For about a minute while reading this story I was on the side of the school. Less than a minute. Maybe thirty seconds. Twenty-eight. Long enough to think, The kid goes to a Fundamentalist Baptist School, what do he and his parents think Fundamentalist Baptists do besides try to beat all the joy out of life?
Background. Out in Ohio there's a school, Heritage Christian School, which forbids its students to listen to rock and roll, kiss or even hold hands in the hallways, and dance. As you would expect, a school this devoted to wringing the spirit and heart out of its pupils is not going to hold a prom.
But a student there, a senior named Tyler Frost, is dating a girl who attends the local public high school and she's invited him to her prom.
Tyler plans to go. If he does go, he's been told by the principal at his school he'll be suspended.
The teen, who is scheduled to receive his diploma May 24, would be suspended from classes and receive an "incomplete" on remaining assignments, England said. Frost also would not be permitted to attend graduation but would get a diploma once he completes final exams. If Frost is involved with alcohol or sex at the prom, he will be expelled, England said.
The principal believes he is just doing his duty. After all, he says, like all the other students at Heritage are required to do, Tyler signed a statement at the beginning of the year in which he promised he would abide by the school's rules.
At the prom, Tyler and his girlfriend might not kiss or hold hands, there's a slim possibility that they might avoid listening to rock and roll---the band or the DJ could be playing nothing but old pop standards and big band music---but there is probably no chance they won't dance, although at my senior ball my date and I shared a table with another couple who didn't dance a single dance together, but they hated each other and were fighting all night. Proms are dances and the principal is not crazy to think Tyler will bust a move or two, probably to the beat of some of the devil's own music, rock and gasp roll.
But who knows. Maybe Tyler and his date plan to do nothing all night but sit sipping ginger ales and quietly discussing their favorite passages in the Bible. Who's the principal to say they won't?
Tyler and his family are mad as heck. Tyler's stepfather has declared his intention to sue if the principal follows through and suspends Tyler.
Frost's stepfather Stephan Johnson said the school's rules should not apply outside the classroom.
"He deserves to wear that cap and gown," Johnson said.
It was while reading that bit that I went through my twenty-eight seconds on the school's side.
Twenty-four. It's more like twenty-four seconds. Like I said, long enough to think, What did you think you were signing up for when you sent your kid to Heritage? They're fundamentalists! This is not a religion known for its flexibility on matters of church teachings.
Catholic schools routinely admit non-Catholics. There's no expectation that those students will show up for mass on Sundays, oppose funding for stem-cell research, vote Republican, and work themselves up into fake outrage over the prospect of President Obama delivering the commencement address at Notre Dame. Heritage's website doesn't say that students enrolling there have to be Fundamentalists or even Baptists or that they are expected to convert. But it is pretty clear what you're letting your kids in for if you decide to send them there. Here's the Statement of Faith on its About Us page.
Heritage Christian School holds to the following statement of faith:
We believe that the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments, was given by inspiration of God, and is our only rule in matters of faith and practice.
We believe in creation, not evolution; that man was created by the direct act of God in the image of God.
We believe that Adam and Eve, in yielding to the temptation of Satan, became fallen creatures.
We believe that all men are born in sin.
We believe in the Incarnation, the Virgin Birth, and the Deity of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.
We believe in His vicarious and substitutional Atonement for the sins of mankind by the shedding of His blood on the cross.
We believe in the resurrection of His body from the tomb, His ascension to Heaven, and that He is now our advocate.
We believe that He is personally coming again.
We believe in His power to save men from sin.
We believe in the necessity of the New Birth, and that this New Birth is through the regeneration by the Holy Spirit.
We believe that salvation is by grace through faith in the atoning blood of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.
We believe in the eternal security of the believer.
We believe the gifts of tongues and healing were "sign gifts" until the time the Scriptures were completed and these gifts ceased at that time.
These people are serious about their old time religion. Tyler's stepfather might have thought that school officials weren't all that serious, but that means he doesn't understand one of the basic premises of most religions---church leaders always insist on the right to stick their noses into your private business. That's what attractive about them to many of the faithful. The church does their thinking for them. They like having their preachers boss them around because they either don't trust themselves to resist temptation or they don't trust their neighbors to and they're willing to give up their own freedom of thought and action if it means the sinners all around them will be kept in line.
