Bring your banned books to the altar. (Matt. 7.24-27)
Jeremy Rutledge, Circular Congregational Church

August 10, 2025

I’ve been going for walks on Sullivan’s Island for 13 years. I have learned its seasons through birds and tides. The shore is different every day — in the winter, after a storm, at sunset, always changing. I like the salt air and the feeling of the sand beneath my bare feet. Lately, I’ve been lingering; I don’t really want to leave.

This is, in part, because I’m aware it is my last summer in the Lowcountry, and I’m savoring the natural beauty of this place. But I think I’ve also lingered because there is truth on the island, stories buried in the sand. I learned it from a children’s book that we read as a family not long after we moved here.

Marjory Wentworth wrote the book. She’s a beloved friend, a former member of this church, and a longtime poet laureate of South Carolina. When she first came to live here, her family bought a house on Sullivan’s Island. There, when the kids were playing outside, digging as pirates for treasure, they found something that stopped them short: it was a pair of iron shackles.

The shackles told a truth about Sullivan’s Island that wasn’t on offer in the small strip of shops and restaurants catering to tourists. But Marjory wanted to know. In conversation with a neighbor, an older Black man named Mr. Green, she and her family began to learn the story. The shackles bore witness to a person who had once been forced to wear them and the countless others brought here against their will, held in bondage, and forced into lives of slave labor. It was a breathtakingly painful story, and it was also a story that had to be told. The island itself offered it up.

Marjory wrote a children’s book about it. The book was entitled Shackles, and it told the story in a way that kids could understand and to which they could relate. Playing pirates, digging in the back yard, finding something, and learning were all parts of childhood. The book meant to honor children’s agency and intelligence by telling them the truth, and it meant to center the ancestors who were here before us, those whose names were not on any fort or post office, but who had laid the foundations of the Lowcountry all the same.

So I think about those ancestors when I walk on Sullivan’s Island. And now I think about the fact that Marjory’s book has been removed from the gift shop at Fort Moultrie National Historical Park on Sullivan’s Island. It’s part of a concerted effort by right wing political forces in this country to ban books and censor the teaching of our true history. This effort includes everything from parents’ individual complaints to libraries and school boards, to the administration’s crackdown on storytelling at national parks and historic sites, to the undercutting of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and the all-out assault on our research universities. To draw from just the first example of parents’ complaints, in May of this year, due to a single parent’s objection, South Carolina added ten books to its banned list. It was enough to earn us the distinction of being the state that has banned more books from its schools than any other. So we now rank first in the nation in censorship or, if you like, fiftieth in the freedom to read. Which is to say nothing of Marjory’s book being removed from one of our historic sites. Which is also to say nothing of the way content is being challenged in the classroom as teachers and professors are harassed and contradicted. On and on it goes. It’s enough to make you want to slip off your shoes and put your feet in the sand for a while.

I think we’re all struggling now with the breadth of the attacks on our entire system of education. As we send our kids back to school, pack their lunches, pump up their bike tires, drop them in dorm rooms and give them our love, we do it the midst of deep uncertainty. We never really thought we’d have to make the case for education, but here we are. Everywhere we turn, something that we’ve always known, and from which generations have benefitted, is being threatened. As I prepared to write this week, I searched for education headlines, and, honestly, the results were almost too much to bear. I read of critical summer learning and English language programs cut while students were still in them. I read of hard right think tanks like Project 2025 and Agenda 47 pushing to dismantle public education and deny our country’s pluralism, eliding our true history to recast the myth of America as white and virtuous. I read of a politicized National Institutes of Health defunding pathbreaking research studies on the verge of identifying better treatments for cancer, multiple sclerosis, and a host of other diseases. Every story was part of a larger story, every effort part of some greater attempt to limit our learning, turn us back, divide us from the truth and each other.

