Amazing Grace

The VC and De Novo (among others) note this story about that Charlie Daniels classic, "The Devil Went Down to Georgia." Basically, the song was in a High School Band's marching arsenal until a certain Robert McLean complained about a presumed asymmetry. Mr. McLean claimed that if the song was about God (the specific example given was "Amazing Grace") the band director would be fired for breaching the Church/State wall. Chastised, the school pulled the piece.

Now, I consider myself a church/state fire-breather. I believe that both Lee v. Weisman and Santa Fe Ind. Sch. Dist. v. Doe were properly decided, believe that "under God" is unconstitutional in the pledge, and if I had my druthers we'd replace "In God We Trust" with our original motto, "E Pluribus Unum." When I was in 5th grade, a bunch of my friends and I expressed concern to our choir director that our winter performance was almost exclusively made up of Christmas songs (they added one Chanukah song for variety). So yeah, I take this stuff seriously.

I went to Walt Whitman High School, a very liberal school smack in the most liberal city (Bethesda) in a very liberal county (Montgomery County, Maryland). Support for the separation of Church and State is, I guarantee you, far, far higher than it is in Prince Williams County, Virginia.

My junior year, our band played what could only be described as a gorgeous rendition of "Amazing Grace" (Frank Tichelli, arr.). It was the warm-up piece for our competitions (HS band competitions feature one warm-up and two adjudicated pieces, plus one attempt at sight-reading). I had no protest whatsoever. In fact, I was thrilled to play such a wonderful song that just seemed to soar and fall with a rare intrinsic passion. That song was and remains one of my very favorites, and I still listen to it regularly on my iPod.

So basically, I think that Mr. McLean has a skewed perception of what us evil separationists actually advocate for. I have no quarrel with playing a song with religious roots, if it was chosen for its artistic merit (as this one clearly was), just as I had no problem studying the Bible as a piece of literature in my AP Literature class. I know of no person of any political persuasion who would argue differently. The moral of the story is that folks like McLean need to get their facts straight. They protest policies that nobody actually supports. If they could just look past the Pat Robertson style demonizations of the liberal atheists and secularists (or in my case, the Jews--we kind of get grouped in with secularists for the purposes of this debate) to what kind of educational policy we actually want, both sides might be able to find some common ground. I'm not saying there wouldn't be disagreements--there would be. But whether or not "Amazing Grace" should be performed would not be one of them.