Imagine walking into your local library, planning to read a theologian such as Reinhold Niebuhr or Karl Barth – or even a best-seller by Jim Wallis or James Dobson.

But instead of finding such important and popular titles, you discover that the religion section has been decimated – stripped of any book that did not appear on a government-approved list.
That's exactly what's happening right now to inmates in federal prisons under a Bush administration policy. As The New York Times put it, "chaplains have been quietly carrying out a systematic purge of religious books and materials that were once available to prisoners in chapel libraries."

The news reports seem implausible. The idea of government bureaucrats drafting a list of approved books on religion seems like something out of Soviet-era Russia, not the United States of America, where freedom of religion – even for those behind prison walls – is something we treasure.

But the reports are true. All of the books and authors named above have been removed from prison libraries. In some instances, according to the Times, chaplains have been forced to dismantle "libraries that had thousands of texts collected over decades, bought by the prisons, or donated by churches and religious groups."

To make matters worse, the contents of the "approved" list are extremely capricious. For example, "80 of the 120 titles on the list for Judaism are from the same Orthodox publishing house," and the list for Christianity "lack[s] materials from early church fathers, liberal theologians and major Protestant denominations."

The Bureau of Prisons says they merely want to ensure prisons are not recruiting grounds for terrorists and other militant groups. So why are they removing the vast majority of materials on faith and religion? And if prisoners are not free to pursue their own faith journeys, what cause for hope should they have?

Christians from across the political and theological spectrum are justifiably outraged. As Mark Earley, president and chief executive officer of Chuck Colson's Prison Fellowship, told the Times, "It's swatting a fly with a sledgehammer. There's no need to get rid of literally hundreds of thousands of books that are fine simply because you have a problem with an isolated book or piece of literature that presents extremism."

Stand up for inmates' religious freedom – demand an end to censorship in prison libraries!

Want to do something?

Click here to tell the Bureau of Prisons to stop censoring prison libraries.

The above report is from Sojourners

Sources:

"Prisons Purging Books on Faith From Libraries," New York Times, 9/10/07.

"2 New York prisoners sue to get their banned religious books back," Associated Press, 8/22/07.