ONCE upon a time… Or, rather, on infinite occasions throughout all of history. That is to say at least as far back as the third millennium BCE…
“Once upon a time! What kind of talk is that?” exclaimed the fire chief in Fahrenheit 451 when, like me, Montag gazed at a list of “a million forbidden books” and tried to work out whether things have always been this way.
The U.S. is creeping toward something resembling Ray Bradbury’s dystopian world, where books were reduced to ashes, sometimes alongside rebellious readers. Since 2021, nearly 23,000 book bans have been documented across 45 states. Most forbid books about gender, sexuality, race, and religion that are disproportionately written by women, by LGBTQ+ authors, and by authors of color.
…So, as I was trying to explain, we humans have long collected our creations—from clay tablets to the cloud—and for as long as we’ve saved information, we’ve also fought an impulse to suppress it.
Emperor Qin Shi Huang burned subversive scrolls. Pharaoh Akhenaten erased references to any gods besides his favorite. Socrates was poisoned for “corrupting the youth,” but mostly for asking too many questions. And in 1630 (somewhere in modern-day Massachusetts), a Pilgrim Separatist leader named William Bradford was so very offended by some “sundry verses and rhymes” that he dispatched a military regiment to destroy a nearby colony and deport its poet, whom Bradford described as a “lord of misrule” and a maintainer of “a school of Atheism.”
It seems then, Montag, that it has always been this way.
But take heart: Our human story is still being written. And in The Librarians, the latest documentary from Kim A. Snyder, we meet heroines in Texas, Florida, and beyond who are defending books—and the people and perspectives within—from those who would banish or burn them.
UPON speaking with Snyder, an Oscar-nominated and Peabody Award-winning filmmaker, I learned she was intrigued early on by the lineage and lore of these “keepers of truth,” as she called them.
The archetypal librarian is, of course, meticulous, studious, and pure—probably more comfortable in a supporting role than taking the lead. Stereotypically, she has dark-framed glasses, her nose in a book, and a finger pressed to shushing lips because, above everything else, they are, all of them, quiet.
Not these Librarians. They’re not staying quiet anymore—not after they’ve found themselves cast as the villains in this strange new world where a solitary complaint from a William Bradford could get them fired or worse. And how could they when they’re instructed to lock books in closets, to paper over or empty entire shelves, to encase children’s books in yellow caution tape as if it was a crime scene?
Snyder’s “small story about books” ended up being something much larger, more profound, and urgent. One librarian in the film called it “the civil rights fight of our time.” Snyder sees three “buckets” of stakes, all of them high: Democracy, young people, and the literature itself.
Defending secular democracy is, of course, at the heart of American Atheists’ work protecting freethought and the First Amendment. I presume you, Dear Reader, do not need me to expound on it, so we’ll move right along. Because, as Snyder told me, “When librarians say, ‘You’ll have to take me out in handcuffs,’ it’s about democracy—and the kids.”
In one poignant scene, Amanda Jones—a school librarian of the year, co-founder of Louisiana Citizens Against Censorship, and author of That Librarian: The Fight Against Book Banning in America—describes the grief of losing twelve students to suicide in a town with only one stoplight. “Books save lives,” Snyder says emphatically. “Libraries are sanctuaries for vulnerable kids, marginalized kids. They find safety in characters they can relate to. So, standing up for them is a deep commitment.”
Then there’s the literature. “They’re not banning just any books,” says a librarian. “They’re banning the best books.” Snyder tells me the consequences of that loss are not abstract: “There’s such attachment to these works. What are we losing if they disappear? Books are characters, and characters are people. When kids see queer, Black, or Indigenous characters disappearing from shelves, the message they receive is, ‘We don’t want you.’ They understand that very quickly. It’s heartbreaking.”
Equally sad are the repercussions for librarians who refuse to allow a vocal minority to decide which people and ideas belong on shelves and which should be locked away. They’re accused of being groomers, pedophiles, and promoters of pornography. Their personal information is doxed. Their lives are threatened. How far and fast we have fallen from that idyllic image of a bookish woman behind a desk: “If you’d asked me ten years ago if I was going to have security concerns at a librarian conference,” mused one librarian, “I would have been like, ‘You’re nuts.’”
Many of the policies spreading from district to district and from state to state call for book purveyors to be suspended or terminated. In one Texas district, 20 of 40 school librarians were fired or forced to leave. Other policies even propose criminal penalties, including felony charges for the provision of “obscene” materials, which in some jurisdictions has included illustrations of nude statues and… mice.
