4:47am March 31, 2015

Secularizing religious music.

I have said before, I hated Girl Scouts but I generally loved the camps, whether they were day camps or sleep-away camps.  We lived so near so many beautiful places, that even though San Jose itself is known mostly for being urban, there are also suburban and rural parts of it.  (We lived in a fairly suburban part of it surrounded on all sides by another town.  So our mailing address was in one town, our actual city location was in another, voting in one, school in another, brothers went to two different high schools, etc.  This is to say, when I say I grew up in San Jose, I’m not just naming the nearest town that far-away people are likely to have heard of, I’m saying we actually lived in San Jose if you look on a street map.  I lived in another town like that later on, where your mailing address could go to either of the two towns and your mail would reach you.  And I was born in an unincorporated area with a mailing address in another town, larger, but still not big enough to be considered more than another unincorporated area.  Human-made geography is weird.)

Anyway, so one thing that happened at Girl Scout camp was we would sing various songs. Standard camp songs and otherwise.

As I got older, I looked them up, and found that the lyrics were not – at all – the same as the ones I’d learned.

The lyrics, in fact, referenced God, or “The Father”, or sometimes even Jesus.

Understand, as a kid, I considered myself an atheist or agnostic, depending on the definition of both.  I had no god in this fight.  (I’m sorry, but the pun was demanding to be uttered.)  I don’t feel now as if I was actually an atheist then, but it’s how I saw myself, and that matters.  (I wasn’t a Christian either.)

Anyway…

One example went like this:

Back of the bread is the flour
And back of the flour is the mill
And back of the mill is the wind and the rain
And the Father’s will.

But we sang it like this:

Back of the bread is the flour
And back of the flour is the mill
And back of the mill is the wind and the rain
And the people’s will.

And those are… not the same song, at all.  The first one is, as far as I know, a Christian way of singing Grace.  The second one is what happens when you remove God from the song to try to avoid offending anyone.

I actually find it offensive the way they handled this.  Yes, there were kids of all kinds of religions and lack thereof at the camp who would be very uncomfortable singing that song.

The solution seems obvious to me:  Don’t sing that song.

As in, don’t sing the original version, don’t sing the Bowdlerized version, find some other song to sing that doesn’t leave people out.  I saw myself as an atheist at the time, and I’d have been extremely uncomfortable forcing Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Pagan, etc. kids to sing atheist songs, if such songs existed.

It’s not that hard, is it?  FFS.

And I actually heard camp counselors arguing about whether this was even a good idea, so I can’t have been the only one uncomfortable.  And I was uncomfortable on behalf of a group of people (theists in general, Christians in particular) that I didn’t belong to, didn’t believe their beliefs, and would’ve been just as offended if we were singing their songs intact all the time as if they were the only religion(s) on the planet.

There was one song that really got to me this way, too.  I forget what it’s called, but I looked up some lyrics once and found out it was another Christian song with God taken out of it.  It would’ve made a really good song if I hadn’t known that, now it just makes me feel icky.

It should not be hard to find songs that include everyone and don’t require a religious belief and don’t require religious people to listen to their own songs being mangled every day.  It just shouldn’t be that hard.

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