It was well past nightfall. Raindrops glinted like falling sparks in the yellow glow from the Board of Education building. A middle-aged black man stood alone near the entrance, dressed in a smartly-tailored camel hair coat. He held an umbrella to shelter himself; his two-speaker tape player was belting out renditions of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” and the “Hallelujah Chorus”. I gave him a wordless thumbs-up salute in recognition of his musical protest.
Once inside the auditorium, I planted myself in a front-row seat and awaited the arrival of the Board of Education. Members of the electronic media busied themselves adjusting floodlights and sound levels; an emblematic half-hour of small-town America was about to unfold: the Board of Education had needlessly irked the folks who pay their salaries and the townsfolk wanted to have a word with them.
Welcome to Maplewood, New Jersey
Maplewood and South Orange were once one town; they separated in the 1920s, but the two towns share a consolidated school system. They share Columbia High School, which is a five-minute walk from the launch pad of this website.
Eighteen days prior to this Board of Education meeting, the local newspaper, the News Record of Maplewood and South Orange, had carried a front-page story titled “Board of Education bans religious music from holiday concerts.” This article gave notice to the residents of both towns that after an unbroken history of relaxed seasonal musical fare the Board of Education would henceforth strictly enforce its Policy 2270 which, according to them, suddenly required that all school-sponsored musical presentations be completely sterilized of any contaminating religious connotations.
All music teachers in the South Orange-Maplewood school district received a memo instructing them to exclude all religious music from all performances. The memo stated that “we will avoid any selection which is considered to represent any religious holiday, be it Christmas, Hanukkah, etc. This holds true for any vocal or instrumental setting. I would strongly suggest you gear towards the seasonal selections – ‘Winter Wonderland,’ ‘Frosty the Snowman,’ etc. Music centered on peace is also a nice touch. For the high school, the brass ensemble repertoire must also adhere to this policy, so the traditional carols must be eliminated from the repertoire.”
According to the News Record, “the memo that was distributed throughout the district made it abundantly clear that the ban on religious music was to include instrumental versions of songs such as those traditionally sung (sic) by the high school’s brass ensemble. According to [Superintendent of Schools] Horoschak, the ensemble plays several songs whose tune is identifiable enough to be able to figure out the religious text that would normally accompany them. ‘If you’re familiar with the tune, you know the words.’”
No law requires such a restrictive policy; this was just something that a few local bureaucrats decided to impose on their local community. I responded immediately with a letter to the editor, which appeared in the next issue of the News Record. It was the first of many dissenting opinions to be published in the following weeks. Here is my opening shot:
Superintendent of Schools Peter Horoschak has decreed that every musical offering by students must be cleansed of any contaminating religious connotations. He even did George Orwell one better; as the News Record informed us last week: “According to Horoschak, the [brass] ensemble plays several songs whose tune is identifiable enough to be able to figure out the religious text that would normally accompany them.” Said Superintendent Horoschak, “If you’re familiar with the tune, you know the words.” In other words, he is banning instrumental music that might prompt listeners to sing familiar, but offending, lyrics inside their heads! Welcome to the era of repertoire-manipulation-as-mind-control.
To quote the News Record once again: “According to Horoschak, this policy extends to all performances that are designated as school-sponsored performances and, therefore, the ban would include events such as the opening of Dickens Village, at which the Columbia High School Band Ensemble is scheduled to perform.”
So the Columbia High School offerings will henceforth be a musical echo of the Weather Channel, with songs about snowflakes and snowmen and Winter Wonderlands, all of it perky, but spiritually vacant.
Let’s face it folks, if it weren’t for Christmas there wouldn’t be a winter celebration; there just aren’t enough Druids in town for a cracklin’ good Solstice shindig and Hanukkah is the least revered celebration of the Jewish calendar, prompting only perfunctory candle lighting in the Jewish homeland. It’s Christmas that does the heavy holiday lifting in America.
The secret to preserving a robust and heartfelt holiday season is to uncouple this town’s musical celebrations from the town’s overbearing commissars of cultural political correctness. Just cut the Columbia High School edu-crats adrift.
Don’t the student musicians of Maplewood and South Orange own telephones? Get organized! Call yourselves the Christmas Music Club or the Holiday Brass Ensemble and ditch the atheist-friendly repertoire. Follow your heart’s desire and sing yourselves giddy.
If student musicians are penalized in any way for favoring their commitments to their unaffiliated music groups, then everyone will know that the true purpose of Horoschak’s edict was to suffocate healthy religious expression.
To the Editor:
Dear Sir,
It’s almost December, and Maplewood is once again tarting itself up with a faux patina of traditionalism while simultaneously sucking the spiritual essence out of the holiday-season experience.
The following week’s issue of the News Record included a flurry of letters decrying the Board’s decision to silence any hint of religious celebration by public-school performers. The Monday-night Board of Education meeting was well-attended, but it was an exercise in futility from the start; the eight-member board was determined to quash any expression of spiritual joy by the students. More than a fortnight before this meeting, Peter Horoschak had told the News Record that he “does not know of any plans on the part of the board to revisit the policy at this time.” He added that he would not recommend to the board that the policy be reviewed. The meeting was, in fact, just an opportunity for the residents of Maplewood and South Orange to express their frustration and bewilderment. Superintendent of Schools Peter Horoschak was comfortable with his decision, which was a duplicate of the one imposed on Shaker Heights, Ohio, where Mr. Horoschak had worked before coming to my hometown. Shaker Heights, like Maplewood and South Orange, has a vocal and determined Jewish minority that has wearied of the Christmas holiday season being so much about, well, … things Christian. Peter Horoschak had grown comfortable with the habit of placating this vocal minority long before he moved to Maplewood; he simply brought his predisposition to knuckle under with him. He was a pushover for the “heckler’s veto.”
Masking their cowardice in the guise of high principle, the board president, Brian F. O’Leary told the Newark Star Ledger “We continue to support the restriction that music programs prepared and presented by student groups as an outcome of the curriculum shall not have a religious orientation or focus on religious holidays.” Mr. O’Leary went on to make himself look even more shallow: “Absent that restriction, a concert or performance could become an opportunity not to learn about a religious holiday or tradition, but to celebrate it.” This little man is fearful that some students might embrace the music with enthusiasm and perform it with verve; once people form an emotional attachment to the music and begin performing it with heartfelt joyfulness and in the spirit the music’s authors intended, then who knows what consequences might ensue? The audience might spontaneously break into song; people might start smiling or laughing; they might start recalling warm memories of Christmases past. Where would it all end?