A bespectacled bookworm may seem an unlikely heroine, but in this story, she’s a natural. Because if censors are, as the fire chief in Fahrenheit said, “custodians of our peace of mind,” then their perfect foil would be the neutral keepers of inconvenient truths and the principled champions of unfettered minds, highly trained and unwaveringly bound by their profession’s code of ethics to place the availability of information for all above the protestations of a few, no matter how vitriolic.
The Librarians makes clear that the leaders of this modern-day censorship campaign are, like their predecessors in colonial Massachusetts, driven by extreme, puritanical religious beliefs. Their leaders openly call it a “spiritual war.” They refer to media specialists as “evil specialists.” At one local meeting, a ban proponent suggests reclassifying nonfiction books as fiction when “the Bible doesn’t support [it].” A Texas woman thinks her pastor should select all the books.
But in The Librarians, many of those fighting back with conviction and moral clarity are also people of faith. There is Reverend Jeffrey Dove, who describes depriving students of Black history as “one of the most evil things a person can do.” There’s Marie Masferrer, a devoutly Catholic librarian who says from a cathedral pew, rosary beads rotating in her hands, “I do not believe that scripture is there for us to use as a weapon or to make our political points.” She implores the censors and their supporters to “do some research,” so they can come to understand, as she does, that what the Founding Fathers feared most “was that we become a theocracy.”
This is something Snyder emphasizes both in the film and throughout our conversation: that the fight to preserve intellectual freedom transcends partisan and religious divides. “The First Amendment is foundational… Even if someone is not an atheist—even if they are a devout believer—it is essential to uphold church-state separation. Librarians aren’t setting out to make that argument. They’re focused on the freedom of expression. But because the white Christian Nationalist agenda underlies so much of this, they are forced to remind people: This is not what the Constitution is about.”
The documentary does an excellent job tracing these heated, hyperlocal debates back to the well-coordinated and -funded astroturfers fueling the flames. As one librarian says, “This is not organic, it’s organized.”
There are players you’ve probably heard of, like Moms For Liberty and Seven Mountain Mandate televangelist Lance Wallnau. But Snyder also introduces us to lesser-known ones, including Florida Man Bruce Friedman, Texas billionaire-fracker-pastor Farris Wilks (who links societal decline to “lack of belief” and wants to replace public schools with private Christian ones), and cellular company Patriot Mobile (a favorite of Donald Trump, Jr.), which claims to provide “exceptional wireless service” and, via its political action arm, to promote Christian conservative values.
In the film, a librarian wonders, “Is the agenda to gain power and money, or to make the country a Christian theocracy, or are they one and the same?” When I asked Snyder what she thought, she joked my line of questioning could land her in trouble. But, like the protagonists of her story, she didn’t shy away from speaking the truth:
“The money, the greed, the extremism, and the theocratic ambitions are completely intertwined right now. It’s a dangerous confluence of capitalism and greed, with a resurgence of zealotry and white Christian Nationalism.”
TIME reveals humankind’s worst inclinations and wisest aspirations. For millenia, some have tried to erase truths, revise history, and extinguish inquiry. But running parallel to that line has been another epic one… of ordinary people engaged in the extraordinarily brave and vital struggle to preserve our historical record, to safeguard stories, and to simply keep asking questions and demanding answers.
Snyder hopes viewers will “take inspiration not only from the librarians but from the courageous people who flank them.” People, she says, like Adrienne Quinn Martin, who stood up in her deeply conservative town and said, “Our school is not your church.”
To take on the William Bradfords in each of our communities will require that we all show up, however we can, in defense of intellectual freedom. Maybe, for you, it will be the private but powerful gesture of reading (or re-reading) a banned book, like Fahrenheit 451. Maybe you can muster the courage to take a more public stand at a local school board meeting. And I certainly hope you will contact your state lawmakers in opposition to book bans and in support of “Freedom to Read” legislation, which has already passed in several states. Because as Snyder said, it’s going to take all of us—atheists and believers alike.
The Librarians is clearly a cautionary tale, but it is also a hopeful one. Intermixing archival footage with intimate interviews, Snyder beautifully captures the high stakes of this conflagration between stewards of information and the suppressors of it. It’s at once an alarm, a call to action, a tribute to those who risk it all to keep the flame of freethought alive, and a testament to the idea that whenever inquiry is under siege or identities stigmatized, any one of us—no matter how unsuspecting— can be the hero(ine) who co-authors a more enlightened and inclusive ending.
The Librarians is playing in select theaters and will be available to stream via Independent Lens on PBS in February 2026. Learn more at thelibrariansfilm.com.