A man and his hymnal

The church I grew up in as a teenager had a newsworthy fire in 2019. In what is surreal footage to me – a place I spent my Sundays from 1997 to 2002 doused in firefighting foam – there’s a close-up on a hymnbook called Praise for the Lord.

That hymnbook was picked largely on my advice 20 years ago, to replace a 1950s-ish hymnbook called Sacred Selections for the Church. It was the standard for this type of church in the 1960s, preceded by Great Songs of the Church and succeeded by Songs of the Church. (Insert a bad stand-up comedian: “What’s the deal with hymns? They used to be great. They used to be sacred. Now they’re just songs?!?”)

Sacred Selections of the Church was compiled by an Indianan named Ellis J. Crum. While he managed to compile a well-used, well-regarded hymnal, the 1971 foreword – 15 years after the original – reveals a man who succeeded in spite of his approach to life. Here’s a relevant excerpt (the hymnal title is in bold calligraphy, which this WordPress-based post cannot replicate):

Sacred Selections for the Church is a collection of spiritual songs that has been acclaimed “the best hymnal on the market.” It has been met with enthusiastic reception in all sections of the country as well as in some foreign lands. Due to the great demand for this book, it is now printed in car-load lots.

An endeavor to produce a truly scriptural song book was the motivating factor behind this hymnal. Because of the belief that it is just as bad to sing a lie as to state an untruth in any other way, more than 130 songs were edited to make them conform to the Holy Writ. […] A certain amount of poetic license is of course necessary; however, where there were unscriptural phrases or where a false doctrine was taught, such songs had to be either edited or eliminated.

So far, so Overton window. But his application of those ideas would reveal the zeal was surreal. Any song that said we’d see “loved ones” in Heaven needed to say “saved ones” instead, because not every loved one would make it. Even teenage undiagnosed autistic me thought that might be a bridge too literal – or at least that it might be better overall to not take words everybody knows by heart and trip up their performance via tiny changes.

As it so happens, Ellis J. Crum did state an untruth two paragraphs after disapproving. He asserted that “the size of this book is not the result of padding with free songs to make volume […] even the shorter songs are choice favorites.” But he wrote many of the songs, and they practically can’t be sung. Outside Alanis Morissette, I’ve never encountered such dedication to emphasizing the wrong syllables. In hymn number 1, “The Church,” you have to sing “command” twice but pronounce it differently in each place based on the rhythm.  Try pronouncing “command” like “Kansas.” Now do it on key.

A man and his wife and their tax case

Around the time I advised on replacing this hymnal, I Googled the guy. It turned out that the only thing he was up to was obstinate linguistic arguments in court. Preparing for law school as I was, I dug into the case – and the 1971 foreword writer was staring right back at me. To write this piece, I re-read for the first time in years, and it’s as ridiculous as I remembered.

In July 2001, an Indiana magistrate judge ordered Ellis and his wife Norma to turn over the tax records of their three music trusts to the IRS agent requesting them. The court stated that the magistrate judge had “fully noted” the issue: “the IRS is seeking to determine whether the income and/or assets of the trusts at issue can be used to pay off the Crums’ tax liabilities.” That seems garden-variety as these things go.

To the Crums, that garden was poisonous. While they invoked the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, the court summarized their stance as “tak[ing] issue with the Report and Recommendation because [it] addresses only the relevancy of the records to the collection of tax liability, and not to the determination of the Crums’ tax liability.” The Crums further questioned whether a trust – an entity that is held by more than one person, a.k.a. collectively – was legally a “collective entity.” Yeeeah. It’s clear that Ellis had not evolved his reading style by his septuagenarian years.

With more Crum-bly grumblings amid the smackdown, they appealed to the Seventh Circuit, and in May 2002 the Circuit smacked them harder. Here, the fact at issue was the U.S. Code’s talking about IRS agents being delegates of the Secretary of the Treasury. Based on that some code references used “Department of the Treasury” and others used “Treasury Department,” the Crums “suggest[ed] that employees of the IRS are members of a body called the “Department of the Treasury,” which, they say, Congress intended to be distinct from the “Treasury Department.” Therefore, the IRS agent was in the wrong department.

