This blog post is by Rev. Dr. Velda Love, Minister of Racial Justice / Education for Faithful Action (EFA), United Church of Christ, adapted from UCC’s Racial Justice Sunday Banned Books Blessing guide. The United Church of Christ is a Unite Against Book Bans partner.
The Sacredness of Our Stories
Despite decades of activism, statistics tell us that in the United States, we still largely live in a segregated society. In our daily lives, we are most likely to cross paths with and be in relationship with people with whom we share experiences and identities. Social media algorithms, search engines, and web platforms conspire to keep us in echo chambers, routinely encountering the lives of people who look like us, think like us, agree with us.
For many, books have been one way to expand our horizons. What and who we read opens us to new worlds, diverse ideas, and different experiences beyond our own. We rely on books to educate and inform us and expand our imaginations, so that we can be better siblings in Christ.
As a people of sacred stories, we know that stories have the power to inform and transform us, to show us both who we are and who we can become.
Banning Books Reduces Capacity for Compassion and Dims the Image of God
In a time of intense political polarization, we are facing an unprecedented number of attempts to ban books. Books by authors of color, LGBTQ+ authors, and women, and books about racism, sexuality, gender, and history are the ones most often targeted by bans.
When some seek to police access to some experiences, some histories, some understandings, or some ideas, the image of God is dimmed. Without the freedom to read, our encounters with the amazing diversity of creation are incomplete, and our capacity for compassion across difference is stymied. Our love of God is limited if we do not have the chance to recognize all the ways the divine image is manifest in our world.
UCC’s Love is Louder & Join the Movement Campaigns Invite Banned Books Blessings
As people called to build a just world for all, we need each other’s stories and experiences to live into the fullness of the Body of Christ. We believe that banned books have a special vocation, a particular calling in our faith communities: to help expand and enliven the image of God and empower us to reckon with truths that demand our loving accountability.
The Unite Church of Christ’s Love is Louder Campaign and Join the Movement toward Racial Justice invite us to bless banned books, so that they might live out their calling and empower us to continue becoming God’s kingdom of justice and love, on earth as it is in heaven.
Resources to Support Action in Your Faith Community
During Banned Books Week—or at any time of the year—we invite fellow people of faith to join us. UCC’s Racial Justice Sunday Banned Books Blessing guide provides free resources to inspire and support you, including the following:
- Ways to Collect Books to Bless, with tips for creating your own Banned Books Library or shelf/section of your church library, and involving your congregation in the process.
- Sample Children’s Sermon, which offers a model reading and conversation program for all ages on the theme “Everyone Belongs in the Kingdom of God.”
- Sermon Seeds, with a curated list of readings to consider when planning a service or program.
- Blessing of Banned Books, which offers ideas for blessings, rituals, and songs of celebration to share with your community.
- Ways to Continue Your Journey, with ideas to support continued engagement in the important work of justice.
For more about how people of faith can stand up for the freedom to read, check out Faith for Libraries: Diverse Faith Communities Supporting Libraries and Librarians. This initiative brings together people of faith, library workers, and other library advocates as a collective force to champion the freedom to read and protect libraries as community spaces for everyone. Faith for Libraries is a collaborative campaign offered by the Interfaith Alliance, the American Library Association, the Association for Rural and Small Libraries, and Unite Against Book Bans.
If you are a representative of a faith-based organization and would like to explore ways to work with Unite Against Book Bans, please contact us! We seek to highlight a diverse range of faith-informed efforts to protect the freedom to read.
