The group you want to contact is the FFRF, not the ACLU. You can check the FFRF website to see if this is the type of thing they’d address. I bet it isn’t.
Christmas is a Christian holiday, and they call it a holiday concert because hanukkah, a relatively minor Jewish holiday, is around the same time. School aren’t required to have a completely balanced program, the requirement is that religious music doesn’t dominate. You might have a weak case if the 75% of the songs were religious, but not two out of eight songs, especially since one is Amazing Grace, which many of us don’t even think of as particularly religious.
You are more than welcome to post here what I PM’ed you and cc’ed to the moderator account.
You can’t suddenly decide to start playing the victim after the way you conduct yourself in this and other disagreements. Furthermore, calling your child fat, dumb, or a Republican would be insulting your child. Facetiously accusing you of questionable judgement as a parent is just insulting to you.
-Tom
I understand Granath’s position and empathize with him. Public schools should not in any way promote a particular religion, and if there is such an appearance, then it’s worth pursuing and I applaud Granath in doing so. There’s grey in this one, not as sparkly white as the loudly shouting crowds seem to be indicating. Perhaps Amazing Grace being played on a recorder isn’t the hill to die on, but it is an understandable position given that public schools cannot include religious favoritism/promotion.
Education about religions? Sure. Promotion or favoritism? Illegal and un-american.
Now, is playing Amazing Grace on a recorder promoting or favoring one religion over another? People’s opinions can vary here without it getting to the point of calling them out as idiots or bad parents, either way. Decorum and empathy don’t have to be forgotten, even given the current state of politics in America, and especially among peers here at Qt3.
The problem I’m having is the Amazing Grace is tied up in a lot of historical American traditions, mostly religious, but that have impacted so many secular issues, that it’s sometimes tough to realize that it is has strong religious ties.
As someone earlier mentioned, it was linked to the civil rights movement and black churchs. It’s tied to settlers and the great depression. There is hardly a rough time in US history that doesn’t have someone singing Amazing Grace.
Further more, it’s a beautiful song, much like the Sistine Chapel is beautiful art, or The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is classic book. You can’t run away from the religious aspect, but throwing it out seems like a waste especially if you don’t sing the words or emphasize the connection to Christianity.
Finally, there are more secular version of the lyrics abound, if you look for them.
As for other songs, thanks to Disney, Copy Right is a headache, and a lot of children songs suck balls!
As for suggestions - Caledonia? It’s pretty simple. Suggest that.
Dulaman!
If you want to introduce some other religion into the environment, so be it. A refusal for the school to accommodate your religion, while accommodating Christians, would be a problem.
But demanding that they just automatically include ALL religions, in every event? That’s not reasonable. And really, it’s been decided as such in the courts.
For the same reason that I am saying not to worry about something as inoccuous as playing Amazing Grace on a recorder, I’d argue in favor of someone of some other religion who wanted to express themselves in that space. Because it’ll benefit other kids to be exposed to it, and will help build communal understanding.
Although, it’s also worth noting, that it may be the case that for a holiday concert, you’d be primarily focused on Christian and Jewish stuff, and perhaps Mawlid from Islam occurring at the end of November.
To me, every event wouldn’t have to have every religion. You might have some other event at a different time which allowed some other group to express themselves.
The fight should be to allow people to express themselves freely, not to suppress anyone.
All very reasonable in the discussion of whether it is appropriate or not to use in a public school, and done respectfully. Thanks legowarrior!
Still, it is originally a spiritual, with all that that also brings to the discussion. ‘Grace’ is in the title after all.
Hard to say it’s not a religious song, even when it has expanded far beyong just being a religious song.
This is part of the discussion which I think I take issue with.
The fact that something had a religious origin doesn’t seem, to me, mean that exposure to that thing constitutes religious indoctrination.
For instance, take the Sistine Chapel. It’s a church. The images there depict religious images. It was funded by the pope.
But it’s more than that. It’s an amazing human accomplishment.
Observing it does not make you Christian. Everyone should be exposed to it, not because the mythology it depicts is “truth”, but because its an awe inspiring artistic achievement.