At the meeting, Shirlee Gross, a 51-year resident of Maplewood gave voice to her opinion that Policy 2270 contradicted the very pride in diversity that Maplewood was forever congratulating itself as exemplifying. She looked straight at Peter Horoschak: “I suppose you realize that Columbia’s students think the policy is silly, and thanks to media coverage, we have become the laughingstock of the country as well.”
This was true. My first notice that my town’s bureaucracy was suddenly hostile to all expressions of religious sentiment came from my radio. Someone tipped WABC Radio in New York City to Maplewood’s stingy new regime. The Curtis & Kubi Morning Show made it a topic of call-in conversation for days. Soon they were using their 50,000-watt transmitter to broadcast a parody that pretended to be the Columbia High School Singers performing a weird rendition of “Joy to the World” into which they had shoehorned the lyrics of “Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog.”
At the Board of Ed meeting, Demetrios Stratis, a lawyer with the Alliance Defense Fund, reminded the board members that “People are tired of efforts to sanitize religious expression in the public schools. This policy against even instrumental Christmas music flies in the face of all common sense and is neither necessary nor constitutional.” He’s right. The First Amendment seeks to maximize religious expression by prohibiting Congress from making any law that would favor any one sect to the disadvantage of any other sect. The Amendment makes its intent even clearer by declaring that the free exercise of religion shall not be inhibited by any agent of the federal government. The Constitution left it to the individual states to decide whether they wanted to establish state-sanctioned religions within their borders. Several states chose to do exactly that, but all of those states abandoned religious favoritism within forty years.
To my mind, the First Amendment points the way to a resolution of my town’s unhappy dilemma. The members of the Board of Education believe themselves to be agents of the government; they imagine their schools’ teachers and administrators to be agents of the government also; they believe that all school-sponsored activities are extensions or expressions of their agency powers. Furthermore, they have taken the position that any expression of religious sentiment within the context of a school-sponsored student activity constitutes an endorsement of religion, however tenuous the endorsement may be. It’s a big stretch from “Congress shall make no law” to the belief that few students in a small town willingly singing Silent Night threatens to impose a government-established religion, but that’s their harebrained position and they’re sticking to it. They have succumbed to the threat of the heckler’s veto.
The quickest and most certain solution to this predicament is for citizens to disengage their cultural and spiritual lives from agents of the government. Teachers may be agents of the government, but students are not; students are captives of the government. The government compels students to attend school; if they resist attendance, then the government will use its police powers to force them into a classroom; to be truly free, students must escape from their captivity. In short, students who exercise their constitutional rights to free association and peaceable assembly away from school property are free to perform any sort of music that makes them happy. Maplewood is bursting with talented musicians and all of them are familiar with the traditional Christmas and Hanukkah repertoire. Only the sloth of a people grown accustomed to having the government do things for them prevents a swift and pleasant end to the Policy 2270 dilemma. Barring scheduling conflicts, students would be free to perform at both school-sponsored and unaffiliated venues. The public would be free to choose between the traditional repertoire and the one that was more atheist-friendly, or they could attend both performances.
You Own Your Culture
Your local culture is an expression of your community’s collective sensibility and you have an ownership interest in defending it. A timely example of this idea in action comes to us from Denver, which recently held its annual Parade of Lights. Renowned for its studied blandness, this event is organized by the local business community, which sought to keep it safely secular and commercial. Santa was the center of attention; Jesus was not invited. But this year Jesus came anyway, thanks to a gentle rebellion by ordinary folks who had tired of witnessing their cherished traditions run through a bureaucratic PC de-flavorizer. It happened this way. . .
First, the parade committee snubbed the folks of the Faith Bible Chapel who had applied for permission to include a float with a choir singing hymns and carols. Then Denver’s mayor chose to replace the banner on the roof of the City and County Building that had always read “Merry Christmas” with a banner that said “Happy Holidays.” To many Denver Christians these slights were the last straw; the parade organizers received hundreds of e-mail messages from the unhappy faithful. Soon the Faith Bible Chapel was joined by another dozen sympathetic congregations.
For two nights of the parade hundreds of Denver-area Christians headed downtown and from the sidewalk filled the air with the joyful noise of carols; they sang of shepherds and holy nights and offered strangers hot chocolate. It was a mild, but determined, protest against a secular blandness that was swallowing their local culture.
The Downtown Denver Partnership has run the parade since 1974 and each year does a follow-up evaluation of the event. “This was always just supposed to be a cutesy parade for the kids,” said partnership president Jim Basey. “The purpose was to get bodies downtown.” But this year the faithful had come downtown in force and sung their soaring songs in defense of their culture; they had rescued their sacred day of celebration from the promoters of cutesy secular blandness.
Some business owners called Mr. Busey to suggest that if people wanted religion, then let them have religion; citizen groups are free to express religious sentiments, so let the market determine the product. It was an argument that any bottom-line capitalist could understand. Mr. Busey recalled, “We heard from one of our directors who said, ‘Gee, why don’t you just do it? Throw some religion in and be done with it.’ ” This notion of religion as some sort of condiment to season the season was short on spirituality but long on common sense. Why not invite Jesus to his own birthday party?
The senior pastor of Faith Bible Chapel, George Morrison, told the New York Times, “I never had the intention to have a campaign – this thing just took on a life of its own. It touched a chord.” Indeed it did, and it was a fine example of how citizens can assert their ownership interest in defending their local culture.
Meanwhile, back in Maplewood . . .
Back at the Board of Ed, a board member summoned Ryan Dhan to the microphone. The Columbia High School sophomore strode quickly to the polished table, seated himself, and began to read his prepared text. He had a lot to say and only three minutes in which to say it; he spoke quickly, but ran over the three-minute-limit anyway. When the Board tried to silence him, members of the audience began shouting “Let him speak!” When Ryan concluded, the room erupted in applause. The following week the News Record included Ryan Dhan’s entire text. In the sophomore’s own words: “I have vivid memories of going into Maplewood Village with my friends and lighting up the town with Christmas carols and Jewish folk songs. People would clap when we finished a song and would whisper about how wonderful it was that high school students would do this for the town. Truthfully, I didn’t see anyone walk away disgruntled at our choices of music.”
