Standing tall against zealotry

Centuries ago, many of the American colonists who helped shaped our nation arrived on our shores from a Europe where they had been forbidden to participate in the public life of their homelands because of their religious affiliations.

They fled to the new world because they envisioned a place where people would not be forced to go underground on account of their faith, a place where everyone would be welcome in the town square regardless of which church they attended, a place where freedom of religion would be celebrated to ensure that everyone is free to follow his or her conscience.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation, on the other hand, apparently envisions a world where people of faith are free to do anything they want in the public arena as long as it doesn’t bother atheists.

This group, along with the American Civil Liberties Union and their local allies in the Flathead Area Secular Humanist Association,  last week tried to intimidate the Kalispell and Whitefish school districts into pulling choirs from three local schools out of concerts that were planned at a local church to celebrate the Christmas season.

To their credit, both school districts — and in particular superintendents Kate Orozco of Whitefish and Darlene Schottle of Kalispell — firmly declined the requests to cancel the choirs’ participation. As one letter writer to the Inter Lake suggested, that sends a positive message to the community about standing up to bullies.

There are any number of reasons for local schools to participate in Christmas celebrations, but for choirs especially the justification is simple — much of the very best choir music in the world was written specifically for Christian celebrations as part of the Western world’s nearly two-millenia-long tradition of being predominantly Christian.

Complaints about the choir performances seemed to focus mostly on the deleterious effect on individual non-Christian students of being forced to participate, but this was always a charade. No one was forced to participate, and there is no difference between non-Christians singing Christmas carols in a choir than gay students singing love songs between a man and a woman. No one is expected to change their lifestyle, and certainly not their faith, based on what they sing in choir — and no one was forced to join in the performance anyway.

Is there a war on Christmas in America? Maybe not, but there is certainly a zealous strain of non-believers who are intent on imposing their vision of an America where religion has no role in the public square. And maybe that amounts to the same thing.

The bottom line is that the Constitution does not guarantee that people in government or students in schools will not share their personal faith experience with the rest of the world; it simply ensures that no one in government can force anyone else to attend a church or espouse a particular belief against their will. But the second part of that clause from the First Amendment is equally if not more important — the government shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion.

As long as Congress and our courts uphold that part of the Constitution, then America shall never have freedom FROM religion, and for that, we are grateful.