One of the most pervasive and persuasive articles of faith of Laïcité is that it enshrines and ensures the principle of neutrality of the liberal State. Nowhere is this ‘dogma’ more strongly held than when it comes to the role of the State in education. The Second Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights in the Lautsi Case vs. Italy gave forceful expression to this principle. In unanimously finding that the Italian requirement of displaying a crucifix in all classrooms of elementary public schools was a violation of the European Convention of Human Rights it said: «The State’s duty of neutrality and impartiality is incompatible with any kind of power on its part to assess the legitimacy of religious convictions or the ways of expressing those convictions» (47).

Obviously displaying a crucifix in the classroom would violate such. It is a position and a conclusion which appear almost axiomatic. If one believes in the neutrality of the State – not least on matters of religion -- as a core liberal marker, how could one not reach such a conclusion? Often it is put as follows: how could one consider an empty wall, which forbids the crucifix, as more objectionable than a wall which allows the crucifix?

I do not wish to engage with the far deeper ontological issue of whether liberalism as such can usefully be described as a ‘neutral’ worldview, but instead grapple with the assumption of neutrality and the way it plays out in relation to religion in contemporary European societies.

Secularism and laïcité are not an empty categories which signifies absence of faith. To many, they signify a rich world view which holds, inter alia, the political conviction that religion only has a legitimate place in the private sphere and that there may not be any entanglement of public authority and religion. For example, on this view, only secular schools should be funded by the State. Religious schools must be private and not enjoy public support. It is a political position, understandable historically and respectable as such. But it is difficult to consider it as “neutral” on the political spectrum.

Today, the principal social cleavage in our States as regards religion is not among, say Catholics and Protestants, but among the religious and the ‘secular’. If the social pallet of society were only composed of blue yellow and red groups, than black – the absence of colour – would be a neutral “colour.” In a society the overwhelming members of which are religious albeit of different denominations, a secular, non-religious State could in this setting be considered as neutral. But once one of the social forces in society has appropriated black as its colour, then that choice is no longer neutral.

Secularism is not like the black which is absence of colour, but the black which is a bold colour in and of itself. If one is presented with a binary choice, in this case religious versus non-religious world view, neither choice is any longer neutral.

Let us see how this plays out in relation to education. If we compare two models of State funding of education – the Franco-American model on the one hand and the Dutch-British model on the other. Under the first model, in the name of neutrality, the State will only fully fund secular schools. This is a happy choice for non-religious parents the education of whose children will be paid by the State but somewhat less happy for parents who wish their children to receive an education which reflects, or at least respects, the religious commitment and to achieve such have to send their child to a private school which at best receives a partial subsidy for some functions.

The Netherlands and the UK, understand the dilemma and adopt an ‘agnostic’ position: they will fund public schools which are secular, as well as schools affiliated with one of the principal religions in society. I think a case can be made that the Dutch and British model are more neutral.

If we look inside the class room we may also see the difficulty of the neutral posture articulated by the Second Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights. Consider the following parable of Marco and Leonardo, two friends just about to begin school. Leonardo visits Marco at his home. He enters and notices a crucifix. ‘What is that?’, he asks. ‘A crucifix – why, you don’t have one? Every house should have one’. Leonardo returns to his home agitated. His mother patiently explains: ‘They are believing Catholics. We are not. We follow our path, no less noble. Now imagine a visit by Marco to Leonardo’s house. ‘Wow!’, he exclaims, ‘no crucifix? An empty wall?’ ‘We do not believe in that nonsense’ says his friend. Marco returns agitated to his house. ‘Well’, explains his mother, ‘We follow our path.’ The next day both kids go to school. Imagine the school with a crucifix. Leonardo returns home agitated: ‘The school is like Marco’s house. Are you sure, Mamma, that it is okay not to have a crucifix?’ But imagine, too, that on the first day the walls are naked. Marco returns home agitated. ‘The school is like Leonardo’s house,’ he cries. ‘You see, I told you we don’t need it’.

In reality, the laique alternative to the crucifix is not a naked empty wall, The walls of our schools are open to accommodate and endorse all manner of world views, and in reality often do -- except the one world view which is explicitly excluded which is the religious world view. At the entrance of every elementary school in France you will find inscribed: Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité – the battle cry of the French Revolution. I would be delighted to send my children to a school which displayed such rousing words, embodying such ideals. But if I were a Monarchist, I might feel, well, upset. Were I a Monarchist and were to complain to the School board of the city or region, I would be told: Win the next election, and have it removed, and put up instead, La France est Moi. I would never dream of telling my children that Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité is a neutral principle. On the contrary, it is an ideological position which I favor, and for which much blood was spilled. I would mobilize to defend it, democratically of course, and hope my children would be equally so mobilized. But neutral?

