Here at the public school in my NJ town, for the Holiday program, there are no explicitly Christian songs: only roasting ”Chestnuts Roasting ”, and other purely secular seasonal songs. But there were last year no less than three Hanuka songs, which seems a bit excessive, since first Hanuka is a rather minor Jewish holiday, and second, there are almost no Jewish students in the town. There were several Kwanzaa songs, one praising the virtue of “collective work.” All that Kwanzaa stuff is totally synthetic. Its garbage.
By contrast, “Lift Every Voice” is genuine, and far better than most compositions being produced today. I don’t think that it was written as a nationalist hymn, so much as a freedom song. Bear in mind that it was first performed just over 30 years after the Civil War. Freedom was the issue, as it is still today, — for all of us!
Amen! I wish I could be put in charge of editing the Methodist Hymnal. I'd throw out everything written after 1939. Gerald Kennedy's "God of Love and God of Power" (1939) would be the newest hymn in the book.