Why My Old School District Removed 41 Books, Including The Bible, From Its Libraries

August 19, 2022 Bobby Ross Jr.

Weekend Plug-in 🔌

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KELLER, Texas — I don’t remember the Keller Independent School District making national headlines when I was a student here in the 1980s.

Even back then, this North Texas community — which began with a railroad extension from Fort Worth in the 1850s — was growing.

But in my time at Keller High School, then the district’s only high school, Keller was still more farm town than burgeoning suburb. We had one grocery store along U.S. 377 and no McDonald’s — I drove to nearby North Richland Hills to flip Quarter Pounders my junior and senior years.

An old gray water tower that proclaimed “Keller: Home of the Indians” greeted visitors to our town, referring to the school mascot. I edited the student newspaper The Wigwam, played sousaphone in the marching band and graduated 23rd in a class of about 300 in 1986.

The next year, our former drum major, Michelle Royer, won the Miss USA Pageant — the biggest news I recall from those days.

My parents still live in the area, so I visit frequently and have witnessed Keller’s explosive growth, including multiple exits along Interstate 35.

This week, I’ve watched with interest as the Keller school district’s decision to remove 41 books from its libraries, including the Bible and an illustrated version of “Anne Frank’s Diary,” has made headlines everywhere from the Texas Tribune to the New York Times.

What in the world is happening?

Basically this: The national culture wars have come to the local school board. And not just in Keller.

A previous Plug-in highlighted stories by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram’s Emily Brindley and The Tennessean’s Liam Adams on school board candidates campaigning on Christianity and conservatism.

Each of the books pulled in Keller — including the Bible — was challenged by a parent, lawmaker or other community member in the last year, USA Today’s Jeanine Santucci reports.

The Washington Times’ Mark A. Kellner points out:

“Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation” is an illustrated version of the bestselling classic written by a young Jewish girl in the Netherlands as she and her family hid from Nazi occupation forces. The story ended when the Franks were captured and sent to concentration camps; Anne and her sister Margot died, most likely of typhus, in the Bergen-Belsen camp. Her father Otto survived and published the diary, which had been hidden by his secretary, after the war.

Several of the challenged books listed by the Keller Independent School District on its website deal with mature or LGBTQ themes, such as “Keeping You A Secret” by Julie Anne Peters, “If You Could be Mine” by Sara Farizan, and “All Boys Aren’t Blue” by George M. Johnson.

At the Washington Post, María Luisa Paúl offers this crucial context:

Keller is one of 20 school districts in Tarrant County, a politically divided area where Joe Biden won by just 1,826 votes in the 2020 presidential election. The election results kindled a conservative push to take over school boards in the county, Hawes said. Patriot Mobile Action, a Christian political action committee based in Texas, endorsed and funded the campaigns of 11 school board candidates across the county, who all won. Three of them joined Keller’s seven-person board of trustees in May.

One of their first moves was revisiting the district’s book selection. On Aug. 8, the new board adopted two policies endorsed by the state’s department of education relating to the acquisition and review of instructional materials and library books.

This is important, too: The review of the books before possibly returning them to the shelves is part of a national trend, as the Deseret News’ Kelsey Dallas explains:

The Deseret News covered this trend in March, noting that school districts and state legislatures across the country are debating whether to protect schoolchildren from sensitive or concerning (at least to some) material.

“What you’re seeing is how much we do not trust teachers to have the expertise in what they do. It’s really the job of the teacher to say, ‘This is the best book for my curriculum and this is how I’m teaching it,’” said Emily Knox, an associate professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who studies intellectual freedom and censorship, to the Deseret News at the time.

Anna Salton Eisen, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, lives in the Keller district and is among those protesting the books’ removal.

“At a time when we need to learn from history how to be better humans and citizens, which are some of the important lessons of the Holocaust,” Eisen told me, “we are instead mimicking the book banning and limiting ideas, which was the hallmark of the Nazis.”

But Charles Randklev, the school board’s president, defends the review.

“Per the new policy, instructional materials previously challenged following the old policy, which was flawed and exposed children to pornographic material … will be re-evaluated,” Randklev said on Facebook. “The challenge process for these materials will go through a committee composed of community and staff members, which will be open to the public and video and audio recorded.”

It doesn’t sound like my old hometown will return to its quiet, sleepy days anytime soon.

Power Up: The Week’s Best Reads

1. Sacred rivers: “Rivers provide wondrous gifts — nourishment, mobility, irrigation, natural beauty. Some cultures consider the rivers of their realms to be sacred,” The Associated Press’ global religion team notes.