The sophomore lamented that his beautiful repertoire had been slashed from 25 pieces to only five or six. “It is ridiculous that every piece of music we play has to be approved by the district lawyer.” He went on to liken the banning of music to the banning of books. “Should we ban Handel’s ‘Messiah’, or should we perform it at the appropriate time of year? Bach wrote all his pieces for the church, so should we throw these away, too?” Young Mr. Dhan was perplexed that Policy 2270 applied only to December musical presentations; the Board of Education was silent on the issue of singing Silent Night at performances in the month of May. Ryan Dhan was dumbfounded that his brass ensemble would be invited to perform at the Maplewood Christmas three-lighting, but would be forbidden to play “Santa Clause is Coming to Town,” when Santa arrived.
If the Brass Ensemble got hit hard by the newly-enforced policy, then the Martin Luther King, Jr. Association’s Gospel Choir got slammed even harder: almost their entire repertoire was rooted in religious expression. As Ryan observed, “The public suffered, too, hearing us repeatedly play our five songs at last Saturday’s tree-lighting. There weren’t crowds cheering us on this year – they all got bored!”
Carpe Diem or Dude! Where’s My Sousaphone?
The December 16th issue of the News Record brought a welcome surprise. The front page featured an article titled “Columbia High School students perform as independent ensemble.” The article described how “a group of approximately 14 students, all members of the Columbia High School Brass Ensemble, assembled Saturday in Ricalton Square in Maplewood to play Christmas carols for visitors to the Dickens Village.”
The break-away group had been organized by high school junior Jessica Schneider, a strapping lass who plays the sousaphone. “I knew we couldn’t play in school and the community really enjoys it,” said Ms. Schneider. “This way, we were able to give the community holiday music and do something proactive instead of just protesting.”
In other words, she chose to stop butting heads with the local edu-crats; she recruited like-minded student musicians, and together they slipped free to perform beautiful music for an appreciative audience. They called themselves the Holiday Brass Ensemble; they rehearsed in one another’s homes without the assistance of any taxpayer-funded faculty member. A front-page photo shows Jessica pumping out the bass line of “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” and “We Wish You a Merry Christmas.” Page three included a photo of sophomore Ryan Dhan playing his trumpet in an unaffiliated performance by the Holiday Brass Ensemble. These students had asserted their ownership interest in their own culture; they had preserved the continuity of their cherished local traditions; they had learned a valuable lesson in how easy it is to marginalize silly local bureaucrats.
If the majority of citizens are told that their expressions of religious or cultural sentiments are unwelcome in the public square, then the community might consider marginalizing the public square as well, leaving it to the snappish malcontents: just move your cherished traditions beyond the reach of cowardly bureaucrats and those tiny intellects who eagerly anticipate the opportunity to “be offended” by your cultural traditions every December. Make the most exciting and vital part of your community the part that isn’t subject to the influence of any cranky, hostile minority. Privatize your community culture as much as possible. Let every unwelcoming public square become a windswept echo chamber for those who have chosen to hold themselves apart and aloof; let the celebration continue elsewhere without them.
To quote the News Record, “of the newly formed Holiday Brass Ensemble of Maplewood and South Orange, [Superintendent of Schools] Horoschak said, “If they were not representing Columbia High School, they have a right to do whatever they want.” In other words, to be truly free the students must ditch all attachments to their government school. Ms. Schneider said her group was very well received. “I think a lot of people enjoyed it a lot.”
The Season of Unnecessary Suffering
There is no necessity to banish religious sentiments from public school musical presentations. My town’s student musicians had entertained holiday crowds with religious music for a full decade after the adoption of Policy 2270 in the early ‘90s and every presentation was well within established Supreme Court guidelines, so the real reason for clamping down on instrumental presentations of religious music had to be something other than black-letter law; it had to be something rooted in the psychology of the bureaucrats who willed the newly restrictive enforcement into existence.
The real reason appeared in a News Record article by Managing Editor Katherine Berk, wherein “Horoschak said that the board feels that since the district is such a diverse community, ‘rather than try to represent all groups, it’s best to just stay away from religion.’”
What does the aging Mr. Horoschak mean by “rather than try”? He’s saying that he and the board had succumbed to one of the Seven Deadly Sins: Sloth. They were just too lazy to engage every group that might clamor for representation. And who were these groups that were demanding representation? We were never told. There were repeated references to “Buddhists, atheists and Muslims” who lived in my town, but no evidence was forthcoming that any of them had ever lodged a complaint. Was the real reason just every liberal’s nagging fear that they might offend someone by being distinctively . . . anything other than innocuously moderate and equivocating?
In the present era of identity-group politics, when every self-identified splinter group struggles for the spotlight, the month of December has become a self-imposed “dilemma” for partisan cranks. They jostle with the enormous Christian majority for “equal time,” no matter how minor their claim for attention. In truth, Buddhists, atheists and Hindus are just December bystanders. Kwanzaa is a fabricated feel-good “harvest” festival that makes no sense whatsoever at the deep end of December. Kwanzaa is a black-nationalist anti-Christmas created to promote the socialist ideology of its sociopathic founder Ron Karenga; it was intended to “de-whitize” Christmas, to quote an enthusiastic Rev. Al Sharpton. (see The Rotten Roots of Kwanzaa in this series).
In this era of identity politics Hanukkah, the least significant observance on the Jewish calendar, has ballooned from its former perfunctory candle lighting to a full-blown Hallmark holiday complete with a fresh reinterpretation of the Maccabee rejection of Hellenism as a role model for Jews to resist the blandishments of the bogus messiah, Jesus. The “holiday of lights” now desperately tries to outshine Christmas.
