RELIGIOUS AND SECULAR SYMBOLS

Religious and Secular Symbols

Religious and Secular Symbols

Introduction

This paper focuses on the conflicts that arise in relation to “the place” of religious symbols in the public sphere, and, specifically, in State schools. Such conflicts, I believe, do not only reflect most of the dilemmas that liberal democracies face in the attempt to reconcile constitutionalism and religion through adherence to secularism in the public place—they actually challenge the very legitimacy of the dominant conception of constitutionalism and its nexus to the principle of secularism.

Religious Symbols

Religious symbols in the public schools normally lift two sets of conflicts. The first set of confrontations arises over the span to which the right to wear religious emblems and apparel can be limited in the title of other privileges and principles of equal legal value. In principle, this kind of confrontation may originate both in relative to the denomination of the majority as well to those of devout minorities. The French regulation of March 17, 2004, which prohibits “the wearing of emblems or clothing by which scholars conspicuously manifest a devout appearance” in all State schools, is neutrally worded and therefore applicable to all emblems, encompassing Christian ones. In practice, although, controversies have was derived exclusively in relative to the right of students belonging to religious minorities to wear their emblems and have almost exclusively worried Islamic schoolgirls. The second kind of conflict arises when a devout symbol, such as the crucifix, or the crèche, is used as a “public dialect” of persona by State authorities. In this case, different in the first type of conflict, the challenged emblem comprises the superior religion and not that of few groups.

Most academic works on religious symbols address either the first or the second set of conflicts. Many works have focused on the hijab cases in different contexts (e.g., in France), while many others have addressed the polemic over the display of the crucifix in the public schools (e.g., Germany, Italy, and Switzerland) or that of the Ten Commandments and the crèche (e.g., the United States). In this paper, I suggest to jointly address the two distinct groups of confrontations, as they both have to do with the connection between religion and legal persona as well as with the distinct understandings, uses and going by car values of secularism as a constitutive component of constitutionalism. In the first place, in a pluralistic society, both for majorities as well as for minorities, religious symbols play a peculiar role in identityrelated dynamics. Their role cannot be compared with that of official State symbols such as the national flag, which do not represent any “official truth” but rather testify to the existence of a political community that shares a (limited) set of common political values. The consequences of globalization, large scale migration, and the aftermath of September 11 have dramatically increased the demand for social cohesion and for strong collective identities, which are better expressed by religious symbols thanks to their capacity to evoke absolute and therefore reassuring ...