Officials at Heritage aren't thrilled with the publicity Tyler's case has brought. But they have their defense in place. The first thing Heritage tells you about itself is this:
- Number of teen pregnancies - 0
- Number of alcohol related incidences - 0
- Number of illegal drug incidences - 0
- Number of tobacco incidences - 0
- Percentage of students transferring in from public schools who are happy to be in a wholesome environment - 100%
This is a school that is all about making sure teenagers don't act like teenagers. Tyler's family had to have known this and it struck me that they were doing what a great many proud Christians do, discovering that the rules don't actually apply to themselves whenever those rules become inconvenient.
Not that Christians are unique in practicing this kind of hypocrisy. The idea that "Whatever I appear to have thought about the subject before, because I am a good person in my own eyes I deserve whatever I want, the rules be damned" is a pretty common, and very human, mental gymnastic.
Tyler's stepfather and apparently Tyler himself seemed to me to think that because Tyler has been a good student and a good kid he ought to be declared exempt from the rules he'd been following dutifully up until the point where those rules actually got in his way. So tough cheese, Tyler.
But then I took in this.
The high school his girlfriend goes to requires that students from other schools get signed permission from their principals before they're allowed to attend the prom.
And Tyler did that!
"I expected a short lecture about making the right decisions and not doing something stupid," Frost said. "I thought I would get his signature and that would be the end."
The principal gave Tyler permission to go to the prom.
But then...
[Heritage Principal Tim] England acknowledged signing the form but warned Frost there would be consequences if he attended the dance. England then took the issue to a school committee made up of church members, who decided to threaten Frost with suspension.
What in the name of all that's holy is up with that?
England gives the kid permission to go then takes the matter to the committee? If he didn't have the authority, he should have referred the matter to the committee to begin with.
Why did he give Tyler the OK---an apparently grudging OK, but still an OK---if he was just going to pass the question along and let the committee decide?
Here's what I think happened.
England got scared.
Either he second-guessed himself afterwards or he started worrying that someone or someones---other students' parents, teachers, members of the committee, people who could make his life unpleasant---would start second-guessing on his behalf when they heard that Tyler Frost was going to a prom.
So he decided he'd better pass the buck.
Basically, if this is the case, the principal may be a good God-fearing Christian but he's also a coward.
Tyler Frost followed the rules, he and the principal agreed to a deal. My twenty-four seconds of sympathy for the school---Twenty-three. Twenty-two.---ended right there.
England comes to his own defense on the Heritage website, and he just makes himself look worse, because now the problem as he sees it isn't that Tyler might dance at the prom and listen to rock and roll. The problem is that the prom is a "lustful situation."
First, the article in the Courier is fairly accurate. What the article leaves out are the principles behind the rules. In the Old Testament, Joseph was in a place of temptation and he fled. Unlike this situation, he didn’t put himself in that place. Proverbs 4:23 says, “Keep your heart with all diligence for out of it are the issues of life.” II Timothy 2:22 says, “Flee also youthful lusts but follow after righteousness faith charity and peace with them that call on the Lord out of a pure heart.” When the school committee, many years before I became the principal, set up the policy regarding dancing, I am confident that they had the principle of fleeing lustful situations in mind. The question as I see it is, should a Christian place themselves at an event where young ladies will have low cut dresses and be dancing in them? Isn’t it contrary to the example of Joseph and the verses that I stated?
Oh no! Ladies in low cut dresses!
You know, these Bible-thumpers read their bibles awfully selectively. England apparently doesn't know the story of Susanna and the Elders. He's referring to the story of Joseph and Potiphar's wife in which the wife of Joseph's boss tries to seduce him and connecting her to teenage girls in pretty dresses. The girls are nothing but adulterous little seductresses and a good Christian boy wouldn't want to go anywhere near them. But only a dirty-minded old man would think of young women in prom dresses and let his imagination leap to the images of seduction and sex and blame the young women for it. In his mind he's spying on these girls in their baths and then accusing them of being the wanton ones.
Now it looks as though he gave Tyler permission and then after Tyler left his office he let his mind drift and scared himself by having dirty thoughts about what Tyler's girlfriend might be wearing to her prom.
Did I say twenty-two seconds? Might have been more like two.
There was a moment when I was half on the school's side, but that was while I was thinking what I usually think when I hear about schools like Heritage---why are there such places and who in their right mind would send their kids to them?
Which is dumb of me. There are such places because the world is a complicated, often chaotic, frequently terrifying place in which people are taught one lesson over over and over---We have about zip control over what happens to us---and this scares people out of their wits.