Amazing Grace, while perhaps not on the same order of magnitude when it comes to artistic achievement, can be appreciated beyond its origin as a religious song. It’s more than that.
I’m not Christian, but that song can still move me. Just like a man singing the call to prayer from the top of a mosque can. It’s not indoctrination. It doesn’t make me into a member of that religion. It doesn’t make me feel bad to hear it. It makes me feel good to hear those things, because those people are humans expressing themselves in beautiful ways.
And I don’t disagree with you. But it is a spiritual and we do require separation of church and state. And that does cause a potential conflict. Deciding whether it is a conflict that is important enough to make an issue of is a personal decision. You feel that the overall context and beauty of the song is more important than the fact that it is a spiritual. That’s valid. Granath feels that the fact that it is a christian song in a public school is a problem. That’s also valid.
You can disagree and still have a reasonable discussion. You might not be able to convince the other person that they are wrong, and that’s ok too :)
That is reasonable. What it comes down to at that point is the establishment of actual harm being done, and I don’t think anyone could make a strong legal case that playing Amazing Grace on a recorder would harm you. The argument given was literally a slippery slope argument, which isn’t valid.
Based on his own personal experiences with exactly this type of situation. Where the harm is trivial at every step, but cumulative in effect.
I don’t think @Granath was making a slippery slope argument, but rather one borne out of real experiences. Where any individual incident is so trivial as to be insignificant, but the net effect over time adds up to something more. We, being in this case the broadly Eurocentric Christian heritage individuals, don’t feel and see this, as it reflects our own heritage. Granath, being a person from a different cultural religious background, will experience those things differently than us.
As the wise Gurney Hallak said, it is the slow blade that pierced the shield.
But Christianity is included in every event, all over the place, and he’s asking for it not to be in this one and getting shouted down because it’s apparently completely unreasonable to find another song to play. Why can’t we demand that they include no religions in anything except appropriate coursework like history or comparative religion classes? No one is saying you have to ban the playing of Amazing Grace in all venues, just maybe don’t make it a kid’s homework assignment? You would think that he was arguing that we should demolish all Christian art and never play a Christian song on the radio or TV or in a movie. He was not at all arguing that. There is literally no danger of his kid being unable to experience the moving joy of listening to that song. It will be around, all over the damn place, regardless. But constantly including Christian works in every lesson, every assignment, every set of examples, is far too common.
No one said that they couldn’t include other songs. Folks asked what songs they should be, and no answer was given. Hell, we wanted to know what songs were actually on the list besides the two being complained about.
The problem is saying that some public school music teacher is orchestrating some kind of religious indoctrination plan because she had kids play amazing grace, which again, is fairly standard fare for a recorder song at that point.
Why should we? What benefit would that serve?
The answer to being afraid of excluding other religions, isn’t to just exclude everyone.
That approach is harmful to society. It will do nothing to foster cohesion, and will only breed resentment. It creates the impression that you are rejecting those people, and their religion. It creates the same feeling in them, that you would be creating if you refused to allow other religions to express themselves in that space.
The answer is to allow everyone to express themselves, not to try and scour the environment of all traces of what makes us different.
On some level, you can think about it as a software feature. When you give users a new feature, you need to really consider what you’re doing, because while users might not care about that feature prior to having it, if you give them something and then take it away, it can result in significant customer dissatisfaction.
Religion has always had a place in the public space in America. Trying to remove it is guaranteed to create resentment, and it will serve no purpose. It will not benefit anyone.
There are limits to this presence, of course. No religion should be taught as objective truth. But the mere exposure to any given religion, and their songs, and their art… that is not harmful. It is not indoctrination.
Seriously, no one is converted to Christianity in a public school. That’s absurd. If you aren’t Christian, you aren’t going become one by singing Amazing Grace, or really by doing anything you could possibly encounter in any American public school. Hell, I’d suspect that you wouldn’t even be converted by going to a Catholic school. Because your parents are going to have infinitely more influence on that aspect of your life than school.