“Today, even as these rivers remain an object of devotion, some face dire threats,” the team adds.

AP explores those threats in an ambitious six-part series:

1. New Zealand river’s personhood status offer to Māori (by Nick Perry)

2. Colombia River’s salmon are at the core of ancient religion (by Deepa Bharath)

3. Nepal’s holy Bagmati River choked with black sewage, trash (by Binaj Gurubacharya)

4. Jordan River, Jesus’ baptism site, is today barely a trickle (by Mariam Fam)

5. Nigeria’s Osun River: Sacred, revered and increasingly toxic (by Chinedu Asadu)

6. On Chile rivers, Native spirituality and development clash (by Giovanna Dell'Orto)

2. Ukrainian clergy say Russian occupiers target them with threats, violence: Ian Lovett, the Wall Street Journal’s national religion reporter, normally is based in Los Angeles but has spent recent months working in Ukraine.

In this compelling piece, Lovett talks to priests who “say they face assaults if they refuse Russian demands to collaborate and influence the local population.”

3. How an Oklahoma man's 'little ditty' 90 years ago became a 'Fly Away' success: In a world of heavy news, enjoy this sweet feature by The Oklahoman’s Ed Godfrey.

Godfrey introduces readers to Albert E. Brumley, the Oklahoman who wrote “I’ll Fly Away,” the most recorded gospel song in history.

BONUS: Last week’s Plug-in focused on the shooting deaths of four Muslim men in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

More on that: The “sectarian ghosts” stirred by the arrest of an Afghan refugee in the case is the focus of a front-page New York Times story by Simon Romero, Miriam Jordan, Ava Sasani and Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs.

The suspect, Muhammad Syed, is a Muslim himself who left a “trail of violence,” report Susan Montoya Bryan, Stefanie Dazio and Julie Watson of The Associated Press.

Inside The Godbeat: Behind The Bylines

This week’s tragic death of Richard Dujardin, longtime religion writer for the Providence Journal, stunned the Godbeat community.

“He mentored and encouraged many of us in our coverage of religion,” the Religion News Association’s board of directors said in a statement. “We were able to honor his legacy in 2015 by awarding him RNA’s 2015 William A. Reed Lifetime Achievement Award.”

Dujardin, 77, “was vacationing in Milwaukee with his wife when he died in a gruesome fall as a downtown bridge opened,” the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Sophie Carson reports.

“Our friend and colleague Richard was a fair-minded, nonpartisan and ever-reliable reporter’s reporter in the golden era when print was all-important and such journalistic principles had yet to come under challenge,” Richard Ostling, retired Associated Press and Time magazine religion writer, told me.

Charging Station: In Case You Missed It

Here is where you can catch up on recent news and opinions from ReligionUnplugged.com.

• How Guyanese Hindus are preserving their religion in South America (by Manmeet Sahni)

• Conflicts in global Anglicanism become black-and-white (by Terry Mattingly)

• What can martial arts monks teach us about faith? (by Jillian Cheney)

• Faith-based fashion entrepreneurs aim to transform the way we purchase online (by Alicia Lenea)

• Qatar’s largest mosque highlights beauty of Islamic art and architecture (by Clemente Lisi)

• New book tells story of woman married to a white supremacist (by Tracy Simmons)

• Jews and Christians enjoy new VR, multimedia exhibits in Jerusalem's Old City (by Gil Zohar)

• South Africa’s faith groups counter rising xenophobic attacks on migrants (by Kim Lawton)

• Most Americans today are choosing cremation — here’s why burials are becoming less common (by David Sloane)

• Sports, passion and how North American team games connect to religion (by Clemente Lisi)

• Love them all, let God sort them out (by Paul Prather)

• Leonard Cohen documentary ‘Hallelujah’ solidifies the power of a song (by Jillian Cheney)

The Final Plug

My beloved Texas Rangers fired their manager, Chris Woodward, and their president of baseball operations, Jon Daniels, this week after yet another disappointing season.

The new interim manager, Tony Beasley, has “leaned on his Christian faith throughout his career to keep focused, stay hopeful and be a positive influence on others,” the Deseret News’ Kelsey Dallas reports.

A cool thing about Dallas’ story: She quotes a 2017 Religion News Service interview I did with Beasley.

More bright news: I got to see a 10-3 Rangers win Thursday.

Happy Friday, everyone! Enjoy the weekend.

Bobby Ross Jr. is a columnist for ReligionUnplugged.com and editor-in-chief of The Christian Chronicle. A former religion writer for The Associated Press and The Oklahoman, Ross has reported from all 50 states and 15 nations. He has covered religion since 1999.

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