A brief post on being a Freethought librarian.

Here in short is why I almost never apply to libraries affiliated with religious institutions, and would certainly never work for one that required any sort of "statement of faith" or similar pledge as a condition of employment.

I actually did not belong to the Atheist & Agnostic Student Association of Texas A&M back in my undergraduate days at Aggieland, because back then I shied away from the label of “atheist” and, if I called myself anything at all, I called myself an agnostic. Though I was basically an atheist from birth and remained one from early Childhood on thanks to having a Natural Science teacher for a dad, and an English teacher mom who was very lax in her religious observance, unlike her own mother, who’d been an avid member of the fire-and-brimstone Church of Christ denomination. My paternal grandmother was a sweet, basically moderately liberal Presbyterian (though viciously anti-Catholic), and held anti-war / anti-militarist views that I am more in agreement with now than I was in my teens and twenties.

My worldview has gone through many, many revisions in my years on the planet so far. My religious views & antipathies have largely gone hand in hand with revisions in my political outlook and are well nigh inseparable from them, and a full accounting of my personal intellectual history with respect to finally affirming myself as an Atheist would at the same time involve a recounting of the evolution of my political views, affiliations, changing loyalties, etc. But I don’t feel like recounting all that here, right now. I do really try to keep this blog topical and focused, so I don't want to stray too far from that. I go on at length about this personal history and related issues elsewhere.

Anyway, the main Freethought librarian who writes on and studies Freethought materials in North American Libraries that I know of is activist Librarian Earl Lee, who devotes an entire chapter of his work Libraries in the Age of Mediocrity (1998, McFarland) to this subject. I, for one, would love to see Lee someday expand this chapter into a full-length book on this topic; it’s a book that I’m sure Prometheus Books and other “Freethought” publishers would be interested in. Interestingly, Earl Lee is also a creative novelist and satirist, having penned a satirical response to the (in)famous Left Behind series, namely a sarcastically titled work called Kiss My Left Behind. This mirrors in some ways the literary path taken by Theodore Roszack, whose nonfiction work The Cult of Information was decisive in the shaping of my library career and my basic library science education as its foundation. Roszack has subsequently penned The Devil and Daniel Silverman about a down-on-his luck liberal academic & homosexual playwright who is invited to an ultra-conservative bible college somewhere in the Midwest to give a lecture. As fate would have it, an unexpected snowstorm traps Mr. Silverman at the College, forcing him to share close quarters with his hosts for much longer than expected, to the exquisite discomfort of both. I haven’t yet stopped to read either fiction work at any length; at most I’ve flipped through the pages of The Devil and Daniel Silverman, and browsed the reviews for Kiss My Left Behind online at Amazon.com, but if I decide to make time for some fun fiction in my busy reading schedule, I could certainly do worse than Kiss My Left Behind and The Devil and Daniel Silverman, I think. I like fiction that is of literary quality, but most of all I like fiction that is able to make me LOL and ROFLMAO. Master and Margarita, by Bulgakov, did this for me, as do the aphorisms of Karl Kraus, Libuše Monikova's The Façade (Die Fassade , orig. German title). Monikova was for me a powerful writer, an exiled Czech artist living and working in Berlin; She died far too young of ill health not too long ago. Her book of essays, Prager Fenster (Prague Windows), was as illuminating and thought-provoking as The Façade was side-splittingly funny. Czech Literature & Film are particular favorites of mine, especially the black & alienated humor often found therein. Though it's a formidably difficult language, I would still like to learn conversational Czech one day, and to be able to read all these masterful writers in their original language. What was unique about Monikova was that she wrote deliberately in her adoptive language of German. I did not read Die Fassade in German, though I could have. But the English translation was masterfully done, and quite hilarious besides. Karl Kraus is the Austrian answer to Mark Twain, or perhaps Ambrose Bierce, and has written some of the funniest one-liners in German that I've ever read. Continuing with the Austrian milieu, Jaroslav Hašek's Good Soldier Šveyk also passes the LOL and ROFLMAO tests with flying colors; Hašek was a colorful figure in his own right, with his own life history being no less outrageous than his famous character.

