In Nazi Germany, the right wing dictatorship established authoritarian control by going after books. Any author who expressed liberal ideas was targeted by Hitler’s nationalists as disloyal to the Fatherland. Their books were burned in the streets in rituals of ideological destruction.

In 2022, Christian nationalists in Michigan are following the Nazi example, targeting books and the libraries that host them. Across the state, Christian groups have been demanding the censorship of books that fail to conform to right wing religious ideology. Now, with Election Day this week, Christian nationalists in Michigan have begun to shut libraries down, under the idea that it’s better for people to have no access to books at all than for Christians to deal with any challenges to their power.

This spring, the director of the Dickinson County Public Library was forced to quit after she was harassed by members of local Christian churches who accused her of having sex with children. There have been no actual accusations by any children or any families against the librarian. Instead, Dickinson County Christian nationalists assumed that the library director was gay because there were books in the Dickinson County Library that discussed LGBTQ+ themes. If the library director was gay, the Christian nationalists reasoned, she must also be a pedophile.

Christian nationalist theology posits that gay people are pedophiles, but it’s actually the leaders of Christian churches across the United States who have been caught engaging in sexual attacks against children.

Now, in Ottawa County, in Jamestown Township, Michigan Christian nationalists have closed a public library down because the library contained a small number of books that didn’t comply with Christian nationalist theology.

Christian nationalists from the Jamestown Conservatives organized a campaign to remove funding for the public library. This week, the Christian nationalist proposal was approved, and so, in early 2023, the Patmos public library will close down.

The same library has plenty of Christian books, including Christian bibles, available to town residents. The Christian bible contains lots of sex scenes, including violent rape and incest. The Christian bible also contains scenes of horrible violence, including the smashing of babies against rocks and the murder of entire cities full of people in the name of the Christian god.

Nobody in Jamestown Township ever attempted to censor these child-unfriendly Christian books, however. Censorship appears to be an exclusively Christian nationalist thing to do.

Amanda Ensing, one of the Christian nationalists in Jamestown Township who organized the campaign to close down the public library, announced to a reporter that, “It’s not a political issue, it’s a Biblical issue.”

In America, public laws aren’t supposed to discriminate against people on the basis of religion. The First Amendment to the Constitution is supposed to protect American government from abusive religious power, but under the influence of Christian nationalist control of the US Supreme Court, protection from government establishment of religion is now widely being dismantled.

Now, in Dickinson County, Christian nationalists are expanding their attacks against the library. In a move reminiscent of Nazi censorship campaigns, citizens there are demanding that the library stop putting books by Jewish authors on its shelves.