a unique architecture, blueprint, or structural body plan. The word explosion is used to communicate that fact that these life forms appear in an exceedingly narrow window of geologic time (no more than 5 million years). If the standard earth’s history is represented as a 100 yard football field, the Cambrian explosion would represent a four inch section of that field.

For a majority of earth’s life forms to appear so abruptly is completely contrary to the predictions of Neo-Darwinian and Punctuated Equilibrium evolutionary theory, including:

• the gradual emergence of biological complexity and the existence of numerous transitional forms leading to new phylum-level body plans;
• small-scale morphological diversity preceding the emergence of large-scale morphological disparity; and
• a steady increase in the morphological distance between organic forms over time and, consequently, an overall steady increase in the number of phyla over time (taking into account factors such as extinction).

After reviewing how the evidence is completely contrary to evolutionary predictions, Meyer and Ross address three common objections: 1) the artifact hypothesis: Is the Cambrian explosion real?; 2) The Vendian Radiation (a late pre-Cambrian multicellular organism); and 3) the deep divergence hypothesis.

Finally Meyer and Ross argue why design is a better scientific explanation for the Cambrian explosion. They argue that this is not an argument from ignorance, but rather the best explanation of the evidence from our knowledge base of the world. We find in the fossil record distinctive features or hallmarks of designed systems, including:

• a quantum or discontinuous increase in specified complexity or information
• a top-down pattern of scale diversity
• the persistence of structural (or “morphological”) disparities between separate organizational systems; and
• the discrete or novel organizational body plans

When we encounter objects that manifest any of these several features and we know how they arose, we invariably find that a purposeful agent or intelligent designer played a causal role in their origin.

Recorded April 24, 2004. Approximately 2 hours including audience Q&A.

I learned a lot by watching great lectures from Access Research Network. Their YouTube channel is here. I recommend their origin of life lectures – I have watched the ones with Dean Kenyon and Charles Thaxton probably a dozen times each. Speaking as an engineer, you never get tired of seeing engineering principles applied to questions like the origin of life.

If you’d like to see Dr. Meyer defend his views in a debate with someone who reviewed his book about the Cambrian explosion, you can find that in this previous post.

Further study

The Cambrian explosion lecture above is a great intermediate-level lecture and will prepare you to be able to understand Dr. Meyer’s new book “Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design“. The Michigan State University book that Dr. Meyer mentions is called “Darwin, Design and Public Education“. That book is one of the two good collections on intelligent design published by academic university presses, the other one being from Cambridge University Press, and titled “Debating Design: From Darwin to DNA“. If you think this lecture is above your level of understanding, then be sure and check out the shorter and more up-to-date DVD “Darwin’s Dilemma“.