Burned Any Good Books Lately?

Pastor Jack Brock and his wife are smiling contentedly as they go about their Monty Pythonish task, aided and abetted (off-camera) by congregants whose enthusiasm for this form of spiritual cleansing went well beyond the J.K. Rowling best seller to include, most ludicrously, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. In for a penny, in for a pound, as the saying goes. One didn't know whether to laugh or cry, but then I remembered Kansas and creationism, the Rev. Jerry Falwell and gays….

The Harry Potter books can "teach children how they can get into witchcraft," according to the flaming pastor, whose acolytes sang "Amazing Grace" as they went about their pyrotechnic duties. What's worse is that Brock wasn't even the first to go down the media-covered bonfire route.

The previous year the Rev. George Bender held a burning of "ungodly" books (including, you've guessed it, a Harry Potter book), CDs, and videos somewhere in rural Pennsylvania. Shirley MacLaine (as author) and Pinocchio (as a Disney movie) were among those on Bender's bizarre hit list. Church members sang "Amazing Grace" and "Father of Creation," as Bruce Springsteen and Pearl Jam were consigned ceremoniously to the flames. The story was picked up by Reuters and generated considerable publicity for the burner-in-chief.

Book-burning was in fashion seven decades ago, only then it was called Bücherverbrennung and took place in cities throughout Germany. The black- and-white images of Sturmabteilung (SA) members giving Nazis salutes as piles of "un-German" books burned on the Opernplatz in Berlin on the night of May 10, 1933 are a particularly chilling reminder of where the ill-conceived, attention-seeking actions of a Bender or a Brock can lead. These two men of the cloth would be well advised to heed the oft-quoted words of Heinrich Heine: "Wherever they burn books, they will also, in the end, burn people."

Of course, the Nazis were not alone in burning books or human beings. Heretics, witches, and sundry other unfortunates have long followed, or preceded, books to the flames. In the armamentarium of the fundamentalist—from Salamanca to Salem—fire has been a favorite means of eliciting the truth, cleansing souls, and eradicating the undesirable. Its appeal goes well beyond the symbolic.

Sometimes it is easier not to build a bonfire and simply torch the national or state library, a very effective way of erasing collective memory and weakening national or ethnic identity. On other occasions, the urge to burn may be more modest, merely a desire to eradicate a specific, offending text: centuries ago, popes Gregory and Julius both issued papal bulls for the burning of the Talmud—precision pyrotechnics, if you will. This, I suppose, is a bit like placing rewards on the heads of Al Qaeda operatives rather than carpet-bombing every nation that is suspected of housing terrorists.

The irony is that firebrands throughout history have probably done much more in the long run against censorship than for their own causes. The effect of the Nazi book-burnings on civilized opinion worldwide was immense, not least in the United States. Paul S. Boyer (Purity in Print: Book Censorship in America from the Gilded Age to the Computer Age, 2d ed., Univ. of Wisconsin, 2002), for instance, has claimed that book-burnings "really crystallized anti-censorship sentiment in this country."

One can only hope that the pathetic parochialism of Brock and Bender will at the very least galvanize the thinking public's commitment to the anticensorship fight, whether the target is Teletubbies, Tiny Tim, or the Talmud. Indeed, if I were desperate (perish the thought!) to boost the sales of my latest monograph, Pulp Friction (Scarecrow, 2003), I'd suggest that the publisher contract with Pastor Brock and his merry band to organize a rip-roaring burning of my diabolic pot-boiler, preferably with a CNN, or, failing that, C-SPAN camera crew positioned nearby. That would work wonders for my royalty payments.

Finally, a request to all misguided librarians up and down the country who feel a need to remove books from their collections: please consider the merits of the "holy bonfire" approach as an alternative to the commonly used stealth method. Be brave. Stand up publicly for your convictions. Come out of the censor's closet. Burn some books...with your buddies Brock and Bender.