Religious Holidays for Everyone!
How much is too much?
Marc may have opened liberalism’s pandora’s box last week when he asked what, exactly, religious freedom ought to require. We began with a well-known dilemma: is it fair that in the U.S., Christians are unencumbered from observing their holy days (holidays and the Sabbath) but most minority religions get no such help? Should Muslims get Fridays off? What about time to pray during the work or school day? And if so, have we not begun barreling down a slippery slope of accommodation?
Christopher Hitchens vents here about a recent New York City resolution to add two Muslim holidays, Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha, to the city’s school calendar. Mayor Bloomberg has come out against the resolution, arguing that a religion needs to claim a large proportion of the student population before necessitating a mandatory school holiday, and that if this trend continues for all religions, there will hardly be any school days left.
Hitchens suggests, first, that:
Those who care enough about their own sect to take a day off school or work should be entitled to do so but should not require others, especially those of school age, to skip a day of education.
And second,
[I]t is the job of our education system to dissolve sectarian boundaries rather than to underline, emphasize, and indeed at least implicitly honor them.
How can we square these arguments with Marc’s tentative conclusion about religious freedom – that our concern should center more on equal treatment than on the ease of religious practice? There are two strategies toward achieving equal treatment: the state can adopt accommodations for any and all religions (by allowing all faiths their own schools, providing state-paid spiritual counselors to soldiers, patients, and prisoners, placing displays from all faiths in government buildings, or instituting state holidays for any and all holy days), or the state can simply refuse such accommodation to all religions.
Hitchens clearly endorses the second strategy, insisting that we leave our religious beliefs at home and allow public places to be free from interdenominational competition. In the U.S., we tend strongly toward the first, albeit sloppily; thousands of religious exemptions are written into local, state, and federal law, but some religions clearly fare better than others. There is also much debate about whether one need be religious at all to warrant relief from particularly burdensome laws. After all, shouldn’t the pacifist be allowed to join the Quaker in conscientious objection?
When it comes Hitchens’s second point regarding the civic role of education, the philosophical ground is much more complicated. There are those who welcome the idea of students leaving their differences behind and learning to see themselves above all else as citizens, and others for whom such an idea reeks of paternalism and alienation. In this too we are divided; as Sam noted here, we have left most questions about the role of education to localities to decide. We can’t even touch those questions without opening up even more problems having to do with parental rights, autonomy, multiculturalism, and perfectionism. Religious freedom turns out to lie at the nexus of liberal controversies. No wonder it’s such a hot button issue.
Unfortunately for those seeking an easy political guidebook for hijabs and holidays, our understanding of church-state problems may be inextricably tied to much larger questions about pluralism, neutrality, and privacy.
-Colin
Related posts:
- Paid religious holidays
- Douthat on religious dialogue
- Homo Religiosus
- Secularizing the calendar!?
- Reason and faith in higher education
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