Night of caroling won’t be silenced

A Republican in the blue state of New Jersey is bucking what some decry as a national trend to eradicate all traces of religion in public places.

Steve Lonegan, who is running for the Republican nomination for New Jersey governor, is defying a school-district edict that bans religious music from holiday-season celebrations this year.

Mr. Lonegan has asked local residents of all religions to join him at 5 p.m. tomorrow “to sing and listen to” songs such as George Frederick Handel’s “Messiah” and “Silent Night,” which have been banned from schools, even in instrumental form, by the South Orange/Maplewood School District.

Residents will sing and hear Christmas, Hanukkah and other music outside Columbia High School, where students and parents will assemble later that night for the school’s official holiday concert.

“The school district’s decision to prohibit even instrumental versions of classic Christmas tunes shows that those who claim to speak for tolerance are, in fact, the most intolerant,” Mr. Lonegan said.

“It’s time people lighten up and enjoy the Christmas and Hanukkah season, instead of denying the religious foundation of our nation and the holiday season,” said Mr. Lonegan, who is mayor of Bogota, a small town across the Hudson River from New York.

In a Dec. 6 statement, school board President Brian O’Leary said the ban is intended “to balance the important roles that religion and music can and do play in our curriculum with a desire to avoid celebrating or appearing to celebrate a religious holiday.”

He added that “religious music, like any other music, can only be used if it achieves specific goals of the music curriculum.”

Mr. Lonegan said his purpose in organizing the sing-along is “to send the South Orange/Maplewood Board of Education and others who will deny our religious heritage a message that we’re not going to let them take God out of our public life.”

Tom Wilson, the New Jersey Republican Party chairman, seconds that notion, saying that “some of the greatest works of art were commissioned by religious institutions and leaders, including much of the music we come to associate with a traditional time of year.”

The planned demonstration comes at a time when the annual battles over Nativity scenes and other Christmas-season displays are including counterattacks from a religiously motivated public against those who seek to cleanse the public sphere of religious symbols.

• Voters in Mustang, Okla., incensed over a superintendent’s decision to remove a Nativity scene from an elementary-school Christmas program took out their anger at the ballot box. A bond measure worth nearly $11 million failed, getting 55 percent of the vote on Dec. 14, short of the 60 percent needed.

• A privately funded Nativity scene in a public park in Milford, Conn., was the target of a demonstration yesterday by the group American Atheists. However, only four members of the group showed up, Fox News reported yesterday, while about 100 people carried signs and demonstrated in favor of the creche. Milford resident Robert Jones lamented to Fox News that “we can’t say Christ in public; we can’t say Christmas in public; we can’t say God in public.”

Mr. Wilson sees what he considers an absurd disconnect between the New Jersey school board’s actions and American cultural practice, affirmed by the same Fox poll that said 96 percent of Americans say they celebrate Christmas, a larger number than those who profess to be Christians.

“Just because a song refers to a religious figure doesn’t make it a religious song,” says Mr. Wilson. “Nor does some 10-year-old blowing it on a flute make it a religious statement.”

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