Posted on 12/13/2009 7:30:38 AM PST by markomalley
Fifteen-year-old Katarina Keen won't sing along to "Silent Night" or "Listen to the Stars," two Christian songs planned for her choir's upcoming Christmas concert at Borger High School. But she will sing "Jingle Bells" and "A Carol in Winter."
Katarina and her family are Wiccan.
The Borger High choirs have given a concert every December, with traditional religious Christmas songs, but this is the first time in director Johnny Miller's 23-year career that any Borger student had issues with the religious themes in the music, he said.
A concert at 2:30 p.m. Sunday will feature a ninth- and 10th-grade choir and an 11th- and 12th-grade choir, with each ensemble singing five songs. The concert will take place in the Borger High auditorium.
"We're doing our best to accommodate everyone's wishes," Miller said. "It's just difficult, because it's a complete 180 of what I have always done."
Every year, in communities across the nation, Christmas activities in public schools spur conversations regarding religion in schools, said Charles Haynes, a First Amendment scholar who has spent 20 years helping communities find common ground.
"Many Americans understand that a lot is at stake on how we handle religion in public schools," said Haynes, senior scholar at the First Amendment Center in Washington, D.C.
Students began preparing in October for the concert in Borger, and Katarina said Miller had planned for the choir to sing Christian songs. She and her mother, Jean Keen, told Miller she couldn't sing those songs because she's Wiccan.
The Keens also have raised concerns this year about prayers in class and a prayer board posted in the choir room.
Miller said he gave students permission to lead prayers in class Mondays, at their request. The prayer board was a student-led activity, he said. Miller revamped the concert to include a wider variety of secular songs for the holiday season.
As a Wiccan family, the Keens worship Mother Earth.
"We don't believe in Satanism," Jean Keen said. "We worship trees, the solstices."
Wicca began in the early 19th century as a religion that emphasizes growth through harmony in diversity, knowledge, wisdom and exploration, according to a Web site for the Church and School of Wicca.
While their Christian peers in Borger celebrate Christmas, the Keens are preparing for one of eight Wiccan holidays, the Yule, in celebration of the winter solstice Dec. 21.
"It's not a very pushy religion," Katarina said. "It's really easy to worship. We accept everyone, and we don't diss anyone. We don't put any other religion down. We accept them while other people just judge them."
The music selected for the Borger choir concert is standard choral literature, even though some pieces are religious in content, said Miller, a member of the Texas Music Educators Association and the Texas Choral Directors Association. The choir has produced all-state singers, choral directors and garnered awards in concert performance and sight-reading from the University Interscholastic League.
"Choral music has its roots in the church. In order to teach it accurately, you have to teach it from whence it came," Miller said. "I teach the foundation or the building blocks so these students can go out with a well-rounded foundation in choral music."
Some school districts have staged concerts that mirror a church service, while others have excluded religious content entirely, Haynes said. Either scenario can result in conflict, the former creating a potential issue with the First Amendment and the latter producing a community backlash.
The better solution is to make a "good-faith attempt" to teach religious material in the context of discussing cultures and traditions, being careful not to promote a particular theology, Haynes said. Schools also should provide a reasonable, limited opt-out policy that is specific to certain songs or a lesson, he said.
"Sometimes being religious comes with a price, and it makes the student feel like an outsider," he said. "A school cannot avoid all of that. A family has to make a decision what kind of school environment they want. In a public school, (there are) certain things a child is exposed to."
Randall High School's choir concert Sunday will include "Of the Father's Love Begotten," "Jesu Bambino" and an arrangement of "Deck the Halls," director Marcus Bradford said. The choir will end, per tradition, with the "Hallelujah Chorus" from Handel's "Messiah."
"I try to vary styles of literature, sacred and secular literature," Bradford said. "We're not teaching a theology of anything. We're really teaching music history and culture."
In Borger, Katarina won't have to sing compositions that are counter to her faith, Superintendent Clifton Stephens said.
"We've bent over backwards to be cooperative with (the family)," Stephens said. "We've always taken time to listen to concerns they have."
For Katarina, though, the experience this year in choir isn't the fun class she had envisioned, where she would learn songs in a team environment.
"This is school and not church," she said. "I was the one kid that stood out."
Exactly how is her not participating in songs that run counter to her religion "telling us what to do?"
It seems that this is a news story because of what she and her family are NOT doing, which is trying to stop the Christmas Concert. In fact, it seems that she and her family are specifically NOT telling anyone what to do.
Mark
Do you not understand what setting a precedent in or outside of a court room means? Small steps brings the change wherever the small steps begin.... The time will come when a Wiccan will say their Constitutional Right is not to be stepped on and demand religious holidays to be removed and rename them to Winter Soltace or maybe Mother Earth Embracing Day (sarc). Who will win then? And please go do some research if you do not know this has been taking place in many areas of the USA for years.