This assertion was bonkers. It was also in character for a man motivated 50 years earlier to spend tons of money and effort (saith the foreword) to get people to sing “saved ones” instead of “loved ones.” The Seventh Circuit took the trouble to cite to journalistic style guides that said the shorter “X Department” was preferable to “Department of the X” for federal departments. It said out loud what had been quiet to only Ellis: “This semantic argument strains credulity,” and “That an agency’s name takes two forms is hardly remarkable.”  It’s as if Ellis grew up with spot-the-difference puzzle books and thought that’s what reading comprehension was. Backed by talks of integrity and scriptural fidelity in his 20s, he sounded plausible; making the same argument to fend off the IRS in his 70s, he sounded ridiculous.

A tax case and its lawyer

In looking at this again, I wondered what lawyer would have been bold enough to argue all this to a higher court. Was it the sighing, obliging grandkid of someone from church who they were told was a “sweet young man with adorable cheeks who I hope settles down soon”? Did they represent themselves because no one would take this?

No, they had an actual lawyer, named Kurt St. Angelo. This is not a usual name, and there is a Kurt St. Angelo from Indiana who I assume is the 2002 lawyer.

His name on X is “Kurt St. Angelo: Don’t get me started.”

He’s written five books, according to Goodreads. His pinned post explains: “It is my books’ unique thesis that the form of government in DC (and the other federal areas) is different than that within the States. State republics are limited in power. Nonrepublics like Congress in DC are plenary (absolute, unlimited).”

Having been a reader of Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution and some case law, I have no idea how what he’s asserting is unique. I’m also guessing that his use of the plural possessive “books'” refers only to his nonfiction works on Goodreads. I say that because one of the fiction ones is “a sexuational comedy”: “Eastern enlightenment meets Western dysfunction in this unadulterated comedy screenplay about the funny and fatal sides of sex and masturbation.” My “sweet grandkid” theory dissolves.

A quick scroll through his X posts show a belief that the 2020 election was stolen. Ellis J. Crum died in 2011; Kurt St. Angelo is alive and Trump-ing.

A post and its conclusion

I grew up hearing Matthew 7:15-16 plenty, in which Jesus said of false prophets, “ye shall know them by their fruits.” A few verses later, Jesus says that different people build their houses (i.e., lives) on foundations of rock or sand; when storms come, the former stays up and the latter doesn’t.

The “fruits” I was most vividly warned about weren’t the things commonly held as evil; it was those belonging to another group of Christians, whether denominationally or ones just a bit to the left. Being in those groups and teaching what they taught were the evil fruits. It wasn’t even lacking the “fruit of the Spirit” from another context; that would have been bad theology, but it would have lined up fruit and fruit, like a slot machine of holiness.

But fruits represent actual outcomes – you look at someone’s life and go, “how’s that working out for you?” Fruit trees and bushes have loads of distinctive features, but only the fruit is fruit. It’s easy to get distracted by the shininess of the most distinctive thing about someone or a group of someones – whether “them” or “us” – and decide the most distinctive thing is the most important thing. That governs everything, from political division to “REAL fan” gatekeeping to emo/goth distinctions to “we don’t act like that in OUR family.” The shiny, distinctive thing is how to carve out emotional territory in a big, scary world, so it consumes whatever it finds. And a lot of shiny lives get admired by shiny-aspiring people – they must have been built their life-house on a great foundation, because look how nice the house is! Meanwhile, that life-house is actually on the sand, hanging by a moment.

My gob remains smacked that, by and large according to the polls, the people who told me of all this guilt by association, where evil fruits equaled being in a different group, and where “what if someone sees you at the prom, even though you’re behaving?” was considered a legitimate argument against attending the prom, had no trouble voting thrice for one of the least moral – as a matter of law AND scandal – presidential candidates a major party has put up. But my gob unsmacks when I trace the history of someone whose starving for truth might have just been starving for semantic range. The sandy foundation was there; it just wasn’t inspected until he didn’t want to pay taxes.

When people quote illustrative sin lists from the Bible, the most popular ones are the ones with all the scandals. But 2 Timothy 3’s list talks about avoiding people who are “proud,” “unappeasable,” “and swollen with conceit.” To the extent those issues have been treated less seriously – and their fans allowed to stick around – than the titillating ones, the last eight years reflect that subcultural choice. Did anybody Mr. Crum respected tell him to stop playing dumb with the IRS? The person willing to agree with him for money in 2002 is now, quite proudly, waving the banner of victory.

In the Crum-penned hymn number 540, “There Is a Way,” people have to sing “EEE-ter-NAAAL-ly” in verse 1, and the chorus ends in a ritardando of altos and tenors singing “OH heed HIS per-FECT plan.” I’m not joking. Somehow, neither was he.