The Public Space

The presence of religions in the European legal systems is increasingly challenged by demographic developments. Two developments are particularly significant in this respect, as shown by the statistical data collected by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life and a special Eurobarometer poll of 2010:

a) A growing number of Europeans (more than 20% of the population of the EU Member States) do not view themselves as belonging to any religion and often question the support offered by the state to religious communities.

b) A similarly increasing share of the population professes religions that are not considered traditional in Europe (for example Islam, which according to the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life is followed by almost 3% of the population in EU Member States) and which are still generally excluded from various forms of support reserved by the states for ‘majority’ religions.

While those who do not profess any religion suggest reducing the presence of religious communities in the public space, by contrast those who profess non-traditional religions argue in favour of this presence provided that they can enjoy the same advantages as those hitherto reserved to mainstream religions. The first group is more likely to support a neutral public space, without any religious connotation, whereas the latter tends to be in favour of a plural public space that is inclusive of different religions. Traditional religions for their part have reasons to oppose both the neutrality and the plurality of the public space because, in the first case, the religion would be in danger of being confined to the private sphere and, in the second, they run the risk of losing their dominant position.

For all these reasons a complex and lively debate about the place of religions and beliefs in the public space is taking place across Europe. In this policy brief, after presenting the main policy models one can encounter in contemporary Europe when it comes to the governance of religious diversity, we move on to discuss religious symbols in the public space.

This timely volume discusses the much debated and controversial subject of the presence of religion in the public sphere. The book is divided in three sections. In the first the public/private distinction is studied mainly from a theoretical point of view, through the contributions of lawyers, philosophers and sociologists. In the following sections their proposals are tested through the analysis of two case studies, religious dress codes and places of worship. These sections include discussions on some of the most controversial recent cases from around Europe with contributions from some of the leading experts in the area of law and religion.

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The public space issue cannot be appropriately addressed without keeping into account these three different perspectives. This is why WP5 has chosen, as case-studies, the dress codes (that are relevant both to the spatial and to the personal approach) and the religiously oriented private schools (that are relevant to the functional approach). But why to include a third case-study, the places of worship? Places of worship are the most visible manifestation of religion in the public space (in the sense of streets and squares). In theory, building a place of worship should be a no-problem issue: as this type of public space is accessible to all, all religious communities should be entitled to have their own places of worship, provided they respect some general rules concerning safety, health, etc. In practice, it is not so: almost everywhere in Europe building a Muslim mosque or a Jehovah Witnesses’ temple is much more difficult than building a Catholic (or Orthodox or Protestant) church and some countries (Switzerland, the Carinthian region of Austria ) have recently limited the right to build a place of worship according to the architectural canons that are traditional in some religions. The place of worship issue is a privileged observatory to study how much the accessibility of the public space –even in its part that should be open to all without limitations- is questioned in a society that is not accustomed to religious plurality.