(The Lion) — Children waved flags, cheered at a talking puppet, and laughed at knock-knock jokes, but a story hour inside the Library of Congress on Saturday carried a deeper message.

Hosted by the Education Department’s Center for Faith along with Brave for Good, the event urged parents to reclaim public spaces and education for faith, biblical values and moral courage.

The See You at the Library story hour welcomed families at the historic Library of Congress – the world’s largest library – to reflect on the “role of faith and courage in shaping young minds.”

It was one of hundreds of story hours taking place in libraries across the country, as part of a national pushback against woke ideologies that began in 2022 when actor Kirk Cameron revealed he was turned away from reading a wholesome Brave Books story by more than 50 public libraries – many of which had hosted drag queen story hours.

Brave Books is a Christian company that publishes “books for kids that reinforce biblically based, foundational values.” Saturday’s event at the Library of Congress included readings of several stories from the Brave Books series, including Pride Comes Before the Fall, Because You’re My Family, and Little Lives Matter. 

Three years ago, when libraries across the country were prohibiting reading hours with its books, it was a “wake-up call,” Brave Books CEO Trent Talbot said Saturday.

“They saw us fight back, exercise our First Amendment, and I think it left a mark,” he said, adding that now more than 200 libraries across the country, as well as the Library of Congress, are welcoming the faith-based books.

The story hours are about “celebrating family, faith and the power of story, and it’s about the family of faith leading in our communities,” he said. “We believe in the power of storytelling to connect one generation to the next, to inspire children to dream big, to teach truth. And we believe in the power of story to change a child, a family, a community, and even a country for the better.”

The Library of Congress reading hour is the first event the Education Department’s Center for Faith has held, says director Hannah Earl.

“The work of the Center for Faith is empowering faith-based stakeholders and families and parents in their pursuit of meaningful learning, and central to that is the recognition that parents should be empowered to choose the education that is best for their children, including a faith-based education,” Earl said. “And alongside a faith-based education is the recognition that those values do have a place in the public square.”

By gathering in the “Library of America,” she said, the event aimed to “recognize that the values of faith, the timeless values of faith, will continue to make this country great.”

The reading hour was held inside a packed auditorium inside the Library of Congress, where Cameron and a talking puppet named Iggy welcomed children up onto the stage. There, they told jokes, read stories, sang songs and told the children to “be honest, be brave, be truthful.”

Political commentator Michael Knowles also appeared at the event, noting the Library of Congress is full of religious items, including a statue of Moses holding the Ten Commandments and passages of Scripture inscribed on the walls.

“The only two items that are on permanent display in the library are two Bibles: the Giant Bible of Mainz and the Gutenberg Bible,” he said. “That is not just a coincidence; that is the point of the library. In the religion on which our country was founded, God and the Word are one.”

Knowles said in recent years, activists have attempted to turn libraries away from their purpose as “repositories of knowledge” and instead have “invited absurd characters to read false stories that promote only ignorance and confusion.

“They tried to turn the library into a circus, and that’s not what the library is for. This is a library, and the purpose is education.”

Education is about more than memorizing facts – it is “about forming a whole person,” Knowles said, citing Noah Webster’s 1828 dictionary definition of education: “to give children a good education in manners, arts and science, is important; to give them a religious education is indispensable.”