There are many examples throughout human history of people withdrawing into small communities of the supposedly like-minded who agree to give up their freedom of thought in exchange for a promise of a perfectly ordered and safe little world of their own. Not all of these communities have been authoritarian and sexless (or sex-phobic). Some of them have been quite democratic and enthusiastically sexually open and permissive. Many of them aren't even organized around any religious beliefs. But they have all been Puritanical in that they have been based on the idea that sin, wickedness, evil, and disorder are the work of the Other. Temptation always comes from the outside and as long as you agree to stay inside with the doors bolted, you will be safe.
Looked at from a certain point of view, there are public schools that, thanks to high property taxes and careful policing by neighborhood associations and vigilant parents keeping tabs on their children's friends, are secular and progressive Heritages, enforcing different sorts of rules but with a similar end, keeping their children safe from temptation, imposing upon them an adult-ideal of proper teenage behavior, making sure they grow up into versions of their parents. And one of the unspoken missions of our elite universities is to identify the undesirable element and exclude it, with the definition of undesirable being very broad and its opposite very narrow and neither definition is limited to questions of academic promise and achievement. There are the wrong kind of people and there are the right kind, our kind.
But these other would-be-mini-utopias are different from the ones like Heritage in that they don't set out to create order through the suppression of joy.
Christian is as Christian does, and most of what gets to call itself Christian in this country isn't very Christian in too many ways to get into here. But let's just take this. There is a whole strain of Christianity that thinks the purpose of life here on earth is to sit around doing not much of anything but wait gloomily for Christ to come back and put an end to the place and carry all of us who have been gloomy enough off to heaven where we will spend eternity giving thanks for being saved from the trouble of being alive. This religion of mopes is not Christian, if you believe what is one of the first commandments of the New Testament and think that our job here is to prepare the way of the Lord.
We're not warned to run away and hide from disorder. We're commanded to bring order about. And the reward for order is joy.
Of course I don't mean order as a synonym for control. I mean it as arrangement. We're here to set things right, to put what's broken back together, to restore the world, and the best way to do that is through art. What else is art if it is not arrangement? If it's not an ordering? This is why I think art can make us so happy. The saddest stories are still full of joy because they bring order, if only for a moment.
That's what I think has made this video so popular on the web. It's the definition of art in action. All at once, right before our eyes, where there was randomness sharing space with a vague effort at control, there's order, and it's heartbreakingly beautiful.
Of course you don't get that kind of order by squashing all the individuality and vital energies out of children.
But what do I know? I didn't get my religion out of a selectively read Bible. I got it from nuns who loved to dance. And from books like A River Runs Through It
Also I've never understood how supposed Biblical literalists could come up with a religion that forbids drinking and dancing. After all, what was Jesus' first miracle? He turned water into wine to keep a wedding party going.
At any rate, I hope Tyler and his girlfriend have a great tonight and I hope their prom looks and feels and is forever remembered by them as being like this:
Who'd have thunk it? "Footloose" was a documentary.
Posted by: Continuum | Saturday, May 09, 2009 at 05:29 PM
A human of my acquaintance, back in his school days, gave the "King David/leaping and dancing" speech, the one that Kevin Bacon gives to John Lithgow, to his fundamentalist parents, almost word for word. Quoted the bible verses and everything. They let him go to the prom. I guess he figured his parents would never see the movie.
Es la verdad.
Posted by: El Gato Negro! | Saturday, May 09, 2009 at 08:50 PM
I would say the school authorities are well within their rights, although of course they're being dicks. But what would you expect from fundamentalists? We can apply Menckens' definition of a Puritan to a fundamentalist just as well.
All in all, I'm not sorry this happened to the kid - maybe it will encourage him to take a closer look at religion, and hopefully, outgrow it. And maybe his parents will know better than to put their trust in fundamentalist institutions from now on. One can hope.
Posted by: Apostate | Saturday, May 09, 2009 at 09:38 PM
And anything that gives us the phrase "fleeing lustful situations" can't be all bad. That made me giggle like crazy.
Posted by: Apostate | Saturday, May 09, 2009 at 09:40 PM
The school may have no pregnancies, but they don't know the difference between incidence and incidents. He'd be better off expelled.
ice
Posted by: ice9 | Monday, May 11, 2009 at 07:08 PM
Teen for God
Posted by: Ken Muldrew | Wednesday, May 13, 2009 at 12:02 PM