Liminal Libraries

Libraries are Sacred Spaces, with Rituals, Practices, and Texts that Patrons Encounter. Yet, the 20th Century Profaned them with Marxist Theory and Fragmented Knowledge.

The Enduring Human Need for the Sacred

Libraries were meant to be sanctuaries of wisdom, but have they become temples of control? Explore how industrial titans and progressive ideologies reshaped these sacred spaces—and what we can do to reclaim them.

You are a sacred creature, created to be religious and in communion with a holy God. You cannot rid yourself of your religious impulses, and you will find a way to fulfill your need for a consciousness greater than you.

This religious nature explains why certain places take on sacred significance in our lives. Churches, temples, and cathedrals were designed as sacred spaces, but they are not the only sanctuaries where we commune with consciousness beyond our own.

A library is a sacred place because books are, in a way, a collection of consciousness. They aren’t just ink, pages, and shelves. Each volume contains the preserved mind of another human being, allowing us to transcend the limitations of time and space to connect with thoughts not our own.

Books aren’t just physical objects—they’re vessels of presence. When you read C.S. Lewis, something of Lewis is present with you across time and space. Do you not feel his presence as you read through Mere Christianity or Till We Have Faces? I do, and anyone who denies the author's presence in the sacrament of the text denies truth.

This is why libraries feel sacred even to those who deny the holy. This ontological reality explains why even materialists are drawn to libraries as gathering places for consciousness.

Libraries have lived in our communities throughout history. They have served many purposes, but a sinister political theory force has risen in humanity's profane heart. This force seeks to corrupt all forms of knowledge and material space, including the library. Marxism conquers every quarter, every institution, and every heart. As Karl Marx declared, “Man makes religion, religion does not make man,”¹, reducing faith to a human construct born of suffering—an “opium of the people” masking real oppression. In the same way, his followers worked to remake libraries into temples that were not of true knowledge but of controlled enlightenment.

It was Marxist theory’s irreligious impulses that drove the foundation of libraries because they were materialists desperate for the sacred. This paradox lies at the heart of modern library science.

The materialist philosophy that undergirds Marxism explicitly rejects the spiritual and transcendent. Yet the library's institution reveals how even committed materialists cannot escape their hunger for sacred connection.

Marxists deny the existence of God and Absolute Truth, yet reinforce the absolute morality of the Library, its priests, and the Right to Read as if they were delivered by a papal bull from the Frankfurt School in 1923.² While their theory emphatically denies the sacred, their practice creates new sacred spaces and dogmas. Marxism cannot help itself because man is religious even in his desire to be irreligious.

Yet these same Marxists are desperate to spend time with books because they need to spend time with minds other than their own. Their theory denies the sacred connection with consciousness that their practice affirms.

As man moved away from religion in the 20th century, he hungered for the sacred.

As societies abandon their traditions, they don’t become more rational—they become more confused, with nothing to measure claims against except popularity or power. This is why libraries became new temples, filling the vacuum of declining religious authority with new forms of sacred space and practice.

Government bureaucrats and progressive reformers recognized this vacuum and sought to fill it. Unlike Marxist theorists who deny apparent truth for their absolute ideals, bureaucrats and reformers were practical and willing to use the library as a resource to manipulate and control.

The public library became one answer—a temple of secular knowledge where the state, not the church, would mediate humanity’s encounter with wisdom and consciousness. The Government needed men to have temples of faith in every community, but not temples that led away from the Government.

We are religious creatures. We need sacred places. We need to encounter consciousness in others that don’t belong to us. It’s why we have sacred texts. The question is not whether we will worship, but what and how we will worship.

The Library as Temple: Beyond Books and Shelves

Libraries are far more than utilitarian repositories of information. They function as sacred spaces in our communities—quiet sanctuaries where visitors observe unspoken rituals and engage with texts in reverent silence.

Marxists claim that there is no author in a text and that the reader brings meaning to the text. This view is prominently represented by Stanley Fish’s reader-response theory, which argues that “the meaning of a text is not inherent in the text itself, but is instead constructed by the reader in the act of reading”³—a perspective that undermines traditional notions of authorial intent and textual authority.

Yet, Marxists are desperate to spend time with books because they need to spend time with minds other than their own. This contradiction reveals how even materialist philosophical traditions demonstrate a human need for connection that transcends purely material explanations.

