Among the flurry of executive orders issued by President Donald Trump, a recent one could be overlooked. It should not be.
Last week, Trump signed an order eliminating the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the only federal agency that provides support for America’s public libraries and museums.
Libraries get the bulk of their funding from local sources, but as the American Library Association has pointed out, the loss of funding at the federal level threatens a host of initiatives, including early reading programs for kids, summer reading programs, braille books for the visually impaired and aid for veterans.
During my travels in Christian Nationalism over the years, I have noticed that its leaders often push anti-intellectualism. During the Christian Nationalist meetings I have attended, attendees are told not to trust science, public education, libraries and higher education.
Make no mistake, the men and women who run Christian Nationalist groups are often themselves well educated, and they make sure to send their own children to top-flight schools – but for the masses, the message is clear: Libraries can be dangerous fonts of “wokeism.” Public education is “godless” and best avoided. Universities are run by out-of-touch eggheads who embrace far-left positions.
This attack on public libraries (and, by extension, the knowledge they disseminate) has been festering for years. In the 1990s, a Virginia woman named Karen Jo Gounaud started a group called Family Friendly Libraries that sought to purge public libraries of any material offensive to fundamentalist Christians. While the group failed to take off, its ideas live on in organizations like Moms for Liberty and other pro-censorship outfits that plague our land.
Christian Nationalists fear knowledge because knowledge leads people to question the simplistic answers they peddle for the complex issues facing our nation. The message I heard repeatedly when attending their meetings was, “Don’t think, don’t question, don’t doubt. All the answers to life’s thorny questions can be found in our narrow interpretation of an ancient holy book. Just do what we tell you, and everything will be fine.”
Trump and his Christian Nationalist allies have a personal stake in ensuring that as large a segment of our population as possible wallows in ignorance. They’d be happy for us to shut off our brains.
The answer to that is simple: Don’t.