And yet, there it is on the wall. Imagine, not a farfetched hypothetical, that a region in the country decided to be Nuclear Free. Driving through Europe you find many such regions. Many of them espouse a nuclear free icon. Often the triangular piece sign of the 60s. It, too, in such regions could go on the wall of a school. The classroom wall, in principle and in reality, is covered with signs and symbols which reflect democratic, ideological preferences of our polities. Leave your privileged tenured university desks, enter into the nearest school. Take a look around. The only thing you will not find is a religious symbol. The principle of classroom neutrality does not, in theory and praxis, require an empty wall. It could not – there is hardly a symbol or picture which does not carry some explicit or implicit ideological baggage. Even Goldilocks and the Three Bears is not ideologically neutral.

What the laique constitutional principle does is to allow most such representations on the wall, when democratically arrived at by school boards, educational authorities and the like, except religious ones which are prohibited even if they were to be massively supported by democratic institutions. This result follows the logic of constitutionally defining religion as a private affair even if religion itself does not so define itself.

The educational consequence is not trivial. For the message, both explicit and implicit, can well be understood as – all world views can find their place on the wall and are thus to be understood as legitimate, except a religious world view which, by implication at least, becomes toxic. Nelson Mandela or Che Guevara: Yes; John Paul II, Mohammad or Moses: No.

Both the Italian choice – crucifix – and the French choice – no crucifix, pose an educational challenge. The Italians will have an imperative exigency in their educational programming to teach respect for other religions and for no religion at all. The French, who today do not only forbid a crucifix on the wall, but forbid children to wear a cross or a headscarf or a kippah (but you can wear a shirt with Marx, Karl or Groucho, on the back) have an imperative educational exigency to teach respect for the religious sensibility and not allow the ban to be interpreted as the State endorsing an attitude of contempt or derision towards religion.

There may be particular circumstances where the arrangements by the State could be considered coercive and inimical given, say, the demographic composition of a school catchment area, in which case a variety of pluralist options are open. But, indeed, pluralism and accommodation seem to be more fecund concepts to deal with these issues than ‘neutrality’.

Reframing the Approach to Collective Religious Identity and Individual Religious Liberty

As noted above, we habitually talk of the commitment to religious freedom, both positive and negative: freedom of religion and freedom from religion, which European states are constitutionally to guarantee their citizens and residents.

But when it comes to the identity of the State, how does one reconcile between the two? Would not a religious identity of the State militate against the freedom of religion of its secular population and citizens adhering to a different religion? And would not a State shorn of any religious identity not compromise the freedom of religion of, say, a majority who wish to see that preference reflected in the State? Europe, I would argue, has charted an interesting and in my view appealing approach to this issue.

The European constitutional landscape posits two rather than one “Freedom of and from Religion”. One is the classical individual Freedom of and from Religion, which is a common European constitutional asset. No one should be privileged or discriminated on account of their religious affiliation or the absence thereof.

However, in its very statal structure Europe represents a second collective, identitarian, Freedom, conceptually stemming from the internationally guaranteed right of self-determination, namely the freedom of nations/states to include in their self-definition, in their self-understanding and in their national and statal symbology, a more or less robust entanglement of religion and religious symbols.

Consider France and the United Kingdom, good examples because both are founding members of the European Convention of Human Rights and, with the usual imperfections, are both considered robust liberal democracies in good standing.

France, in its very Constitution, defines itself as laïque – usually understood as mentioned above, as a political doctrine which does not allow the State any endorsement or support of religion and would, say, consider the display of religious symbols by the State or the funding of religious schools, as, well, anathema. At an individual level, laïcité does not necessarily mean individual atheism or agnosticism. I know many persons who are religious in a profound and capacious way, but uphold laïcité. They do so because they believe that, independently of their personal conviction, it is wrong for the State to get entangled with religion. This precision is important since it helps highlight the fact that laïcité is a political doctrine about the best way to regulate the relationship between the State and Religion. The origins of, and justification for, laïcité can be historical (the specificities, for example, of the Ancien Régime and the subsequent French Revolution) but also theoretical – rooted in both principled and pragmatic consideration of, say, how best the State may ensure peaceful coexistence among religious factions.

Laïcité is to be contrasted with an opposing doctrine, which is also very common in Europe and which has no accepted name. “Theocracy”, even by the most ardent supporters of French style laïcité, would not be an appropriate label to describe a State like the modern UK or Denmark. For convenience let us refer to states the collective identity of which contain a religious self understanding and sensibility. The most striking manifestation of such are those states which have an established Church and a State religion, like the UK (Anglican), Denmark, (Lutheran), Greece (Orthodox), Malta (Catholic) to give but a few examples. I estimate that around half the population of Europe live in States which cannot be defined as laique as la France.

These States are committed as a matter of individual rights to freedom of and from religion, but see no wrong in a religious, or religiously rooted, self-understanding of nation and state, and their public spaces are more or less replete with state-endorsed religious symbology. In England, part of the UK, the Monarch is both the Head of State but also the Titular head of the Anglican Faith and its institutional manifestation in the Church of England: the “Established Church” of the Nation and State. Many State functions have a religious character: clergy sit (or sat) ex-ufficio as part of the legislature, the flag carries the Cross (of St. George) and the national anthem is a Prayer to God.