The reverence many people feel in libraries suggests that, regardless of theoretical stance, we intuitively recognize books as more than physical objects—they’re vessels of consciousness.

I love libraries. They are a source of joy for me as a reader and writer. They are sacred ground.

Yet, there is a stain of pollution. There was always a stain.

Some books weren’t just dangerous—they were deliberately harmful. They were collected to sow doubt in children's minds about religion, whether in public or school libraries.

The Hidden History: Industrial Titans and Institutional Religion

This stain was deliberately engineered by industrial titans Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, whose philanthropy transformed libraries into repositories of secular faith, alternatives to churches designed to sow doubt through incomplete knowledge.⁴ As I’ve noted, losing faith from a bit of knowledge of the universe is easy, though much knowledge often leads back to faith. Their efforts, rooted in materialist philosophies, set the stage for the American Library Association’s (ALA) progressive and radical ideologies, which continue to shape libraries today.⁵

Carnegie, with his $56 million empire, built 2,509 libraries worldwide between 1883 and 1929, including 1,689 in the United States, investing the equivalent of billions today.⁶ His The Gospel of Wealth (1889) reveals the secular agenda behind this largesse, cloaking materialist ambitions in religious rhetoric.⁷ Carnegie declares, “The best means of benefiting the community is to place within its reach the ladders upon which the aspiring can rise—free libraries, parks, and means of recreation,” positioning libraries as democratic sanctuaries for self-improvement. This “gospel” frames philanthropy as a secular salvation, with libraries designed to inspire awe, their staircases symbolizing intellectual ascent and lanterns representing enlightenment.⁸

Influenced by Herbert Spencer’s positivism, which prioritized science over faith, Carnegie envisioned libraries as engines of rational progress, not spiritual communion. He praises Spencer’s Synthetic Philosophy as a “new light” on human progress in his Autobiography, suggesting an anti-religious subtext that rejects metaphysical truths.⁹ His pragmatism, evident in requiring communities to fund maintenance (10% of the grant annually), ensured control over these spaces, subtly reshaping cultural priorities in an era when overt secularism risked backlash. While Carnegie never publicly denounced religion, his positivist lens and strategic silence—likely due to Gilded Age religious norms—align with a godless agenda to elevate material progress over divine grace.

Rockefeller, inspired by Carnegie’s Gospel, extended this vision through $550 million in donations, funding secular institutions that prioritized empirical knowledge over religious dogma.¹⁰ His $80 million grant to the University of Chicago established a Divinity School embracing theological liberalism, challenging Baptist orthodoxy with modernist ideas that echoed transcendentalism’s critique of institutional faith.¹¹

The Rockefeller Foundation’s $100 million hookworm eradication campaign elevated medical science over spiritual healing, reflecting a materialist ethos. Though a devout Baptist who tithed from age 16 and viewed wealth as divine stewardship, Rockefeller’s funding of progressive institutions suggests an anti-religious undercurrent, constrained by the era’s norms. Claims of his involvement in secret societies like the Illuminati, while debunked by the Rockefeller Archive Center, mirror his monopolistic control of Standard Oil, which critics likened to elitist cabals aiming to dominate knowledge.¹² Rockefeller’s philanthropy, like Carnegie’s, became a secular temple, filling the spiritual void left by waning church authority and laying the groundwork for materialist ideologies.

The ALA’s Progressive Legacy: From Positivism to Radical Ideologies

The American Library Association, founded in 1876, inherited and amplified this secular legacy, its history steeped in progressive ideas and radical voices that echo Carnegie and Rockefeller’s materialist ambitions. Early on, ALA co-founder Melvil Dewey’s Dewey Decimal System standardized knowledge in a positivist framework, organizing information to prioritize empirical over spiritual truths. By the 20th century, the ALA’s advocacy embraced leftist ideologies. In 1969, its Social Responsibilities Round Table pushed anti-war and civil rights initiatives, reflecting Marxist critiques of systemic power akin to those in the Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory, which sought to unmask capitalist domination through social analysis. Recent leaders like Emily Drabinski, ALA president in 2022–2023, openly embraced Marxism, tweeting about “queer theory and Marxism” and advocating libraries as sites of “collective struggle.”¹³ The ALA’s 2021 resolution condemning “capitalism’s impact on libraries” and its support for feminist scholars like Alison Bechdel, whose graphic novel Fun Home critiques patriarchal structures, underscore ties to radical feminism and materialist thought.¹⁴ These resolutions, criticized by the World Socialist Web Site for performative radicalism, align with Marx’s view of religion as an “illusory happiness” masking oppression, redirecting libraries toward secular emancipation. While the ALA’s diverse membership includes community-focused librarians, with 62% prioritizing local needs per a 2024 Library Journal survey, its progressive agenda—evident in controversies prompting states like Montana to sever ties—suggests a continuation of Carnegie and Rockefeller’s secular vision, prioritizing ideological control over spiritual cohesion.¹⁵¹⁶ This politicization, rooted in a century-long plan to reshape Western society, confirms the ALA as a priesthood of curators seeding doubt through fragmented knowledge.

