Music, Dance, and Religion

Last night I watched the 1984 film, "Footloose," starring Kevin Bacon as Ren McCormack. The movie itself was about a town in which dancing and rock n roll were illegal. There was one point in the movie where Ren gets pulled over for playing his music too loud in his car. The town was mostly Catholic and the reasoning for no dance or rock was that it was the devil's music. As I watched the movie, I wondered if this actually happened somewhere in the United States and it has. In a town in Oklahoma, dancing was outlawed from the founding of the city until 1980. It was illegal for about 100 years. In Elmore City, school held invitation only, private dances, but this didn't happen too often either because the schools also didn't like dancing. In 1980, the juniors and seniors wanted to have a prom, so they brought up the issue. The arguements for not having dance was that "nothing good can ever come out of dance. When boys and girls hold each other, the become aroused." The boys and girls just wanted to have some good memories from high school. The law was lifted by a narrow margin and dancing would no longer be illegal.

I looked into this because I thought it was interesting. I was surprised that the law was not lifted earlier in time due to separation of church and state because it seemed the only thing holding this law together was religious beliefs.