Again, I can appreciate not wanting to make others feel excluded. I fully support the equal access to all religions. But as a non christian myself, I was in no way harmed by, for instance, singing vaguely religious songs in Chorus. I didn’t feel like an outcast simply because I didn’t believe in the God in a song. Because it was just a song. Maybe to a christian it would have had some deeper meaning, but if you aren’t a Christian, then it’s just a song. If all religious art and mythology was removed from my education, my education would have been worse.
“Shouted down” is not a particularly fair assessment of the conversation… he was doing half of the “shouting”. It’s possible to have a reasonable position but to act unreasonably about it. Most of us were trying to find that line. We all bring our personal experience to the conversation… like I said, I was thinking about it from the music teacher’s perspective.
Why is this relevant to his complaint? I don’t understand why the response here has been, “Well, there really only are 6 secular songs that could possibly be played on recorder, so we have to include 2 Christian ones.” That position is just wild.
This is not at all what I took away from his argument, so I have no idea where you’re getting it.
Because it’s school, you are forced to be there, so we have to guarantee balance between different faiths. Can’t do that if you have to include something from every faith each time, so it’s a lot easier to exclude all. Again, from situations where you aren’t specifically studying history or sociology or religion or w/e. The casual inclusion of art from the dominant religion is a problem, because it creates a strong imbalance in the representation. It is not balanced by also celebrating Hannukah.
This will always have the effect of creating a strong imbalance towards the majority religion. It’s akin to asking black people to solve racism, by asking the minority religions to just be louder so they get equal representation.
Slavery and racial discrimination had also always had a place. It will benefit everyone who isn’t part of the majority religion.
No one is arguing that this is the problem. The problem is the alienation of other beliefs. Treating Christian works and beliefs as normal, everyday things, and treating other works and beliefs as religious oddities of foreign cultures.
Yes, some of his comments were overly-charged attacks on the intelligence of anyone who might disagree with him. But he was also having his position dismissed as completely unreasonable by a number of people.
You are not being helpful by saying that he needs to find other songs to have his complaint heard. That might be a reasonable response if was asking for better songs or some similar issue of taste, but he is simply asking not have religion be a part of his kid’s homework in a situation where it’s completely gratuitous. There are many songs, the burden is not on him to provide songs. I mean, seriously, if there are only 6 non-religious songs they could even just assign only 6 damn songs. This is just not a reasonable issue about his complaint.
Well, if I had said he “needs” to do that, you’d be right. But I didn’t say that. I was suggesting (not insisting) that he could offer alternative ideas. He said he doesn’t have the expertise, to which I said, okay, maybe ask the teacher if they had suggestions. Granath agreed that might have been a good approach. (Not too late, G!) Heck, he could share some of the ideas people offered in here.
If I were that teacher, I would appreciate the person who came to me with a concern trying to work with me to find a solution. Teachers (arguably) get paid enough for the (hopefully) passionate sharing of knowledge with children which can be rewarding in and of itself. But they do not get paid enough to deal with parents causing problems. And Fox News doesn’t need more material to use against us.
I just think conflict avoidance is really valuable. Is the goal to remove and/or replace Amazing Grace, to balance out Amazing Grace, or to raise a stink? Two out of three of those seem fine to me but the third is worth avoiding. If you approach stuff like this with arms crossed, a confrontational tone (no matter how inadvertent), and a sizable chip on your shoulder, as I think he did in here, then all you’ve accomplished is stink and you won’t get what you want.
I’d also think that once the song list has gone out to the parents, that ship has sailed and the song list is set for the concert. Granath’s email would be valuable for the music teacher to consider removing or replacing it in future concerts. But doing so now would most likely cause a big stir. I suppose a song could still be added for balance without controversy.
Like I said earlier, I have personal experience with this kind of criticism of the films I screen in my classroom. I initially bristle about it and feel defensive but, over time, the message sinks in and I make adjustments going forward.
Part of this is that, no, of course you can play an infinite number of songs on a recorder…
But a third grader? There are only so many that have simple enough fingering for that level of player. Like I said, if you google beginner recorder songs, Amazing Grace and the Saints always comes up. And they are good for a concert, because the simplest parts of them are also the most recognizable.