Collection Development as Religious Statement

These architects of the modern library system understood a fundamental truth: control what is collected, and you control what is known. This is why a library’s collection doesn’t represent mere books but a statement of religious values. The selection process involves fundamental judgments about truth, beauty, and moral worth.

What moral responsibility do librarians bear when they decide what goes on the shelves and what doesn’t? Every inclusion or exclusion is a value judgment, not just a practical decision. When a book is shelved among “mythology” rather than “religion,” a profound statement is made about what counts as truth.

Many of the books in a library are never checked out. They are purchased and keep publishers happy, but they are never read.

The circulation facts show that most books remain on the shelf while only a handful are circulated. This “80/20 rule” observed in library science, where roughly 80% of circulation comes from about 20% of the collection, reveals something profound about these institutions.

But who gets to decide which knowledge is needed? Librarians? Or publishers?

The community collects 80% of the collection to sit unread and unused as “maybe” in an emergency. Yet many small and rural communities take on an unnecessary burden just because a collection development librarian with a title and an education has made decisions that aren’t based on need or want but on their personal opinion. Why should one person’s education determine what a community needs?

Does a college degree give them special insight into the needs of 80,000 people? 8,000 people? 8,00? 80? 8? I would argue that one person’s fragmented education is insufficient to determine what they need, much less what eight others need.

Despite promises of democratization, nothing is free, not even knowledge.

You can promise free knowledge, and while many used libraries and were promoted on TV and in books as places for growth, functional literacy in the 20th century has declined.

The Priesthood of Librarians and the Fragmentation of Knowledge

The modern library system has created what might be called a “priesthood” of professional librarians who judge what knowledge merits preservation.

The American Library Association, founded in 1876, has established standards and practices that shape how knowledge is categorized, presented, and accessed across thousands of communities. The organization has become increasingly politicized, with its leadership openly embracing Marxist ideology while claiming to champion “intellectual freedom.”

The Fragmented Mind Defined

The Fragmented Mind is a condition of modern consciousness that results from exposure to specialized, compartmentalized knowledge without an integrating framework or wisdom tradition. It is characterized by:

1. The possession of information without understanding its proper context

2. An inability to see connections between different domains of knowledge

3. A tendency to mistake partial knowledge for complete understanding

4. Susceptibility to intellectual pride despite profound gaps in wisdom

5. Resistance to traditional or holistic frameworks that might challenge its perceived expertise

This fragmented consciousness results from educational systems and knowledge institutions that present information in increasingly specialized and isolated forms. The Frankfurt School’s critical theory, established in 1923, contributed significantly to this fragmentation, seeking to reinterpret Marxism by incorporating psychoanalysis and other disciplines, explicitly rejecting traditional religious frameworks.¹⁷

A person with a fragmented mind knows many facts but lacks the wisdom to interpret or apply them properly. They often become the most vocal advocates for problematic materials in libraries, using their incomplete understanding to bully others into accepting harmful content.

This system presents knowledge in increasingly specialized and fragmented forms.

When libraries fragment knowledge, they don’t just organize books differently—they change what counts as “knowing” something. A sentence from the Bible placed among literary myths means something different than the same sentence in a theology section. This epistemic shift fundamentally alters how we understand and relate to knowledge itself.

While a comprehensive understanding might return to transcendent truth, partial knowledge often creates doubt and uncertainty.

