When it comes to religion, secular Europe and spiritual America are more than an ocean apart. So, too, when it comes to the veil.
In the USA, even opportunistic anti-immigration politicians are steering clear of the question of head coverings for Muslim women. But legislation banning burqas, niqabs and other forms of Islamic dress that cover the eyes is being hotly debated across Western Europe.
On June 30, a Tory member of Parliament introduced in the United Kingdom a bill that would make it illegal to cover one’s face in public. On July 13, France’s lower house of parliament passed, by a 335-1 vote, a ban on face-covering veils.
Politics is, of course, about power, but power is energized by symbols, and in Western Europe the veil symbolizes gender inequality — a “walking coffin,” according to the French immigration minister, Eric Besson.
It also symbolizes what Christians and secularists alike fear is a growing Muslim threat, which opponents of the veil articulate as a threat to public safety. To paraphrase The Shadow, who knows what evil lurks behind the jihab?
In 2004, France, which is home to Western Europe’s largest Muslim minority (about 5 million), responded to this threat by banning all religious symbols, including crosses and Muslim head scarves, from its public schools. In parts of Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, public school teachers are forbidden to wear Muslim head scarves, though Catholic attire for nuns and priests is allowed.
American legislators are going in the opposite direction. In April, Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski signed into law legislation lifting a ban on religious garb for public school teachers. Enacted during the anti-Catholic panic of the 1920s, this ban was designed to keep nuns from teaching in public schools.In recent years it had been used to dismiss a teacher who wore white clothes and a white turban after converting to Sikhism. But it had not been employed to dismiss teachers who wore crosses.
A Western divide
According to a Pew Forum survey released earlier this month, support for laws prohibiting face-covering veils is strong across Western Europe, with huge majorities in France (82%), Germany (71%), Britain (62%) and Spain (59%) supporting such legislation.
Not so in the USA, where only 28% approve of such a ban.
Why the discrepancy? Why are European politicians making hay over this issue, while American politicians are largely avoiding it?
One factor is the relative size of these countries’ Muslim communities, which according to Boston University‘s World Religion Database account for only about 1.5% of the U.S. population but 5% of the citizens of Germany, 6% in the Netherlands and 9% in France.
A second factor is culture. In the name of their holy trinity of liberté, égalité and fraternité, the French bow down at the altar of secularism. So it should not be surprising that French politicians want their streets and schools to be religion-free zones.
America’s public sphere, by contrast, has never been naked of religious expression. Then again, it has never been given over to religion either. So Americans struggle with a challenge quite unknown to the French — how to balance a godless Constitution with a Declaration of Independence that derives our inalienable rights not from the state but from the Creator.
Years ago, in a gathering on American religions sponsored by Boston College‘s Boisi Center, Ingrid Mattson of Connecticut’s Hartford Seminary asked whether an American Muslim public school teacher ought to be allowed to wear a hijab to work. Mattson, who was at the time the vice president of the Islamic Society of North America (she is now president), said the answer was obvious: Muslim head coverings should be allowed in public schools on religious liberty grounds.
I thought the issue was far more complicated. In fact, I thought it presented a classic case of the First Amendment at war with itself.
Dueling ideas
On the one hand, the free exercise clause (“Congress shall make no law ... prohibiting the free exercise” of religion) seems to support Mattson’s view that public school teachers should be free to express their religious identities at work. On the other hand, the establishment clause (“Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion”) seems to argue against any sort of religious dress for public school teachers, on the grounds that impressionable students might read such garb as an indication that their school is pro-Catholic (if their teacher wears a habit), pro-Sikh (if their teacher wears a turban), or pro-Muslim (if their teacher wears a hijab).
I believe that the Constitution requires public schools to allow teachers in upper grades (where students are generally less impressionable and less deferential to authority, and typically cycle through various teachers each day) to express their religion in dress, as long as they maintain in their teaching the religious neutrality required by the Constitution. However, I believe that the Constitution requires public schools to deny this same freedom to teachers in lower grades because here, students are generally more impressionable and more deferential to authority, and often have only one teacher in a given school day.
Creating a balance
My position might seem convoluted, but it is no more so than many U.S. Supreme Court rulings on religion, which are forever trying to balance the demands of the establishment clause for religious neutrality with the demands of the free exercise clause for religious liberty. My position is also in keeping with the views of many ordinary Americans, who continue to differentiate themselves from Europeans when it comes to religious tolerance.
To be sure, fear of Islam is a staple for many U.S. radio and television personalities, who worry continually about the imposition of sharia (Islamic law) on American life — a worry even more remote than the possibility of cross-dressing criminals concealed behind burqas starting a spate of bank robberies from London to Rome.
Occasionally, this fear spills over into the general public, as recent hearings on the proposed Ground Zero community center and mosque can testify. But the so-called culture wars are a product more of the news media than of the middle class.
Ordinary Americans (those without talk shows) exhibit what sociologist Alan Wolfe referred to in One Nation, After All as a striking tolerance for competing religious perspectives — a “soft multiculturalism” that, true to our nation’s highest ideals, gives to others the same religious freedoms we want for ourselves.
What will happen in the USA if Islam claims the 9% of the population it now claims in France? Or if another 9/11 befalls us at the hands of a terrorist praying “Allahu Akbar”?
I don’t know. For now, I am grateful that our talking heads are not whipping our legislators into a frenzy, and that Muslim women are free to wear whatever they want in our public places.