“Book Boundaries” in West Michigan School Board Election Campaigns: Examining White Christian Nationalist Visions of Dominion Over Literacy Education

ABSTRACT Across the United States, White Christian Nationalism (WCN) has emerged in public discourse, policy, and practice around literacy education. Examining varied localized enactments of censorship further nuances accounts of how WCN asserts its vision for public literacy education. In particular, school board campaigns have become spaces of debate on the goals and contents of literacy education, as WCN candidates advocate for censorship of topics, materials, and pedagogies that they perceive as conflicting with their perspectives and label as harmful to students. Ottawa County, in West Michigan (US), is a significant site for studying WCN school board campaign rhetoric due to its settlement history involving intertwined ethnoreligious (Dutch Reformed Christian) and economic forces. In this paper, we examine data from school board candidates ( n = 11) endorsed by Ottawa Impact (OI), a political action group in Ottawa County, MI that we interpret as enacting a Reformed Reconstructionist stream of WCN. We contextualize OI rhetoric regarding “book boundaries” (terminology from the data set) in the historical and theological foundations of the Dutch Reformed Christian culture of Ottawa County. Through this contextualization, we examine how OI candidates' perspectives on literacy censorship reflect their vision of God's dominion over Ottawa County and the US nation‐state, leading to governance policies that forward parents' sovereignty over children's education defended by rhetoric of protecting “childhood innocence.” This examination of candidates' perspectives reveals the varied implications of WCN's influence in literacy education—impacting not only what children read, but also, in the case of Ottawa County, who decides.