Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, April 8, 1993 TAG: 9304080084
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CODY LOWE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Medium
MONTGOMERY'S OTHER COALITION WOULD PROTECT RELIGIOUS DIVERSITY
Nancy Alexander said she started to worry after the Montgomery County Board of Supervisors was "mobbed" at a meeting in December.What the crowd wanted was support for the request that the School Board rename school vacations "Christmas break" and "Easter break."
They got it. The supervisors voted unanimously to tell the School Board they thought the religious designations should be used on the school calendar, rather than "winter" and "spring."
Alexander concluded that the 300 people at the meeting had created an atmosphere of "fear and pressure" to coerce a vote that constituted a threat to freedom she couldn't ignore.
"If we had not stood up to defend" the School Board, Alexander said, "we would be in deep trouble."
It was a sentiment shared by many others in the county.
Soon, Alexander was involved in a new group called Coalition for Community, created specifically to counter what it considered the undue influence of the Christian Coalition.
The Coalition for Community gathered 400 signatures for a petition/newspaper ad published in mid-February supporting the use of nonreligious names for school vacations. More than 500 names were added for another ad that ran Sunday in this newspaper's New River Current.
The number signing the petition far outnumber the 60 or so who may show up for a coalition meeting, Alexander acknowledged. Yet the group's position, like that of the Christian Coalition, obviously has wide support in the community, she said.
And the issue is "deeper than the naming" of the breaks.
In a recent interview, several members of the coalition stressed the need for the protection of religious and ethnic diversity in Montgomery County.
"Inclusion is the name of the game," said Marian Sanzenbach. "The whole county needs unification."
"We support a curriculum that fosters tolerance and respect for our differences," said Ann Hess, a coalition member and former Montgomery County supervisor. "The Christian Coalition is accenting polarization rather than bridging differences."
She also worried that many of those who showed up at the supervisors' meeting and a later School Board meeting were there not because they had studied and understood the issues, but because a minister had told them to go. "It's not that they became informed, but they became organized."
The Coalition for Community wants to seek out areas of common ground with the Christian Coalition and participates in a "dialogue committee" with them, she said.
The two groups "will find that we agree on more things than we disagree on, if we can get the rhetoric down," Hess said.
For instance, the Coalition for Community agreed with the proposal to include all religious holidays on the school calendar.
Further, she and many others agree that relevant religious references have been expunged unnecessarily from some textbooks.
Many texts have been "so watered down by political pressure" that religious factors are all but ignored, Julia Smith said. That includes not only Christianity, but Native American spirituality and the religious influence of recent immigrants.
Alexander said the Coalition for Community supports better training for public-school administrators and teachers about what religious expression is allowed.
School personnel sometimes go too far because of "a lack of understanding" of the legal issues involved, Smith said; she knew, for instance, of a child who was told she must refer to her "Christmas tree" as a "winter tree."
Still, differences of opinion remain between the two coalitions.
"I think the Christian Coalition neglects to see constitutional rights" as protecting everyone, Smith said, including its own members from the imposition of someone else's religion.
"The state must not condone a particular religious view," Alexander said. "People who want religious doctrine taught in school should send their children to a private school."
Alexander, a Presbyterian, also resented the phone calls questioning her Christian commitment or "telling me that I'm going to hell."
But an incident at the School Board meeting on the holiday names gave her pause.
A minister in favor of the religious designations "called on all who were Christians to stand for prayer."
"I didn't like" the implication that opponents of the religious names might not be good Christians, Alexander said. "But, by durn, he was not going to make me sit in my chair."
And, she said, "It turned out that it was a good prayer" that encouraged tolerance.
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