In somewhat of a mirror image of what I wrote above, I know many persons in England who are very convinced atheists and yet see no harm in the this religious entanglement of the collective identity and are also able to invoke considerations of principle and pragmatism: has the UK been more riddled with religious strife than, say, France? It would seem that at least until recently, Catholics, Jews and Muslims were at peace with, say, a photo of the Monarch on the wall of a classroom or, more significantly, the English (or British) population at large has been at peace with a Catholic, or Jewish or Muslim or Church of England classroom funded from the general tax receipts of a population which is mostly secular, just as their French counterparts would be uncomfortable with the above.

It is not my purpose to claim normative parity for these two positions – a proposition which would be hotly contested. But I will make two claims in relation to them. First, both the France and the UK (English) models are considered constitutionally legitimate in Europe. The UK (or Denmark, or Malta, or Greece) and many others with different recipes of Church/State arrangements are not, simply by being what they are not in violation of the Convention or in violation of the common constitutional traditions of Europe. Second, and more controversially, I do need to repeat here that the claim that laïcité embodies a principle of neutrality – requires a very narrow (and self-serving) definition of what we mean by neutrality. Sure, a laïque State, a la France, is neutral as between different religious factions in the French public space. But it is not neutral in a broader political sense. What may hang on a French classroom wall will depend on the political colour of French democracy at any given time: a bust of Voltaire? S’il Vous Plaît. Marx? Pourquoi Pas? The noble Battle Cry of the French Revolution – Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité – is, as mentioned, to be found on countless schools across the country. The only things that may not be displayed, independently of the contemporary colour of voter preference, is a cross, or a mezuzah or a crescent. Kids may come to school with any manner of emblems such as the famous peace triangle, but not with you-know-what.

There is not contestation in Europe about the principle of freedom of and from religion (though many debates about its application) at the individual level . But there is a deep contestation about the most suitable way to regulate the symbolic and iconographic entanglement of Church and State. The laïque position is surely not “neutral” about that contestation: it is as much a polar position as is the more religiously oriented position outlined above. It does not simply choose a side. It is a side. It is theoretically autistic or disingenuous to claim neutrality for a term which defines one pole in a bipolar dispute.

This argument brings about yet a third very important underlying distinction which is rarely articulated, but which can be very visible. There are those who truly believe that laïcité is a primordial condition – sine-qua-non for a good liberal democracy and that, at least implicitly, the moderate secularist position is sub-optimal at best and aberrational at worst. Consequently, it is morally imperative for good democrats and liberal pluralists to attempt to clip the wings of religious manifestations even if moderate as far as possible – a principled and consistent position.

There are others (myself included) who hold the view that, even more in today’s world than before, the European version of the religious states explained above is in fact hugely important in the lesson of tolerance it forces on such states and its citizens towards those who do not share the “official” religions and in the example it gives the rest of the world of a principled mediation between a collective self-understanding rooted in a religious sensibility, or religious history, or religiously-inspired values and the imperative exigencies of liberal democracy. There is, on this view, something inspiring and optimistic by the fact that even though the King is the Titular Head of the Church of England, the many Catholics, Muslims and Jews, not to mention the majority of atheists and agnostics, can genuinely consider him as “their King” too, and equal citizens of England and the UK. I think there is intrinsic value of incalculable worth in the European pluralism which validates both a France and UK as acceptable models in which the individual right to and from religion may take place.

This, then, is how I would frame the issues against which the spate of cases and debates currently present in the European public space must take place. All too often these debates are reduced to the oft-difficult line drawing exercises between freedom of and from religion and their counterbalancing by other societal mores.

We all accept that when it comes to Freedom of Religion, the right, like all other fundamental rights, is not absolute. We would not allow in the name of religious freedom human sacrifice, or even the kind of conduct which incites to hatred or threatens public order and peace. The individual liberty is ‘balanced’ against a collective good variously defined.

But surely Freedom from Religion is not absolute, and its vindication has to be so balanced, and the principle collective good against which it should be balanced would, in my view, be the aforementioned collective freedom of a self-understanding, self-definition and determination of the collective self as having some measure of religious reference. Freedom of Religion surely requires that no school kid be obligated to chant God’s name, even in, say, God Save the King. But does Freedom from Religion entitle such to demand that others not so chant, to have another national anthem? How does one negotiate the individual and the collective rights at issue here?

At the identitarian level one should simply accept that religion, religious symbols and memories and histories can be an important part of the fabric of the collective self which constitutes the nation and accept, as is the practice in so many European states that such could be reflected in the symbology of the State. And yet at the same time, respecting and embracing an inclusive notion of equal citizenship, recognizing such as a marker of tolerance and a modern manifestation of liberal sensibilities and perhaps even celebrating the overall European constitutional landscape with its openness to so many formulations of the relationship between religion and State.

At the individual level whilst striving to respect fully freedom of and freedom from religion, instead, then, of negotiating the impossibilities of neutrality through separation, the operative concept should shift to accommodations – pragmatic solutions in which the hard cases where freedom of and from religion clash, one seeks the outcomes that afford maximum respect to these different personal commitments.

I think that both to understand the new debates and to arrive at meaningful, ethical, deontological, identitarian and pragmatic results may profit by this reframing.