Colorado high school student quits choir over Islamic worship song

By David McElroy · February 17, 2012

What would happen if a government-run high school put on a program featuring a song with the words, “There is no other truth except Jesus Christ”?

I’m betting that half a dozen civil liberties groups such as the ACLU would be threatening to file lawsuits to protect against this “establishment of religion” in schools. Why does it never seem to happen when it’s not a Christian message being presented?

In Grand Junction, Colo., a high school choir is preparing for a program that will include an Islamic worship song called “Zikr.” I hope you’ll listen to it. I like the music and think it would probably be beautiful as a live performance when sung properly by a choral group. It has value as a way to learn another culture.

But the song contains lines — in the Urdu language — that say “There is no truth except Allah” and “Allah is the only eternal and immortal.” When the choir teacher gave the students the translation of what they were to sing, one senior boy said he couldn’t sing those words. When the school refused to remove the song from the program, he quit the choir.

“In the Bible, [it says] that you don’t worship any other god — and this is worshipping another god and even another prophet,” said James Harper, who’s a Christian and is active in his church. “I think there would be a lot of outrage if we made a Muslim choir say ‘Jesus Christ is the only truth.'”

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is supposed to guarantee people freedom of religion, but Supreme Court decisions over the years have made it much more complicated than that. You can make a good case for allowing schools more leeway in determining what religious expression is appropriate in schools, and you can also make an argument for allowing no religious expression of any kind.

The problem is that courts have tried to establish a nebulous boundary between the two, splitting hairs to allow some narrow things, but not allowing other things that seem very similar to those who don’t follow the legal arguments.

If I were a high school student, I wouldn’t be willing to sing, “There is no truth except Allah.” I would quit the choir, too, if forced to make a choice. The question is why we force people to make such choices.

Why do we need a system of government-run schools? Unless the purpose is to make sure that the state controls what people believe, there is no rational purpose for having the system run in such a centralized and monopolistic way.

Why not let parents buy education services for their kids just as they buy food and clothes and medical services for their children already? Even if you believe in the morality of the coercive state, why not simply tell parents they’re responsible for educating their children — in the same way they’re required to feed and clothe them — and then let the parents decide how to do that? Even if you insist that some parents couldn’t afford to send their children to schools, you could set up a need-based credit system that works similar to food stamps.

Then let a thousand schools bloom. Some would work better than others and would attract more students. Some would cater to certain specialized desires. Some would be Christian. Some would be Jewish. Some would be Islamic. Some would be so secular that religion would never even come up. Some might be hyper-strict and structured. Others might be laid-back and unstructured. There are many different ideas about how to run schools. Why not let people pursue the ideas they want to pursue — and then let parents decide which models to choose?

As long as we try to have the government-run “one size fits all” school system, we’re not going to quit having these battles over what’s allowed and what’s not. Even worse, we’re never going to know just how good education could be if government would get out of the way and let the market do its job.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

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The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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