This expansive – and expensive – collection of 16 essays offers a wide range of disciplinary, comparative and political perspectives on the intersection of religion, secularism and human rights in modern Europe. The starting point for most authors is Lautsi v Italy (2011), the European Court of Human Rights case that upheld the display of a crucifix in an Italian public school classroom against a religious freedom challenge. But the chapters also range over sundry other questions of the legitimacy of religion in public schools and other state institutions – whether state-sanctioned religious symbols and ceremonies, private religious rituals, ornamentation and attire by students and teachers, or various local community forms of spiritual instruction, activity and expression.
The topic is propitious for modern-day Europe and the editor is ambitious in trying to give voice to a wide range of perspectives. But the collection is ultimately a bit of a jumble, which a good editorial introduction, index and bibliography only partly offset. Western and eastern European civilians, English, Canadian and American common lawyers, child psychologists, philosophers and semioticians are all crowded together to make their specialised cases for and against religion in public schools and public life, some more successfully and clearly than others.
The book does have several strong chapters that provide useful points of comparison, especially for religious freedom and human rights scholars. For example, the leading Italian jurist Silvio Ferrari offers a very interesting quantitative analysis of the European Court's religious freedom rulings between 1959 and 2009. He shows, tellingly, that majority Orthodox countries lost 79 per cent of the religious freedom cases brought under the European Convention on Human Rights, while Catholic countries lost only 9 per cent of the time, notably including Italy in Lautsi.
The Dutch and Belgian legal philosopher Jean-Marc Piret offers a close analysis of the jurisdictional questions at stake in Lautsi. Despite his own preference for a purely secular public sphere and classroom, Piret contends that the Grand Chamber in Lautsi correctly adopted ‘an attitude of judicial restraint’ (p 83) in the case. He urges that the European Court should, in future cases, endeavour to protect core human rights without imposing inflexible standards of state neutrality on nations with diverse legal and religious traditions.
The editor, the Dutch religion and human rights expert Jeroen Temperman, takes the opposite view. After carefully identifying the central rights claims (and claimants) in cases such as Lautsi, he argues that the European Court should require European states ‘to ensure that everyone can enrol in public schools without conscientious trouble’ (p 167, emphasis added). According to this view, state-sanctioned religious symbols and ceremonies are simply out of place in public school classrooms, given the growing numbers of professed atheistic students and parents and the diverse religious populations now in place. When national governments abrogate their duty to provide adequately neutral education, as Italy did with its crucifix law, the Court should play ‘a catalyst and occasionally counter-majoritarian’ role to compel compliance (p 173).
The leading American religious liberty scholar Brett Scharffs, informed in part by American religious liberty jurisprudence, contends that religious symbols have diverse and malleable meanings – meanings that are properly interpreted by the (local) communities in which they are used. He argues that, whenever possible, courts should give local communities the interpretive space they need to develop the meanings that are appropriate to them: ‘When courts give official sanction to a particular interpretation of a symbol, this has the jurispathetic effect of killing other competing interpretations.’ This symbolic violence is unnecessary and ‘antithetical to the very character and purpose of symbols’ (p 58).
Finally, the Dutch political philosopher Wouter de Been offers a creative re-interpretation of ‘inclusive’ state neutrality, using theories adapted from Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein's popular 2008 book, Nudge. De Been contends that the complete removal of religious symbols from public institutions would represent a form of secular iconoclasm – not an indifferent form of religious neutrality, as some other authors argue. In de Been's view, public schools more than any other institutions are responsible for transmitting a nation's culture and values to the next generation. Thus, rather than completely removing religious symbols from public schools, states should make schools ‘an acceptable default option for the overwhelming majority of its citizens’ (p 183), while providing reasonable alternatives for those who might object.
These and other essays in The Lautsi Papers are sure to spark fruitful debates about religion, secularism and human rights in European classrooms, legislatures and elsewhere. Such debates will become increasingly heated in other parts of the world, too, as immigration, globalisation and secularisation all bring major shifts to local populations and political attitudes toward religion, tradition and culture.
