Public Attitudes toward Censorship of Particular Book Topics

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Weighing conflicting points of view to arrive at reasoned conclusions is a key humanistic competency, and Americans’ willingness to permit the public dissemination of texts they may not agree with can serve as one marker of this capacity. The NORC General Social Survey has included questions on book banning for over 50 years. The questions ask whether a respondent would support removing a book on controversial topics from their public library. With the exception of racist books, Americans were far less likely to support such censorship in 2022 than during the 1970s.

Findings and Trends

In the 1970s, about 40% of Americans supported removing from libraries books that are racist, oppose churches and religion, were written by an avowed Communist, propose a military dictatorship, or favor homosexuality. By 2021 and 2022, Americans were less likely to support removing books from libraries on most topics. The sharpest decline was from 43% approving removal of books advocating homosexuality in the 1970s to 14% in 2021 (the lowest percentage across all topics; 2022 data are not available for all types of books).
An exception to declining support for the removal of books from libraries was racist texts. The level of disapproval for this sort of text hovered around 35% from 1976 to 2016 but then began to climb, reaching 44% in 2022.
The only other type of book whose removal more than 40% of Americans supported are books by Muslim religious leaders with an anti-American message. Although support for the removal of such books has decreased modestly since 2008 (the first year for which data are available), close to half of Americans (46%) still favored their removal from libraries in 2022.
The data suggest a sharp increase from 2021 to 2022 in the share of Americans wanting several types of books removed from public libraries. Due to changes in the way the survey was administered, we cannot know for sure whether this jump reflects what was actually happening in the population or is attributable to the change in methodology.1

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Data Source and Other Information

Source: NORC at the University of Chicago, General Social Survey (1972–2022). Data analyzed and presented by the American Academy’s Humanities Indicators (http://www.humanitiesindicators.org/).

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Endnotes

1
Face-to-face interviews, the traditional method for collecting GSS data, were not possible in 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and thus most respondents completed the survey online. In 2022, about half of respondents completed the questionnaire on the Web, while the other half were mostly interviewed in person.