The truth is that this is all part of an authoritarian playbook. Authoritarians have always been threatened by learning, which fosters dissent and critical thinking while celebrating our many different cultures, life experiences, and intellectual and artistic pursuits. Authoritarians want to control the narrative and tell us who we are, where we’re going, and what we should think. Teachers, however, invite us to expand our thinking and question not only who we are, but how we got here, what it means, and how together we may find a way forward drawing on the lessons of the past. Put another way, authoritarians would seek to rebury the shackles in the sand. Teachers would lift them into the light and tell their human stories with neighbors and children gathered around.

For people like us, this is all deeply religious. By which I mean it is sublime in its senses of meaning and connection. We are grounded in the truth of our stories, without which we could not really know ourselves. And we are a people of the book. We refer to sacred stories passed down to us, which have been bound into footnoted study Bibles. Yet we draw from entire libraries as well, seeking guidance from the arts, humanities, and sciences. We are a people of conversation, working out our living together, not in some top down, power-over, authoritarian way, but always more communally in that side by side, power-with, egalitarian way. We are a people who seek to be humble, lifelong learners. Our curiosity and our searching are constitutive elements of our faith.

It calls to mind the morning scripture lesson, in which Jesus encouraged his hearers to live wisely by applying what we have learned. If we hear the teachings, he said, and then act on them, our actions will be well founded, like a house built on stone. Yet if we hear and do nothing, then things become more slippery, like a house built on sand. The teachings to which Jesus referred were the things he himself practiced, radical ideas of a beloved community that included everybody. In the short chapter from which we’ve drawn this morning, he taught us not to condemn others, to question with sincerity and intelligence, practice a Golden Rule, take the narrow path, and think critically about our motives and actions. He did not offer ready-made answers, but the questions he posed, if taken seriously, made real demands on his hearers, then and now. He was quite a teacher.

So it’s good to think of Jesus’ lessons this morning as we gather in church a couple of days before our kids go back to school. And as we think together about how we will stand with them, and for them, as students who deserve the very best we can give, including the truth of our history and the struggle that comes with it. But if Jesus is any example, then our kids can be trusted. He told his own students to let the children come to him, he shared stories and parables to spark their imaginations, and he trusted their intelligence. All the teachers in the room know exactly what I’m talking about. You, who have dedicated your lives to our students, have seen it firsthand. And here we must pause before school begins to say thank you. Thank you, teachers. Thank you, librarians. Thank you, administrators, counselors, support staff, coaches, and band directors. Thank you for all you do for all of our students. Thank you for holding the line in this moment.

Yet the final word should surely be given to a student. The student I have in mind knew Marjory Wentworth. Before Shackles was removed from the gift shop, Marjory used to teach the book to kids. With a park ranger beside her, they’d gather to tell the true story of Sullivan’s Island and all the beloveds who had been there before. I asked Marjory about it this week, what it was like and how the kids responded. She told me they accepted the story matter-of-factly. Kids can handle the truth when it is offered in a thoughtful and age-appropriate way. Yet they also responded with depths of imagination and creativity that surprised her. There was one girl, Marjory said.

The girl wrote a response to the book. She envisioned herself on one of the ships that brought the ancestors from Africa. She lay in the hold, shackled. She felt the swell of the sea. She imagined she could see through the planks above onto the deck, through the riggings, and into the sky, where a bird was carried on currents of air. She thought of the ancestors. She thought of the bird. She thought of freedom in a different way.

That’s how one girl heard the story. And it seems that is what we are fighting for as we begin another year: freedom. Freedom to read. Freedom to learn. Freedom to tell the whole truth and follow where it leads. Love willing, may it lead us on.

Amen.

See Anna Sharpe “Autobiographies and books on slavery at risk for removal from Charleston historical site gift shops” The Post and Courier, July 31, 2025. Accessed online at https://www.postandcourier.com/charleston_sc/fort-sumter-moultrie-national-park-books-review/article_10fdf5f6-3b8d-420e-ae63-c55ac1d1ca0b.html