In my opinion, the most fitting time for a bangin’ Jewish celebration is the Jewish New Year; the best time for Muslim cheer is the feast at the end of Ramadan; the sensible time for Kwanzaa would be in late September, which would place it near the American harvest and closer to Rosh Hashanah. It’s sad that so many people who aren’t Christians hold such a big grudge against Christmas; the desperate desire for “equal time” is pathetic. This year Hanukkah was over and done by mid-December; it was a memory before the first school group tuned their instruments; the towering menorah in my town’s public square was long gone by the time of the Christmas tree lighting. Feeling defenseless, the local minions of secular Judaism or Jewish secularism or atheistic Judaism (pick one!) tightened the screws on Peter Horoschak and the Board of Education to silence Christian music at Christmas time. Not one person in my town believes that the Board of Ed clamped down on Christmas music because of complaints from Hindus, no matter how often that silly rumor is repeated.
Diversity Diverted
The front page of the December 9th News Record bore the headline “BOE holds firm on policy 2270.” The first paragraph said that “Despite saying they will make a priority of ‘developing formal regulations for policy 2270,’ the South Orange/Maplewood Board of Education seems to have no plans to change the policy itself.”
In the article Managing Editor Katherine Berk recalls how Adele Walch addressed the local board of education about the manner in which Hanover Township’s Board of Education had managed an identical challenge last year. Ms. Walch said that “Initially, our board believed that by simply removing all religious content from school performances the ‘December Dilemma’, as some call it, would just go away.” But that was not what happened. In response to an overwhelmingly negative response by Hanover’s residents, the Hanover Board of Education reversed its decision to quash all music with an historical connection to religion.
Ms. Walch observed that “since much choral and instrumental music has religious themes, our curriculum would have been significantly limited by its removal.” She added that “The board also found that the overwhelming majority of residents favored its continued inclusion in school concerts. In a survey conducted by the Board of Education, 96 percent of respondents said they preferred to keep it in.”
What Ms. Walch didn’t understand is that seats on the Maplewood/South Orange Board of Education are eagerly sought by just the sort of schoolmarmish contrarians who would have clustered in the dissenting 4% of the Hanover survey. These practitioners of bush-league identity politics are exactly the sort who would characterize the suffocation of religious sentiment as “sensitivity to minority feelings” and would denounce the singing of a Christmas carol as “a tyranny of the majority.” The strangest twist of Policy 2270 is that it permits public school performances of all sorts of religious music as long as none of it is ever performed in late December.
A vocal supporter of Policy 2270 is local resident Mark Brownstein, who keeps repeating “Let’s face it, we’re not having a concert this time of year simply because it’s Hanukkah.” He has a point. But then again for Jews to pout that Hanukkah, the least significant observance by one of America’s smaller minorities, an observance that celebrates an armed campaign for cultural exclusivity by a people who routinely reaffirm the exclusivity of the Jewish community by denying admission to anyone whose mother was not also a member, for them to fret that Hanukkah is not given equal billing with the most big-hearted and embracing holiday of the overwhelming majority of Americans is to miss entirely the American spirit of generosity and the urgent desire to express that generosity that has made the American Christmas the big star-spangled celebration that it has become. It is a time when Christians put aside their hair-splitting doctrinal differences and come together on common ground to celebrate the spirit of hopefulness and generosity that they hold in common. In many towns the preferred common ground is the village square, the symbolic heart of the local community. When contrarians such as Mr. Brownstein insist that celebrants disperse into their separate churches and homes to do their celebrating in private, they are displaying an emotional cluelessness approaching autism. Barking about some non-existent principle of church/state separation only makes them sound even more dull witted.
But this is Maplewood, the town that used a flimsy zoning technicality as a convenient excuse to prevent a highly educated Christian minister from holding prayer services at the local YMCA. This same YMCA offers classes in basketball, volleyball, kickboxing, karate and something called polyometrics. You can take classes in pre-natal, post-natal and just plain ordinary yoga to “keep your mind, body and spirit in balance. . .” According to its publicity, “Its mission is to enrich the lives of children, families and communities it serves through programs that build spirit, mind and body, in an environment nurturing positive values.” It also provides “a wide variety of services and activities, including quality all-day and after-school daycare, preschool and kindergarten classes, recreational and enrichment programs, such as swimming and other sports, arts, computer activities and day and sleep-away camps; programs for adolescents and teens that include sports, parties and club activities, and programs for adults and seniors.”
This YMCA has become a major comfort zone for all sorts of folks, including the town’s ample Jewish community, but when a highly educated Christian minister asked permission to hold prayer meetings at the Young Men’s Christian Association, he was treated like an extraterrestrial. The local bureaucrats fell all over themselves to find a reason to exclude him and his Christian message; he was a menace to the homogenized secular blandness that passes for sophistication in my hometown.
So Maplewood is not as comfortable with true diversity as it pretends to be; it’s a postcard perfect village at the mercy of prickly minorities who are ever ready to defend their jealously guarded comfort zones. Some voices are more influential than others; the Board of Education listened to the most influential voice, which most certainly wasn’t the voice of the Christian majority. It didn’t have to be this way; there was an open path of moderation.
Hanover Township found the willpower to mount a varied, yet traditional December musical presentation by its public school student musicians. In Cherry Hill, New Jersey, school administrators are guided by Procedure C-17, which states that “Any school musical program or concert composed of several choral and instrumental selections shall have a secular educational value and shall not be…a religious celebration. While individual religious pieces of music may be performed for their musical value, the total effect of the music program or concert shall be non-religious.” That’s the way Maplewood had conducted its December concerts for the previous decade.
Westfield, NJ also has a Policy 2270 which says, in part, “When songs relating to religious holidays are included, music from different religions should be represented in a balanced manner. Songs with highly religious language should not be included. An exception may be made for classical works of substantial aesthetic value.”
This approach is consistent with stated positions of the Jewish Anti-Defamation League and numerous decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court. According to the National Association for Music Education, “…the study and performance of religious music within an educational context is a vital and appropriate part of a comprehensive music education. The omission of sacred music from the school curriculum would result in an incomplete educational experience.” It is the position of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development that “it is not a religious exercise when students present a winter concert at which they perform Christmas music, secular music and music from other religious traditions.” Furthermore, First Amendment Schools, of which the Maplewood/South Orange school district is a member, takes the position that “social studies, literature and the arts offer opportunities for the inclusion of study about religions, their ideas and practices. The use of art, drama, music or literature with religious themes is permissible if it serves a sound educational goal in the curriculum.”