This fragmentation can undermine traditional religious worldviews when readers encounter scientific theories, competing philosophical systems, and diverse cultural perspectives without an integrating framework. You end up with a counterfeit religion masquerading as knowledge, lacking wisdom, and presenting itself as absolute with no humility.

The Community Dilemma: Sacred Spaces and Contested Knowledge

Communities face a profound dilemma with their libraries. They need sacred spaces where people can encounter consciousness in others.

Yet what happens when materials enter the collection that some members consider harmful or degrading? The accusation of “book banning” has become a powerful rhetorical weapon that can silence legitimate community concerns about content.

Some argue that removing religious frameworks from libraries makes them more inclusive. But this ignores how even “neutral” curation serves its faith—a faith in materialism, progress, and state authority. There is no neutral library, only one that acknowledges or disguises its underlying values.

What makes this situation especially troubling is that the silenced patrons are the very ones funding these institutions. Their tax dollars pay for both the collection of objectionable materials and the salaries of the fragmented minds who curate them—yet their concerns are dismissed as irrelevant or dangerous to “intellectual freedom.”

This tension reflects a deeper question about authority—who determines which texts elevate humanity and which degrade it?

In religious traditions, such authority often rests with recognized spiritual leaders, but in secular library systems, it’s distributed among professionals trained in very different epistemological frameworks.

Conclusion: Reclaiming Sacred Knowledge

Yet some texts are unholy and degrading. What does a community do with these texts when the fragmented mind brings them in?

They are told they must accept them or be accused of being a book banner, book burner, or iconoclast. The fragmented mind, which has little knowledge and no wisdom, bullies the patrons into silence.

The wisdom necessary for discernment requires exposure to diverse perspectives while maintaining a coherent moral framework—difficult to achieve in systems designed around fragmented specialization.

NGOs like the ALA represent an existential threat to knowledge. Their process and approach reward publishers who print materials that degrade functional literacy and community morality. If libraries are to move forward, we need alternatives to the ALA that will work with Library Science programs to provide holistic ideas about knowledge and morality, understanding that there is no separation of these concepts in theory or practice. The twentieth century was built on a lie that we could divide the sacred from the secular, yet the holy was made profane, and the secular was degraded into filth.

The future of libraries depends on reclaiming their true sacred function—not as instruments of state control or materialist ideology—but as genuine sanctuaries where communities can encounter transcendent consciousness through texts that elevate rather than degrade.

The true purpose of libraries isn’t just information storage—it’s wisdom cultivation. Information tells us how to do things; wisdom tells us why things matter. Restoring this purpose and end goal can help libraries fulfill their highest calling in communities.

This requires a revolution in how we think about libraries, moving from fragmented specialization toward an integrated understanding that reconnects knowledge with moral wisdom. Only then can libraries fulfill their purpose as sacred spaces worthy of the religious creatures we have always been.

What do you think about the role of libraries in our communities? How can we balance intellectual freedom with moral responsibility? Share your thoughts in the comments below, and consider subscribing for more reflections on faith, knowledge, and culture.

Below is what some members of the community in Nixa think. Do you agree?

References

1. Marx, Karl. A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. 1844.

2. “Frankfurt School.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

3. Klein, John William. “The Role and Impact of Rockefeller Philanthropy During the Progressive Era.” Fordham University Dissertations.

4. “Carnegie Library.” Wikipedia.

5. National Park Service. “Carnegie Libraries: The Future Made Bright.”

6. “American Library Association faces backlash over ‘Marxist’ president Emily Drabinski.” Washington Times, August 30, 2023.

7. “Montana Quits American Library Association Over Marxist President.” Cowboy State Daily, July 12, 2023.

8. “American Library Association.” Wikipedia.

9. “Critical Theory.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

10. “Stanley Fish’s Reader-Response Theory Explained.” Cultural Reader.

11. Carnegie, Andrew. The Gospel of Wealth. 1889.

12. Carnegie, Andrew. Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie. 1920.

13. “Theological Liberalism at Chicago.” WORLD, January 26, 2019.

14. “John D. Rockefeller: Faith and Philanthropy.” Faith and Public Life, 2013.

15. American Library Association. “Resolution on the Misinformation of Critical Race Theory and Its Impact on Libraries.” 2021.

16. “American Library Association’s performative radicalism.” World Socialist Web Site, July 15, 2023.

17. “Librarians Prioritize Community Needs.” Library Journal, March 2024.