Across the United States, a dramatic surge in book bans has become more frequent, more coordinated, and more systematic than at any time in living memory.
Reports indicate that in the 2024/25 school year alone, there were thousands of instances of books being removed or formally challenged in public schools, affecting nearly 4,000 unique titles. States such as Florida, Texas and Tennessee have recorded particularly high numbers.
Only this month, Utah expanded its statewide banned list to include titles such as Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, Nineteen Minutes, and The Perks of Being a Wallflower, under legislation prohibiting what is described as “objectively sensitive material”.
These are not isolated incidents.
What organisations such as PEN America* and the American Library Association are warning about is not merely the volume of challenges, but the normalisation of the bans themselves; the idea that removing books from shelves has become an accepted, almost routine response to discomfort.
The reasoning offered by proponents of book bans follows familiar lines.
There is talk of protecting children from ‘inappropriate’ content, particularly material dealing with race, gender identity, sexuality or difficult social realities.
There is an emphasis on parental rights, framed as the belief that parents alone should control what children encounter in schools.
And there is a recurring accusation that certain books amount to ‘indoctrination’, promoting ideologies often dismissed as ‘woke’ or ‘anti-American’.
Beneath these arguments, however, sit organised political campaigns, pressure from advocacy groups with narrow social agendas, and legislation that increasingly strips authority from educators and librarians and places it in the hands of politicians and activists.
The result is not safeguarding but distortion.
This logic does not withstand scrutiny.
Labelling a subject as ‘inappropriate’ does not make it harmful; it simply silences lived experience.
Books that explore race, identity, sexuality, family life or historical injustice help young readers understand the world they actually inhabit. Removing those books does not protect children; it blinds them.
When a book is challenged merely for acknowledging the existence of same-sex parents or confronting uncomfortable chapters of history, the outcome is not safety but erasure.
Parental guidance matters, of course.
Parents have every right to shape their own child’s reading.
But those rights cannot reasonably extend to dictating what every other child in a public school or library may encounter. Public institutions exist to serve whole communities, not to enforce the preferences of the most vocal or ideologically driven groups within them.
The fear of so-called ‘woke ideas’ often reveals something else entirely: a desire to control narratives.
When books are branded as dangerous simply for presenting honest discussions of gender, race or power, the aim shifts from safeguarding children to managing what society is permitted to talk about.
That is censorship, even when it is presented as concern.
It is also striking how frequently advocates of these bans ground their arguments in a literal reading of the Bible.
Faith plays an important role in many lives.
But using religious literalism as a basis for public censorship is deeply problematic.
The Bible is not a single text that emerged fully formed from the heavens.
It is a collection of writings produced, edited and reworked over centuries by different communities, reflecting their histories, politics and struggles. There was no singular moment of divine dictation.
Ancient Jewish texts were gathered, interpreted and later adopted by early Christian groups, eventually forming what we now call the Old and New Testaments.
The idea that every word of the Bible must function as a precise, literal instruction manual is itself relatively modern.
Early scholars and theologians frequently approached these texts allegorically, contextually and with an awareness of metaphor. Literalism is neither the only nor the most historically grounded way to engage with scripture.
Yet while society has advanced culturally and intellectually, the way some seek to impose religious belief in public life has, in many respects, regressed.
When literal readings are selectively applied to modern society, contradictions quickly surface. Large portions of the Bible contain laws and social norms that most people today would reject outright, including acceptance of slavery, severe corporal punishment and the rigid subjugation of women.
Even within the New Testament, the teachings attributed to Jesus repeatedly emphasise compassion, humility and mercy over rigid rule-following.
Yet these broader principles are often eclipsed by cherry-picked verses used to justify exclusion or control.
To claim absolute moral authority from a text while ignoring its internal complexity and historical context is, at best, intellectually fragile.
What matters here, however, is not theology itself but how belief is being deployed. When a selective, literal reading of a religious text is used to justify removing books from schools and libraries, faith ceases to function as a personal guide and becomes a blunt public instrument.
Scripture, stripped of context and humility, becomes less about meaning or morality and more about authority- about deciding which stories may be told, which experiences are permitted visibility, and which voices are deemed unacceptable.
At that point, the issue is no longer religion at all. It is censorship by another name.
Censoring books does not strengthen societies; it weakens them.
It teaches fear rather than curiosity, silence rather than dialogue.
Healthy communities are built on openness, on the willingness to engage with difficult ideas, and on trust in educators and librarians as professionals whose role is to broaden minds, not narrow them.
A society that is afraid of books is not protecting itself.
It is admitting, quietly but unmistakably, that it no longer trusts its own ability to think.
*PEN America is a major non-profit organisation dedicated to defending free expression and supporting writers, particularly where speech, literature, journalism, or artistic freedom is under threat.