This year, members of my town’s Board of Education were influenced by a few determined complainers and chose to impose restrictions that go far beyond anything required by their own decade-old Policy 2270. The local newspaper of December 16, ’04 included an editorial in which the town was told that “In an attempt to appear strong and not fold under the pressure of outraged parents and increasing national attention, the board has said that it will continue to support the current policy, which states that religious music should not be included in holiday concerts because it serves as a means of celebration of a religion, as opposed to an educational purpose in the curriculum.”
In other words, a few anti-Christian cranks thought that the Christians were enjoying the musical presentations a bit too much, were behaving in ways that struck the complainers as disquietingly Christian. These few cheerless dissenters had found a sympathetic ear in Peter Horoschak. After that, the emotional temperature in my town went way up.
A Town Divided
Veteran music teacher Sandra Singleton-Barnhardt shared her life’s experience with News Record readers in the December 16th edition. She recalled the time, years ago, when “with much anxiety” she had left a “wonderfully rewarding” teaching position in the mostly-black community of Orange, NJ for a better-paying position at the racially-diverse middle school in South Orange. She is a former resident of Maplewood. She says, “I left Orange Middle School and ventured into the world of diversity where I had never been before.”
As the daughter of an African-American minister she had played the piano in her father’s church since she was nine years old; consequently, “there was a distinct sound to my piano accompaniments.” She built a distinctive repertoire, some of it modified old favorites repackaged as “inspirational music.” She recalls that, “No matter their ethnicity or their religion – I got those children to sing from their hearts.” And that “there were never less than 100 children in the choirs at South Orange Middle School and very often more than 200 voices would raise the roof at assemblies and special programs.”
She fondly remembered her colleague, Mr. Wayne Fenstermacher, who “was being attacked for programming some sacred music on his much-anticipated annual holiday concerts…We often discussed how to get our message across to the ‘noisy few’ that could not see sacred music being taught as an art form. Mr. Fenstermacher…vowed to fight the good fight for the aesthetic beauty – not the religious ideal – of sacred music being performed in school.” She added, “Through the singing of all genres of music, these children knew intuitively what tolerance meant – and they lived it through their music.”
Sandra Singleton-Barnhardt now teaches at the Cicely Tyson School of Performing and Fine Arts in East Orange, a public school for grades six through twelve and a magnet school for talented and gifted children. In her own words: “Even though my choir is virtually 100 percent African-American, the diversity of cultures and languages spoken at home and religious beliefs is profound. Yet, my last eight years have been glorious because I teach without anxiety. I teach my classical music the same as I teach the Broadway musical, the same as I teach Handel’s ‘Messiah,’ the same as I teach traditional spirituals and gospel music, even though there may be Muslim children and Seventh Day Adventist children and Jehovah’s Witness children and Catholic children and Protestant children in my choir. I teach the fundamental skills of good vocal technique and it is applied to everything performed as an art form in its own right.”
She is not now constricted by the suffocating and unnecessary restraints of her former school district. She calls her new school home “a breath of fresh air.”
Maplewood resident Aldan O. Markson wrote a letter to remind my hometown that “Residents of Maplewood have long been accustomed to turning up their noses with smug superiority when hearing that some school board in the American hinterlands has banned Mark Twain’s ‘Huckleberry Finn,’ John Steinbeck’s ‘Grapes of Wrath,’ or Mary O’Hara’s ‘My Friend Flicka’.” But now that our own Board of Education has banished Handel’s ‘Messiah,’ Bach’s Christmas Oratorio,’ and Irving Berlin’s ‘White Christmas’ from Columbia High School, we can only hang our heads in shame.”
South Orange resident David Niles echoed my sentiments exactly: “The South Orange/Maplewood Board’s ban on religious holiday music raises political correctness to the level of educational defectiveness…
“If schools in South Orange and Maplewood cannot acknowledge, explore and enjoy music from different cultures and faiths, where can it be done? If citizens of South Orange and Maplewood cannot hear music in a public forum from different traditions without feeling threatened, where can it be done? If a school board in South Orange and Maplewood cannot creatively integrate music from various faiths into a celebration of the arts, where can it be done? Dealing with diversity and celebrating it in an educational setting takes courage and creativity. The music ban, however, is a cop out.”
Maplewood resident Mark S. Brownstein, however, detected a Christian plot behind every Christmas concert: “Let’s not pretend that interjecting songs of devotion or praise of Jesus Christ into a school winter concert is anything other than an effort to assert the dominance of Christianity in public life.”
Mr. Brownstein, who apparently would prefer us all to experience the dominance of secular humanism in public life, concluded his letter thus: “If individuals really feel that strongly about the centrality of Jesus to education, I wish they would devote their resources to building Christian day schools and leave our public schools alone.”
Mr. Brownstein’s “love it or leave it” defense of community schools that are divorced from the traditions of their community is chillingly familiar. Though the predominance of Jewish surnames among the enthusiastic supporters of the religious-music ban might lead us to conclude that these “Jews” are motivated by religious conviction, a simple name tally can be misleading.
In her insightful book God-Optional Judaism, author Judith Seid informs us that “The idea that Judaism is a religion dates back only to the 1700s. Before that, the Jews were considered to be a national entity, like the French…calling Judaism a religion rather than a national civilization flies in the face of history and tradition, calling Judaism a religion is historically inaccurate. Judaism is not one religion and has never been only one religion…Religion is what divides the Jewish people. What holds us together is our sense of heritage, culture, and commitment to our people.” (p.203-4) So, a person can say with conviction that he is a righteous Jew even though he may also be a committed atheist.
The 1990 National Jewish Population Survey reveals that only half of America’s Jews are affiliated with any Jewish congregation. Ms. Seid tells us that “Because many Jewish parents had little Jewish education, have little to do with the organized Jewish community, and do little that is ritually Jewish in the home, they feel they cannot adequately educate their children themselves. In order to get some – any – Jewish education for their children, they allow their children to be taught things that they themselves do not believe.” (p.xi)
And: “Even among nominally religious Jews, those who belong to a temple or synagogue when their children are of Hebrew school age, many are secular in every way. They do not keep kosher, go to services, or even believe in a provident god. They also don’t speak Hebrew or Yiddish, seek out Jewish literature and music, or learn Jewish history. Their tie to Judaism is sometimes merely gastronomic. That is, they like lox and Chinese food.” (p.38)
And: “If you’ve found a home in religious Judaism, you are a minority in American Jewish life.” (p.29)
The peculiar dual identity of Judaism as both a religion and a nationality works to the disadvantage of Christians in the “December Dilemma” debate because it allows secular Jews who are, in truth, atheistic Jewish nationalists to masquerade as deeply committed religious Jews. There is a commonplace assumption among Christians that anyone with a Jewish surname who is “offended” by Christmas festivities is speaking as a religious Jew but, as we have seen, this is unlikely.
