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."
Viola players don’t sing.
But I imagine if I were to ask him, he’d say that words are meaningless unless you sing them in your heart.
How did this become news, anyway? This should be a private matter between the girl, the choir director, and the school.
As for what's Constitutional, "it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg..."
As it should be.
“We’re just so proud of our little vegetable.”
How do you worship a solstice? Wouldn't that be like worshipping lunar eclipses and meteor showers?
Well, at least you know where he is and can keep an eye on him.
Yes, it is.
Glad you're a magnificent hunk who's beauty and physic outshines all around you.
I don't know about my "physic," but my physique is magnificent. Thank you for noticing.
It's so sad we can't all be like you.
Yes, it is. But don't give up.
Buy a clue...
Satan doesn’t care one hoot who you worship as long as it isn’t Jesus.
Sorry.
anyone who does not worship God worships satan, whether they realize it or not. One either worships the triune God or not. All else is worship of satan. There is no gray area.
The others are not too bad, especially the Glenn Miller.
Okay, I won’t dwell on the fact that if the Keens were a Christian family and the daughter was refusing to sing Wiccan songs for school, the left-wing discussion sites would have a field day with that picture alone, even before they started tearing into the story proper. I won’t. Looking like that is punishment enough. I’ll just note the irony of going on at length about what fine open accepting people you and your fellow Wiccans are as you explain why your little princess is refusing to sing “Silent Night”.
Maybe we should bring back purity tests. See how well YOU do...
IMO, likening a 15 year old girl to "a bag of ***-holes" is more than just "edgy". I'm not a Christian but making an unnecessary and crude comment like that hardly seems Christ-like.
If she did read this thread and some of the insulting comments in it, do you think she would be more or less likely to embrace Christianity as a result? Do you think she would be encouraged to develop a live-and-let-live attitude, or to develop a siege mentality and view lawsuits and government regulation as a legitimate tool for protecting herself from the hostile majority surrounding her?
All that happened in this story is that a Wiccan girl decided not to sing Christmas songs. What dangerous precedent does that set?
The whole family is retarded, blind, and ugly?
Someone must have cast a spell on them.
http://www.redding.com/news/2009/dec/08/redding-womans-christmas-carol-initiative-picks/
Keeping freedom is what I want. Restoring what is lost is what we all need.
NOT flushing the rest of our freedoms down the drain should be our goal. This one girl not singing a couple of songs is freedom. The above article would put a government gun in her face to force her to. At “our sides” behest.
All too easy for do-gooders to be as nasty and wrong headed as the commies. Don’t lose sight of that very important fact.
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