At Thomas Nelson, our mission statement is "We inspire the world." Recently, I've been thinking about that motto and what that means. How do we accomplish this?
First, we inspire the world by delivering the written word. Nothing changes the world like the transmission of ideas, and the written word is the most effective way to do that. One of my favorite books, Fahrenheit 451, is about a distopian society that bans books. There are fire squads that go around and burn books whenever they find them.
Captain Beatty, one of the firemen is a zealot for their cause. He used to read books, but now agrees with their mandate do destroy them because be believes that there is nothing more disagreeable and dangerous as a book. He says that books are more dangerous than a loaded gun. This is very true. Not only does reading tell us things about ourselves that we don't want to know, reading gives ideas a way to take root inside of us and change us to the core and prompt us to change. Books can also be a catalyst to change the world.
This can happen for both good change and bad. Beatty was right to describe them as dangerous. Some ways that the written word has changed the world for good are:
- Martin Luther King Jr. found inspiration from Gandhi and Henry David Thoreau to develop his methods of nonviolent resistance. Furthermore King's Letter from Birmingham Jail got the white church leaders involved in the movement.
- Martin Luther's eyes were opened when he studied the writings of St. Augustine and the Apostle Paul. And what would have become of the Protestant Reformation if it weren't for Gutenberg's invention of the printing press?
- When Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin read the philosophy of Marx and Engels and came up with a vision of a utopian society and sparked a revolution.
- Hitler's reading of Nietzsche and his interpretation of Wagner's works prompted him to become the leader that he felt Germany needed. Additionally the Nazi's used propaganda to spread their message with very little resistance.