The sort of worldly suburban Jewish sophisticates who populate my hometown are more inclined to feel uncomfortable in the presence of any genuine expression of deep religious faith, including deep Jewish faith. What they really want is a hermetic suburban comfort zone where they can be temperamentally and socially “Jewish” without ever having to confront their deep-seated unease at having jettisoned the religious observances of their grandparents. They are “offended” by Christmas festivities because the glow of Christmas shines a light on the fact that they have no faith at all. And so, every December, some of them seek to gag the carolers.
The hecklers are quick to announce that they are defending the sensibilities of Muslims and Hindus and Buddhists as well, even though no Muslim or Hindu or Buddhist has ever made a peep of protest on their own behalf. They are emboldened by the good manners of the Christian community which preclude the sort of probing questions that would expose their vacuum chamber of faithlessness. It has been my personal observation that the most observant Jews are the most comfortable when living in a place that permits the most freedom of religious expression; other people’s religious sentiments are not challenging to these Jews because they dwell in a time-tested fortress of faith.
So the assault on the December holiday music program in my hometown is really being mounted by secular humanists who fancy themselves to be the last word in urbane sophistication. Some of these de facto atheists are using their Jewish surnames and their personal aura of “Jewish-ness” to camouflage their true social agenda. The deception begins to slip when these folks start talking about the urgent need to preserve the sanctity of “our secular schools,” the implication being that the public schools are wonderfully free, value-neutral places where children are safe from ideology. This was never true, not even for a minute!
As a matter of historical record, the modern secular-humanist movement began in the late Nineteenth Century when a former rabbi, Felix Adler, founded the American Ethical Union, which became the incubator of the atheistic secular humanist philosophy which teaches that Man is perfectible and the measure of all things. In 1929, a Unitarian preacher named Charles Potter founded the First Humanist Society of New York. The following year he authored Humanism: A New Religion in which he brazenly declared “Education is thus a most powerful ally of Humanism, and every American public school is a school of Humanism. What can the theistic Sunday-schools, meeting for an hour once a week, and teaching only a fraction of the children, do to stem the tide of a five-day program of humanistic teaching?”
This new godless religion was successfully promoted in the public schools by Horace Mann in the late Nineteenth Century. The year 1933 brought the Humanist Manifesto which was enthusiastically endorsed by educator John Dewey whose books were “must reading” in teacher training colleges. It was thus that humanism became the guiding philosophy and world view promoted in the government schools. The effect was nothing less than a cultural revolution as humanists sought to substitute their upstart philosophy for Christian values as the bedrock of American culture.
Because it did not resemble any traditional religion, humanism could be aggressively promoted behind a mask of neutrality; its endorsement did not appear to be an evasion of the Establishment Clause. Nonetheless, a series of judicial decisions have elevated secular humanism to the status of America’s most-favored faith, thereby making it America’s de facto established religion; this was slyly done without any unconstitutional congressional legislative effort. The Humanist Manifesto made so bold as to declare that the social agenda of humanism was to “elevate, transform, control, and direct all institutions and organizations by its own value system,” a value system shaped by a taste for materialism, rationalism and socialism.
Seen from this perspective, the secular humanists are not defending a true separation of church and state; they are the now-established favored faith defending its hard-won dominance of American classrooms. John Dewey himself declared secular humanism “our common faith.” Humanist Julian Huxley aptly called it “Religion without revelation.” The first Humanist Manifesto declared humanism to be “a new religion.” From the rhetoric of its own published manifestos it is crystal clear that the stated objective of the aggressive “new religion” of secular humanism is nothing less than the extirpation of every other faith. At their most doctrinaire, secular humanists are simply bigots masquerading as altruists; their commonly-held delusion that they themselves are not clinging to a faith makes them difficult to reason with. They have created a comfort zone for themselves and they have a deep emotional attachment to defending that comfort zone, which now includes America’s public schools.
Since the Second World War, the secular humanist social agenda has been supported by a mythology that humanists themselves created; they refer incessantly to a constitutional principle of church/state separation which, in fact, does not exist and has never existed. The First Amendment to the United States Constitution tersely prohibits one specific legislative body, Congress, from making any law that would favor any one sect to the disadvantage of all others. Congress is further admonished not to interfere with the free exercise of religious expression. That’s all! It was clearly the intention of the authors of our Constitution to create a society most favorable to religious expression, not to suppress it.
Elsewhere in the Constitution it says that any powers not reserved by the federal government can be exercised by the individual states, which meant that the states were free to favor one particular religion within their borders if they chose to do so, and several states did exactly that. Within a few decades of the ratification of the Constitution, however, all of the states with established religions had abandoned the business of favoring one religion above all others. They did this by legislative means, as people came to view this favoritism as un-American.
The clear black-letter law of the Constitution has left secularists scrambling to find some inkling of the founders’ “true intent”; some have claimed to find it after rummaging through Thomas Jefferson’s private papers. This is a pretty weak defense; Jefferson played no part in writing the Constitution. The historical truth is that all of the harsh language about the importance of erecting and jealously guarding a towering barrier between the people’s government and the people’s religious affairs sprang from the mouth of one man in 1947. It was then that a case landed before the Supreme Court that sought to clarify whether tax revenues that were given to public schools in New Jersey for purposes other than classroom education could also be used to assist children in parochial schools. It was also then that Justice Hugo Black did everything in his power to assure that he would be the author of the Supreme Court’s majority opinion. Hugo Black had been an enthusiastic member of the Ku Klux Klan during its most virulently anti-Catholic period in the 1920s. In 1947, he saw the New Jersey case as an opportunity to harm the Catholic Church. It was Justice Black, not Thomas Jefferson, who bequeathed the humanists all their jabber about high barriers and strict separation.