Some people love to live in la la land.
MERRY CHRISTMAS!
That's harsh and not very Christian. Glad you're a magnificent hunk who's beauty and physic outshines all around you. It's so sad we can't all be like you.
So you'd agree with singing songs praising allah and muhammed if you, as a Christian were a member of a choir singing for muslims? Cool!
Mark
Exactly! We must move to complete separation of school and state.
Our Founding Fathers would be outraged and utterly appalled if they could see what compulsory government K-12 indoctrination is today. Yes, our Founding Fathers valued education. But...They would correctly point out that our nation's children are NOT being educated. Large, large proportions of them even read well. These children are being indoctrinated.
Compulsory government education was pushed by the progressive Utopians and fascist industrialists of the 19th century. It has **always** been a progressive program to turn Americans into compliant brain-dead workers for the state. It was perverted from its very first day!
Simply by attending children learn that it is OK for government to take money from their neighbor to pay for a service their parents want for free. Well?...If free schooling is right, then why aren't other things a right and free? Why not free food, clothing, housing, medicine, college, health care, babysitting, and a thousand other goods and services?
Within one to two generations of compulsory government education we had;
**IRS
**Federal Reserve
**Direct Election of Senators.
** FDR's New Deal
**Johnson's Great Society
** A thousand other paper cuts of socialism
** And now a Marxist Obama.
Yet....**FEW**FEW**FEW*** conservatives understand that it is impossible to reform government schools because from the very first day they opened in the mid 1800s that they were a daily object lesson in making children comfortable with taking their neighbor's money!
Marxism-fascist-socialism is our nations’ **MOST** serious thread, and schools have always been the Marxists’ **MOST** powerful weapon!
If we are ever going to win back this nation we MUST MUST MUST shut down government K-12 schooling and move to a system of private conservative K-12 schools.
I guess I didn't either... Please explain it to me, since I appear to be confused as well. I'm curious to know what you meant.
Post 42
Good heavens. As attractive as a bag full of a**holes, lousy eyesight, horrible sartorial choices, smug, and with an attitude to boot. The poster family for Wiccans.
Mark
Check this out:
The Alliance for the Separation of School and State:
http://www.schoolandstate.org/home.htm
Why not? I'm an atheist, but I had no problem singing song praising Christ when I was in a symphony choir.
“Witchcraft”
Want to watch a pagan or Wiccan’s head spin? Tell them that Marion Zimmer Bradley was a Christian. She authored many sci-fi and fantasy books (including The Mists of Avalon) that the pagans just swoon over but remind them she was a Christian and they absolutely can’t accept it. It’s make believe, people...just like the Wiccan religion.
Please check out the two comments I made to their blog this week:
http://educationconversation.wordpress.com/2009/12/08/thanks-but-no-thanks/
Thanks so much for sharing the link to your posts on the other website. I very much enjoyed reading them and Tammy’s posts as well.
Good, thought-provoking material. Thanks for sharing.
To imply is when the giver of information suggests indirectly; To infer is when the receiver of information makes a guess using specific evidence, the implication.
Apparently neither of you knew what I meant when I said, "And speaking of judgmental, you need to quit inferring things I didn’t imply, if you know what I mean." So I will spell it out for you. Those people are a particularly unattractive lot. I did not mention my religion, or cite my religion, or claim any religion whatsoever -- you both inferred it for your own reasons unrelated to me or my post. My religion did not enter into my statement; I made an aesthetic assessment rather than a religious one, although I can do without gratuitous advice to "talk things over" with my "preacher." If you disagree, and believe they are attractive, fine. Say so, and then defend your position without dragging what you suppose to be my religion into it. The picture of that family speaks for itself.
Wonder if she had any trouble with the Hanukkah songs.
“A family of trees wanted,
To be haunted.”
from “Kids” by MGMT
So if some schmuck wants to go out and worship a mailbox he is worshiping Satan?
The mailbox becomes Satan? Or was the mailbox already Satan?
I'm not buying it.
We'll have to agree to disagree.
I don’t know, guys. I got a chuckle out of it. Yes, the comment pushed the envelope, and wouldn’t have passed muster on a Religion thread, but this is News and some envelope-pushing is allowed. And often, as in the case of Cindy Sheehan, or Rosie O’Donnel, internal ugliness really shows through. Contrast with Jeanne Kirkpatrick or Margaret Thather, who are not covergirl models but whose respective inner beauty and grace shine through.
Respectfully, I think La Lydia’s comments were spot-on, if edgy. I don’t think Christians have to always bite their tongues.
We're a community orchestra... purely volunteer. But I agree, pros play what they need to play to get paid.
My mailbox is Satan. We have a tense relationship.
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