Their toxic fear of ideas is shaping the modern censorship movement.
Growing up in the evangelical church in the piney woods of east Texas, the world felt circumscribed by an ever-present fear—not just of sin but of ideas that might challenge the worldview handed down to those of us in the pews. Everything outside the Christian framework—including secular music, television, and books—was discouraged. Just as I signed multiple purity pledges throughout my preteen and teen years, promising to avoid not just sex but even impure thoughts, we were taught to practice absolute abstinence from dangerous ideas. Not that those dangerous ideas necessarily always came from the annals of great historical thinkers or even figures from the contemporary political climate. As it happens, the most famous of these examples was a widespread prohibition on Harry Potter. To read about witches and wizards, I was told, was to open oneself to the occult and risk spiritual ruin.
This concept of heterodoxy isn’t simply that these works contain themes or ideas counter to Christian teaching; the central belief about ideas is that they are akin to demonic possession, much like the New Testament accounts we heard in Sunday school. This belief—that ideas themselves have a unique, uncontested power to infiltrate and corrupt our minds and souls—reflects the fundamentalist evangelical worldview, one deeply skeptical of intellectual engagement and critical thinking. Rather than the notion that ideas can be critically analyzed and either accepted or rejected, it held that dangerous ideas can indoctrinate and possess you if you are merely exposed to them. To read a book or discuss a theory, in this worldview, is not to exercise one’s intellectual faculties but to risk being overtaken by a seductive, malevolent force with no hope of resistance.
Common in evangelical theology is the concept of spiritual warfare: the idea that Satan and/or other demons are ever-present entities seeking to corrupt and destroy humans—especially the faithful. To resist succumbing to these forces requires constant vigilance and protection through prayer and strict adherence to the evangelical interpretation of biblical teachings. In this worldview, demonic possession or influence mirrors the evangelical concept of ideological corruption; both presume human weakness and vulnerability to external forces that can only be resisted through complete avoidance and submission to religious authority. Just as corrupting forces can enter through seemingly innocuous sources, such as reading, music, or even yoga, dangerous ideas can infiltrate through educational, political, and cultural discourse.
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