With Friends Like These

by Gene Shelburne

Sometimes we Christians are our own worst enemy.

During the 1997 Christmas season, for example, Frank Rotolo got in trouble for a choir concert at Albuquerque’s Highland High School. School administrators said it contained too many Christian references.

Following his controversial concert, the 49-year-old Christian choir director was suspended from his job. Several weeks later, according to local sources, his employment with Albuquerque Public Schools ended.

“Not again!” I exploded when I read the initial Associated Press report of Rotolo’s suspension. I was indignant. Outraged. At the fact that more than 90 percent of all Americans are being told that public expression of their faith is illegal. The unfairness of this still chaps me.

I filed the Rotolo story, thinking it might be something to explore in a later column. As the months passed, however, my righteous wrath cooled and alternate views of Rotolo’s feud with his school system emerged.

The fact that nobody rose to the man’s defense—not the teachers’ union, or local church leaders, or even the ACLU—seemed pregnant within itself.

I began looking for Frank Rotolo, wanting to hear his side of the story. By e-mail search, through later news reports, on Albuquerque web sites, I hunted the former choir director. When I finally turned up his phone number, he did not return my call.

When I asked several Albuquerque friends what they remembered about the Rotolo ruckus, they confirmed my guess that the choir director’s confrontational spirit may have had more to do with his fate than did his faith.

School officials declined to comment on personnel decisions, but close sources said Rotolo allegedly had been reprimanded several times for “inappropriate expressions of his faith,” but kept pushing the envelope, almost daring Highland’s principal, Eartha Lynn, to take action. If all of this is true, the real victim—the person really being abused—in this incident may have been Principal Lynn instead of choir director Rotolo.

Over 200 years ago a firebrand preacher named Jonathan Edwards wrote: “One truly zealous person may do more . . . to hinder the work than a hundred great, and strong, and open opposers.”

Obstreperous, in-your-face Christian radicals often become lightning rods drawing unnecessary bolts of opposition that endanger the rest of us.