So now, in December of 2004, when I sit in the audience of my hometown’s Board of Education meeting, I hear atheist secularists, some of whom are pretending to be religious Jews, using the rhetoric which a Protestant former Klansman created for the purpose of harming Catholics, but using that rhetoric now to harm all people who don’t share the humanist faith. Welcome to my weird republic.
Enter the Lawyers
As the holiday-music controversy continued, the local newspaper became a forum for ever more emotional outpourings of ideology and childhood remembrance. Jewish resident Dinah PoKempner recalled her “painful childhood memories of trying to ‘hum’ over Christian lyrics in music class, embarrassed by the token – always awful – Hanukkah song…” She characterized the dismay of the local residents in response to the total crackdown on all religious music as “a well-orchestrated chorus of intolerance from the community.” She excoriated those outside the community who were alarmed by the anti-expression decree: “There’s no surprise when right-wing activists attack the South Orange/Maplewood Board of Education for daring to ‘censor’ Christmas music.” To Dinah PoKempner any criticism of the board’s decree is an “attack” and any expression of religious sentiment within the schools is “coercive and demeaning.” She offers us no list of Hanukkah musical masterpieces that might replace the awful token song from her “painful childhood memories.” She rips The Alliance Defense Fund, which is offering assistance to Maplewood traditionalists, for its “anti-gay, anti-abortion…agenda.” The gay social agenda is very big in Maplewood. (see Domestic Partnership in this series) Student groups and school wall art extol the virtues of the gay subculture; middle-aged gay males kiss one another good-bye at the Maplewood train station (“We’re here; we’re queer; get used to it!”), but keep your nasty Christmas carols out of the December music concert! Clearly, Ms. PoKempner’s Judaism has wandered from Torah teaching. Could she be a stealth secularist whose Jewish-ness is now mostly sentimental, a temperament rather than a coherent world view rooted in Jewish tradition?
Ms. PoKempner rails against those “right-wing religious activists” but, as Maplewood resident C.M. Townsend pointed out in a responding letter, “…Christmas carols…have been sung during the holiday season at Columbia High School since the school’s inception…this music has a long-established place in both our country and community.” Therefore, Mr. Townsend concludes, it is not the defenders of custom, but the radical upstarts who now want to banish expressions of religious sentiment from musical performances, who are the real “activists.”
He says of Ms. PoKempner:
“Her last argument about individuals in the minority being potentially offended by the singing of Christmas carols is certainly valid; however, if we take this position to its logical extreme, we would have to ban anything that makes any individual uncomfortable. If this paradigm of the minority veto becomes precedence, it would mean that any individual, as long as they represent the minority, could affect the standards and traditions of the community. Within the context of the public schools, all you would need is one disaffected student claiming offense in order to alter school policy. If Shakespeare offends a student, then you must remove him immediately. You would, in fact, institute a tyranny of one.”
Indeed, it would institutionalize the “heckler’s veto.” Barring all expressions of religious faith from the schools, while simultaneously flooding the classrooms with secular humanist values that are hostile to the traditions of the community is to declare war on the community. But Ms. PoKempner can’t hear Mr. Townsend, she’s too busy fretting that the schools aren’t “teaching tolerance” in a way that “dignifies atheists and others.” She declares her emotional bond with Joel Schwartzberg.
Maplewood resident Joel Schwartzberg poured out his heart in a letter to the News Record in which he excoriated the Thomas More Law Center, which had also offered assistance to Maplewood and South Orange traditionalists. It was an echo of a letter he had sent to the Thomas More Center in which he grandiosely presumed to speak for “a strong majority of us” in the town. He urged everyone who thinks just like Joel Schwartzberg to flood the Thomas More Law Center with angry letters and e-mails. According to Joel Schwartzberg: “Our communities of Maplewood and South Orange, New Jersey, each represent a rich range of opinions, religions and lifestyles, but a strong majority of us in both towns find your organization and your mission repugnant and contrary to this country’s moral foundation, as embodied by the U.S. Constitution.”
So, according to Joel, if the Thomas More Law Center helps Maplewood traditionalists restore their long-standing cherished tradition of a few Christmas carols in a school music concert, then they are doing something “repugnant to this country’s strong moral foundation as embodied in the U.S. Constitution.” Explain that to me, Joel. When the Constitution explicitly forbids the government from interfering with religious free expression, how is the singing of a few songs, for a few minutes once a year, a horrible violation of federal law?
Joel goes on: “We are communities dedicated to diversity, tolerance, peace, understanding, freedom and respect for human dignity.” Historical translation: The picturesque town of Maplewood was “discovered” and colonized by liberal, non-religious yuppies and house-shopping homosexuals who took the sleepy town by surprise, ensconced themselves in positions of influence, and then declared all of Maplewood to be their personal comfort zone. They wanted Maplewood’s wooded ambience and its proximity to New York City; they never gave a damn about the town’s traditional culture. In fact, they are hostile to that culture. The sudden influx of secular, totally urbanized newcomers, cash-heavy gays, money-grubbing transients and artsy New Age atheists quickly transformed my hometown into a real estate speculator’s hot market and deprived it of the homogeneity that makes a community a true community: a place with a shared culture. Maplewood is now a snake pit of prickly hypersensitive minorities steeped in the artful ways of aggressive identity-group politics. Diversity in my hometown means a diversity of politically-correct radical opinions. If you’re a traditional home-grown, small-town American person who just wants to hear the school brass band pump out a rendition of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas,” then you had better be prepared to be denounced as an enemy of minority sensitivities. Under this reign of nonsense, one citizen stood up and said, “Enough.”
Local Hero
Michael Stratechuk says he was watching “The O’Reilly Factor” on Fox News when he decided to sue the Maplewood/South Orange school district. O’Reilly was pounding the district’s decision to crush even instrumental versions of religious songs and any reference to religious symbols or holidays. Mr. Stratechuk, himself a college music teacher and the father of two sons in the district, says the news of what was happening moved him to contact the Thomas More Law Center, a public-interest law firm in Ann Arbor, Michigan that specializes in religious-rights cases. Mr. Stratechuk’s suit against the school district alleges that the board’s enforcement of its self-created policy is unconstitutional and that it serves no legitimate educational purpose: “Such a ban on religious music does not promote – indeed, it undermines – the provision of a comprehensive education program,” according to the complaint. And further, that “Defendants’ policy has the purpose and effect of conveying a message of disapproval of and hostility toward religion, including Christianity.” The named defendants are the board of education and Peter P. Horoschak.