Though I typically prefer non-fiction to fiction, I do like my fiction to be boisterous, bawdy, irreverent, free-thinking, sexy & funny...qualities not totally dissimilar to what I desire in a lover, when I'm graced with one in my life. I'm grateful as all get-out to have grown up in and continue living in (so far) a decidedly secular country where that manner of living remains possible, and where the pursuit of happiness is enshrined as a legitimate life goal in the foundational documents of this secular Republic, at least in principle, however flawed in practice.

As a Library & Information professional, I am committed to supporting democracy and opposing tyranny; but that includes opposing the tyranny of the majority, when necessary. Libraries can and do and ought to foster community cohesion, serve as a focal point, etc. But librarians should also be prepared to comfort the loner alienated by community, those marching to beats of different drummers, etc. I belong to the Texas Freedom Network, which is committed to separation of church & state issues in the Lone Star State. I do attend services sometimes at my local Unitarian Universalist congregation--I'm especially keen on their Adult Discussion Groups, which is their version of "Sunday school", with the emphasis on social justice issues rather than obscurantist scriptural studies. But I also rather like the Houston Church of Freethought, whose coffee socials I attend regularly the 1st and 3rd Sundays of each month, and I also am an avid follower of Houston-Area Atheist Meetups through Meetup-Dot-Com.

I have no problem with serving religious patrons, indeed I recognize the majority of my patrons will be most likely of one of the 3 major Abrahamic faiths. Libraries have collected "inspirational" religious literature in the past and shall continue to do so on my watch. But as Earl Lee has pointed out, the record is less consistent with Freethought materials in libraries, though I sense this is beginning to change; The waiting list for Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion was so long at all Houston area libraries that I decided to go out and purchase my own versions of the audiobook and hardcover volume (for later reference/research, as Dawkins does a lot of helpful name dropping).

With more and more news stories coming out of medical professionals--Physicians and Pharmacists chiefly--allowing their pet religious bigotry to trump their professional obligations, I have to wonder if its only a matter of time before some hyper-religious pr*ck with an MLS declines a reference request citing "religious objections". Perhaps it's already happened. I often wonder how librarians who work for Libraries affiliated with Catholic institutions handle requests for materials dealing with abortion, homosexuality, family planning & contraceptive practices, etc. Not sure I really want to know, which is why I'm never keen on applying to work in such places, no matter how desperate my Librarian job search may feel at times. To be fair, it is my personal perception that Catholic institutions are at least open to the possibility of hiring non-Catholics and less likely to demand rigid conformity as with the case of Protestant affiliated educational institutions. I've applied to a few assorted Cataloging positions at a limited number of Catholic educational institutions, though never called back for an interview. But all things being equal, I'd just as soon work for a library in a state-affiliated school or secular private institution or public library--city, county, regional or state-level.

As a product of the Enlightenment, the Library profession as we understand it in the Anglo-American world is antithetical to any form of encroaching Theocracy. Straussian NeoCons backing wild eyed Dominionists, aided and abetted by more moderate, soft-peddling mega-churchers like Joel Olsteen, or the immensely popular Rick Warren...and forming the popular base for a kindler, gentler, uniquely American Fascism is a recurring nightmare of mine. I worry about the long term material sustainability of literate, print-based culture in a future era of increasing energy scarcity, something pitifully few librarians seem even to be aware of, much less making contingency plans for, since high levels of near universal literacy and print culture preserved by libraries have been the bulwark of secular civilization for well nigh 200-some odd years; Loose that and its back to the Dark Ages--literally, as in increasingly difficult to keep electric lighting going, and figuratively, as in keeping the fire-in-the-mind alive and burning--loose all that and superstition, barbarity, and organized Religion win by default.

I don't know about you, but I prefer working in a modern Library proper to working in a scriptorum, with the added requirement of having to take on holy orders just to handle books; though the absurd vow of poverty still seems to be with us in certain LIS quarters.

As a Librarian, I'm mindful--and wary--of Church history. It was religious zealots who put the Library at Alexandria to the torch, and that was not an isolated incident either. Woe be unto any librarian, religious or otherwise, who forgets that.