Paid religious holidays
The limits of religious freedom
America’s two million Jews observed Yom Kippur yesterday. As it fell on a Monday, most were forced to use a precious vacation day to celebrate the most holy of days on the Jewish calendar. America’s Christians face no similar situation. Christmas is a Federal holiday and many workers and students get off a day around Easter weekend as well.
It has been suggested that this represents a violation of religious freedom: Christians get a day off of work for their major holidays, Jews and other minority religions do not. Let us consider whether this is the case.
Our discussion, of course, will depend on how we define the requirements of religious freedom. Traditionally, this freedom requires that no individual or government infringe on another’s religious belief (without condition) or free exercise of this belief (with exceptions, for example morally abhorrent behavior like human sacrifice).
Focusing on the “free exercise part,” this principle can be interpreted in two different ways: as protection against the actions that prevent religious practice; or as protection against actions that make more difficult one’s practice of religion. Both interpretations have fundamental problems.
The first definition limits restrictions of freedom to those that prevent the practice of religion. But most actions that we would consider infringements of religious freedom – from verbal threats to arrest and imprisonment – don’t actually prevent an individual from practicing, they just make it more difficult. Even physically restraining someone is not necessarily prevention, for if you just fight off the restrainers, you would be free. Only death, it seems, can truly prevent an individual from practicing their religion. But since there many things short of this that we consider infringements, then maybe what we really care about in terms of religious freedom is actions that make religious practice more difficult (the second interpretation).
This too, however, is problematic. For it begs the immediate question: more difficult than what? The rule can’t possibly be “more difficult that without the activity,” for most everything in life, from our economic system to rights to seemingly unrelated rules like zoning and food safety laws make it more difficult to practice any given religion. And we don’t typically think of capitalism or women’s rights or pasteurization regulations as infringements on freedom of religion.
If we did not get Christmas off, no one would suggest that the failure to give other religions’ holidays off was a violation of religious freedom. Maybe, then, the answer to “more difficult than what?” is “more difficult than the practice of another religion.” In other words, an infringement of religious freedom is some activity that makes the practice of one religion more difficult than the practice of another.
This, no doubt, is a controversial claim, for it suggests that freedom and equality are more intimately connected that traditionally accepted. But this is no reason not to go where logic takes us. At the very least, it reveals the need for a further look into what freedom of religion protects against.
-Marc
Related posts:
- Religious Holidays for Everyone!
- Banning the burqa
- Douthat on religious dialogue
- “Belief” in climate change
- The myth of a “national security” limitation on free speech
ShareComments
Leave a Reply