Richard Thompson, the President and chief counsel at the Thomas More Law Center observed that “This is another example of the anti-Christmas, anti-religion policy infecting our public school system. The Constitution does not require our public schools to become religion-free zones. Forcing students to strip all religious content from music is like asking them to study art history while excluding paintings from the Renaissance because they contain religious subjects.”
Brian Burch, director of communications for the Thomas More Law Center, added, “You essentially have public-interest law firms, the [American Civil Liberties Union] on one side and us on the other. We are not advocates of theocracy or an alliance between church and state. We feel religion has played a key role in the history of this nation. Law should protect and promote religious activity, not stifle it. Religion is not the enemy. Singing a Christmas carol or listening to Christmas music does not establish a national religion.” As for Mr. Stratechuk, he says “It’s something I felt as a music teacher and an educator, and I am a Christian, and as a father of two children in the district: If not me, who?”
Mr. Stratechuk’s thanks from the community that prides itself on its “tolerance” and “diversity” has been a shower of abuse and recrimination by local leftists who have saddled Mr. Stratechuk with their ire at the Law Center’s positions on such unrelated issues as homosexual wedlock, which have nothing to do with Mr. Stratechuk’s lawsuit in defense of Maplewood’s musical traditions. It’s just the upstart leftists’ way of indulging their taste for snotty sniping while hiding from any honest debate of their true motivations for suppressing traditional expressions of the local culture. Bursting with conquistador-ist triumphalism, these lately-arrived colonists from liberal urban ghettos such as Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Greenwich Village and the Castro have declared traditional small-town American culture passé, totally last week. Mr. Stratechuk begs to differ. His complaint argues that the total quashing of religious music “deprives his minor children the right to receive information and ideas, an inherent corollary to their rights to freedom of speech and academic freedom.”
Furthermore, his suit holds that, “by targeting religious music for censorship and disfavored treatment, defendants’ policy conveys the impermissible, government-sponsored message of disapproval of and hostility toward religion, particularly Christianity. As a result, defendants’ policy sends a clear message to plaintiffs and others who are religious adherents and who believe in religion, that they are outsiders, not full members of the political/school community, and defendants’ policy sends an accompanying message that those students and parents who are not adherents to any religion and who believe in no religion were insiders, favored members of the political/school community,” which is a fair description of my town’s transformation at the hands of prideful left-wing NewAge newcomers.
True story: I recently attended a gathering in observance of the 100th anniversary of Saint George’s Church in Maplewood. For the last three decades St. George’s has been a hotbed of leftist innovation and activism. Present was a priest who had formerly served with distinction at St. George’s. I expressed to her my dismay that the local school board had banned the performance of any religiously-inspired music. Her response? (I am not making this up.): “Yes. Everyone’s been a little crazy since Bush got elected. I can’t believe people voted for that idiot.” When I pointed out that this local decree had been entirely the work of local liberals, she seemed perplexed. In her liberal universe everything is “Bush’s fault.” The president’s name is now one-syllable shorthand for “the political opposition”, for social conservatives in general. Even when the local liberals behave like jerks, it’s somehow always “Bush’s fault.”
Back in November the town was pretty much a border-to-border undulating wave of blue Kerry/Edwards lawn signs, some of them quite snotty (and ignorant). Sample sign: “Re-unelect Bush.” In October, the most memorable Halloween display was the big house on Prospect Street that featured a giant spider’s web made of clothesline that extended from the porch eaves out into the front lawn. Perched menacingly on the web was a humongous black spider, its body made of stuffed black plastic trash bags, its legs made of black plastic clothes-dryer exhaust hose. Its head was a rubber George Bush mask. Just the thing to frighten small children: the new liberal boogeyman, Dubbya.
A Sensible Voice
Just as my pessimism was getting the best of me, the News Record printed a letter from Maplewood resident Jay Eisenberg in which Mr. Eisenberg, using a sort of Socratic-rabbinic drumbeat interrogation, asks the Board of Education, “What were you thinking?”
Mr. Eisenberg asks, “Should the Board of Education defend this lawsuit, in whose behalf will they be acting? Well, for starters, they will be protecting their own vanity in defiance of public outrage and embarrassment over their misjudgment. And they will be acting in behalf of a few complainants whose sensibilities are apparently so fragile that they find it offensive – offensive! – that school children might perform a Christmas song in a holiday performance.
“Would they ban such canonical expressions of our civilization as Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus? Is it too much to suggest that they should put such minor grievances aside and just appreciate the efforts, talents and accomplishments of our kids?
“Instead of taking strength from the vast majority who do appreciate these performances, our board bends to the will of those who are all too vigilant in looking for opportunities to declare their victimization. As a consequence, our entire community has become victimized by the suppression of the very diversity we commonly celebrate.”
Mr. Eisenberg then reverts to an old Jewish theme: “When there are powerful reactionary forces that insist on bringing religious teaching into the science curriculum and mandated prayer into the classroom, our local school officials have played right into their hands by banning the most benign and joyful type of holiday expression.” The old Jewish theme is, “Why stir them up?” Over the ages the “them” has been the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Romans, the Cossacks, Spanish monarchs, and now… “the religious right.” Mr. Eisenberg thinks liberals should leave well enough alone; why provoke a unified opposition to liberalism? Perhaps lawyers frighten Mr. Eisenberg most of all.
He concludes: “With the myriad priorities confronting our schools, we now face a diversion of funds to retain lawyers in defense of a matter sprung upon our community without any public debate, let alone consensus. I call upon the board to leave this lawsuit unanswered: a civil nolo contendre. Let the plaintiff go before a judge, make his case and, in the absence of opposing argument, let the judge say, yes, there can be a balanced presentation of traditional songs in the holiday celebrations in our schools.
“And then we, the citizens of these two wonderful towns, can express ourselves in the next school board election by dispatching the incumbents running for re-election in the hope that those remaining will get their priorities straight and start dealing with matters of genuine urgency, namely, improving the quality of our children’s education.”
I couldn’t have said it better myself.
Happy New Year !
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Thomas Clough
Copyright 2005
January 20, 2005