Knowing what the other ones were was mainly just a curiosity thing… There are other standards that you use, but maybe for even younger kids,like in kindergarten. For instance, hot cross buns is pretty much always the first song, as it only uses the top 3 holes, so you don’t really need to move your hands at all.
However, in terms of knowing what other songs can be played, that’s a legitimate question. If you had some other song , and suggested that, then that’s cool. If it’s something you want, then you can go to the trouble of finding it.
No man, you just need to not exclude people. Every event does not have to have elements from every religion. That’s not a thing.
But they are the majority. As long as they aren’t oppressing other religions, I don’t see the problem.
Again, the answer to oppression isn’t more oppression. Saying that because you are afraid that one group might express themselves more than another, so no one gets to express themselves at all, makes no sense to me. Because it ends up being worse for everyone, except perhaps the atheist whose belief structure excludes all of it.
No, this is wrong for two reasons:
- Being exposed to another religion is not akin to slavery.
- Removing all expression of religion does not benefit you, because it doesn’t actually increase your expression. It limits it. It may limit other people more, but the idea that something that hurts you is good for you as long as it hurts someone else more is a warped, spiteful position.
Again, while I am not a Christian, I am in not way harmed by the peaceful expression of their religion. Certainly if they expressed aspects like homophobia, or attacks on other religions, then THAT would be a problem. But merely their expression of their faith, such as singing about Grace? That does not harm me in even the tiniest way.
Expression of Christian beliefs in this manner doesn’t need to result in the alienation of anyone.
And, to be clear, your casting of all religion out of the public eye alienates all of those religions just as much. You aren’t normalizing them, because they too are being ostracized from the public world. You’re just ostracizing christians too. You’re saying that NO religion is normal and acceptable.
Constantly treating one religion’s expressions as normal while all others are treated as foreign things results in the alienation of those other religions. That’s just how it works. You can’t have a massive bias towards works one faith without equating that faith as normal and everything else as not normal.
I’m glad that you personally weren’t scarred by exposure to things you didn’t believe in. The people who hate Jews clearly were scarred by the alienation of that religion, though, so forgive me if I remain concerned.
I’m just talking about the public sector not the public sphere, please stop conflating the two. I am not advocating that Christian expression be banned from media, I’m saying that it shouldn’t be considered normal to toss it in to random school assignments.
As for the rest of your argument, we’ve seen again and again how affinity affects decisions and popularity, which means we can’t just choose a random sampling of “good” or critically acclaimed or popular stuff, because those things will be skewed towards the majority and will reinforce marginalization of certain beliefs. We also can’t just present all beliefs equally and on the same footing because there are so many it would be difficult to even keep up with them let alone keep them in balance. You’d be spending huge resources digging up works from obscure sects and almost never have space for non-religious works. So keeping all religion out is really the only option. Again, for the public sector, not the public generally.
Really dude? You think that Nazis are the result of… What? Singing Christmas songs in school? Pretty sure that ain’t how it works.
But even if you think that anti semitism is caused by a lack of exposure to Judaism, that just furthers Soopers my position, and erodes your own. Removing religion from the public eye won’t improve anyone’s view of Jews if they are anti-Semitic. It’s just going to reduce any exposure to their beliefs, since i doubt they are going to be frequenting any synagogues.
If you want to help reduce bigotry, the answer isn’t for everyone to compartmentalize off all of their differences and only express them in separate enclaves. The answer is for us to express our differences with each other, do that we can better understand each other as people.
But you are conflating something like singing a song with prosthelytizing.
I mean, we can agree that schools should not teach that a particular religion is correct. But to me, it’s totally fine for people to express that they, personally, believe their religion to be correct, as long as they don’t infringe upon others’ ability to do the same.
Again, things like singing a song aren’t legitimately harmful to anyone. I simply do not accept the suggestion that they do.
And u guess that’s what it comes down to, and there’s not really any middle ground. I would think that the middle ground would be that things like an innocuous expression of faith in the form of a popular song is ok.
But if you want to call all religion or if the public sector… I’m pretty sure you are just gonna lose that fight. Because even members of minority religions aren’t going to be on your side. The only folks on that side are atheist zealots.