Book Burning

I recently finished listened to an account of a major book burning ceremony done by the Nazi party in May 1933.  I was appalled to hear how they gathered every copy they could find of 4000 different book titles and essentially forced the people to participate in the burning of the books not in harmony with their ideals.  Well-known authors commonly read in schools today, such as Victor Hugo, Leo Tolstoy, Jack London, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Helen Keller, had their books burned as part of the attempted purging of the Nazi party seeking to get all to conform to their ideology.  Helen Keller commented, “You may burn my books and the books of the best minds in Europe, but the ideas those books contain have passed through millions of channels and will go on.”  Heinrich Heine, whose books were among the, had written in one of his plays a century before, “Where they burn books, they will in the end also burn people.”  This of course proved prophetic when the regime performed the unthinkable as it attempted to implement the plan of the adversary: “to destroy the agency of man” (Moses 4:3). 

               As I’ve pondered this forced book burning that attempted to limit the freedom of thought of the German people, I’m reminded of a story of book burning in the New Testament.  I think there are fundamental differences between the two events.  We read this about what happened at Ephesus where Paul was preaching: “And many that believed came, and confessed, and shewed their deeds. Many of them also which used curious arts brought their books together, and burned them before all men: and they counted the price of them, and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver” (Acts 19:18-19).  It appears that those who were converted to the Savior realized that their books of “curious arts” were not texts befitting a disciple of Christ.  There is no sense in the passage of compulsion; rather, the people willing brought them forth because of the Spirit of the Lord that worked on them.  It would be perhaps analogous to one who is baptized today and who purges his own belongings of books and movies and music that are not in harmony with the gospel of Jesus Christ.  In the Book of Mormon the converts of Ammon and his brethren did something similar when they all buried their swords: “When these Lamanites were brought to believe and to know the truth, they were firm, and would suffer even unto death rather than commit sin; and thus we see that they buried their weapons of peace, or they buried the weapons of war, for peace” (Alma 24:19).  They were willing to make a sacrifice of worldly pursuits in order to follow the Savior and their new faith.  Unlike the compulsion that constituted the German book burnings, the people of Ephesus and the Anti-Nephi-Lehies gave up their books and belongings willingly in an exercise of their agency.  The Lord of course does want us to rid ourselves of evil and worldliness, He wants us to choose to shun the evil of our own free will.