Member-only story
A Banned Books Week Throwback Thursday: One of the Most Banned Books in the World
This one is worth sharing again
We are midway through Banned Books Week, and since it’s also Thursday it’s the ideal time to combine the event with the final Throwback Thursday episode of the month. I have written about book banning and other forms of censorship since I started writing on this site in early 2021, and unfortunately it seems like there is something new to write about the travesty every week.
Rather than bombarding you with the latest outrages (like this story from The Guardian two days ago reporting that US public schools banned 10,000 books in the most recent academic year), I want to highlight a story I wrote just before Banned Books Week started last year. I chose this one in part because it’s one of the most-read censorship stories I’ve ever done (so it clearly struck a nerve) and in part because it’s about the continued banning of a book that gets little attention: the Bible.
Most of the news coverage of banned or challenged books focuses on recent titles with sexual or racial content, but the Bible still came in at #52 in the American Library Association’s list of the 100 most challenged books of the decade 2010–2019 (the most recent decade list available). As recently as 2015 it made the Top 10, coming in at #6…
