Book Burning

"Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings." -- Heinrich Heine, from his play Almansor (1821)

Book burnings are not usually noted by Banned Books Week, which focuses on efforts to ban books from schools and libraries.  But they do happen.  Book burning is an ancient crime against civilization, but herein the U.S. it is as current as the culture wars and anti-Islam fanaticism and all that goes with it.  In the ALA's excellent published history of book burning, there are examples of a bonfire of Harry Potter books by a church in New Mexico, and a burning in Pennsylvania of books, videos and CDs deemed offensive to God, and a similar episode in Maine which became a cutting instead of a burning when the fire department denied a permit. That there are no examples since 2002 is not because they don't happen, but because the ALA history has not been updated.

Here are a few examples that have come to my attention.

In recent years, we have seen Qu'rans burned, not only by Rev. Terry Jones in Florida (who barbequed one in his church),followed by international outrage and riots in Afghanistan.

One burning staged in Washington, DC in 2008 by the notorious anti-gay bigot Rev. Fred Phelps was widely ignored.  Similarly, Rev. Flip Benham, leader of Operation Save America (OSA, the successor organization to Operation Rescue, the militant anti-abortion direct action group of the 1980s) staged at least two Qur'an burnings in 2004 and  2006, respectively and got little more than local notice.

He also attempted a Qur'an burning in 2006 at the Mississippi state capitol.  Benham's published comments at the time, apparently since scrubbed from the OSA web site (but nevertheless preserved by the Way Back Machine internet archive) were consistent with Heinrich Heine's concern quoted above.  After the cops thwarted Benham's plan to torch the Qur'an, the Rainbow flag and Supreme Court decisions that he considered violative of God's laws at the Mississippi state capitol, he ripped them up and declared:  "...we have three choices with Muslims, kill them, be killed by them, or convert them.  "Which is your choice?"  "While not all Muslims are terrorists, all terrorist are Muslims," he said.  "We destroy the Koran, not to desecrate their religion, but to set them free."    

Benham was more successful in 2004 when he staged his "Burning of the Abominations" at the  Columbus, Ohio City Hall. There, he both ripped-up and burned the Qur'an, the Rainbow Flag, and the Roe vs. Wade decision.  The United States, according to OSA, is defying "the God of our forefathers" by embracing "false religions and gods" as well as abortion.

It is worth noting that even as these events have been considered aberrations, Bruce Wilson reports here at Talk to Action, that the idea of burning books is integral to the religious ideology of the New Apostolic Reformation, a number of whose leaders participated in the prayer rally that served as the de facto kick-off of the Rick Perry for President campaign.  NAR founder C. Peter Wagner, Wilson observes is a big fan of the actions of Girolamo Savonarola in fifteenth century Florence, Italy. "Here," Wagner wrote," is one description of what happened to the city after Savonarola prayed and prophesied:

"The wicked city government [of Florence] was overthrown, and Savonarola taught the people to set up a democratic form of government. The revival brought tremendous moral change. The people stopped reading vile and worldly books. Merchants made restitution to the people for the excessive profits they had been making. Hoodlums and street urchins stopped singing sinful songs and began to sing hymns in the streets. Carnivals were forbidden and forsaken.

Huge bonfires were made of worldly books and obscene pictures, masks, and wigs. A great octagonal pyramid of worldly objects was erected in the public square in Florence. It towered in seven stages sixty feet high and 240 feet in circumference. While bells tolled, the people sang hymns and the fire burned."

Wilson continues:

In his 2008 book Dominion! How Kingdom Action Can Change The World (2008, Chosen Books), Peter Wagner again cites the same passage, introducing it, on page 166 of his book, with "To show that it [transformation] can be done, I love to go back in history to Florence, Italy, where Girolamo Savanarola [sic] led a notable example of transformation. I have told the story in other books, but it is so encouraging that I want to repeat it again".

As far as I know, we have not yet seen anyone act on Wagner's vision, but that this is the vision of society of a leader of a powerful religious movement in the U.S. and the world should give us all pause.