Secular Philosophy and Muslim Headscarves in Schools*

IT is often remarked that the key principles of liberalism — separation between public and private spheres, religious toleration and equality before the law — were articulated in response to the religious conflicts of post-Reformation Europe. Historically, liberalism has been committed, at least minimally, to a weak version of secularism, which requires the state to abstract from divisive religious views and to appeal to values likely to provide a common point of allegiance for all citizens, regardless of their confessional loyalties. Religion should be removed from public affairs and confined to a politically indifferent private sphere. The de-politicisation and privatisation of religion was not merely a pragmatic, prudential solution to the political instability brought about by the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The autonomy of the political sphere from religious institutions and beliefs became an enduring liberal ideal because it offered a powerful articulation of the Enlightenment moral vision of universal rights, freedom and equality. By abolishing the privileges enjoyed by members of the dominant Church, the state guaranteed the free exercise of religious freedoms for all in the private sphere. By establishing a non-sectarian, neutral public sphere, it ensured that all enjoyed the status of equal citizenship, as common membership in a political community transcending particular beliefs and allegiances. It can be said, therefore, that secularism as a doctrine of separation between the political and the religious spheres provided an early, paradigmatic articulation of the liberal ambition to combine the protection of individual freedoms and the diversity of conceptions of the good in society with shared norms of political membership as equal status. Central to this doctrine was the ideal of liberal equality, an ideal which also underpins most recent liberal discussions of state neutrality. Broadly speaking, a state is neutral when it refrains from appealing to comprehensive values and draws instead on principles which all citizens can endorse, thereby — on a contractualist account of political The Journal of Political Philosophy: Volume 13, Number 3, 2005, pp. 305–329