Holiday Conflicts
By Martin Marty from the April 13, 2009,
Sightings. Follow the link at the end to join the weekly
email.
America got past the seasonal holidays and
festivals relatively unscathed this month. Such an observation may sound
surprising, because one would not expect holidays or festivals to scathe
anyone. “Holiday,” says definition one in the dictionary, is
HOLY DAY. “Festival,” says the same authority, is “a
time of celebration marked by special observances.” Religions, like
nations, cannot not observe special days. Observing is in their lifeblood,
and holidays and festivals breed loyalty and inspire passion. All
positive.
Yet observance of holidays can breed
conflict. People get killed in clashes over holidays. An observation
from Voltaire about England, one that James Madison picked up on: In
societies with one religion (in my translation), everyone who does not belong
gets killed. Holiday-observers bring out the knives. More
Voltaire: In two-religion societies, they kill each other. We see
this relationship between Protestant and Catholic in the Thirty Years War and in
Northern Ireland’s recent past, or between Shi’ite and Sunni
Iraq. However, wrote Voltaire, because England had thirty religions, they
had to find ways to get along.
The United States has more than thirty,
and for decades if not centuries, citizens have been learning to get along, to
accommodate each other, to refrain from killing “the other.”
We are far from being at ease about pluralism and diversity at festival time, so
to get through relatively unscathed (with fewer court cases, fewer interrupted
school board meetings, and less gnashing of teeth about neighbors’ ways)
is something about which to cheer. The religious might some day be able to
concentrate on HOLY DAY and
celebration.I played a game with
Google. Link “religious holidays” and “conflict,”
and “December Wars” alone turn up 54,400,000 hits.
That’s the worst, as defenders and attackers of baby Jesus have it out
with each other. Because Good Friday is a school day in most districts,
the number you get is 4,870,000; Easter, a serene Sunday, brings up only 564,000
conflicts, many of them intra-Christian occasions of debate about the date of
Easter. Passover? The number is 180,000. Recall again that
these numbers include internal, member-versus-member controversy and not always
with outsiders. Muslim? Eid brings up 143,000, while Islamic
holidays together draw 1,030,000
references.
Whoever has been near controversies and
conflicts over religious holidays, whether in legislatures, courts, or school
boards, knows to duck when Easter eggs fly, the crèche is on the court
house lawn, or Jewish or Muslim children have a hard time getting excused from
school for their holiday. One state that decided to take this issue on and
allow for “HOLY DAY” and “celebration,” is New Jersey,
which by law lets children’s absences be excused when school does not
close for their holidays. That state recognized seventy-five religious
holidays: thirty-two Christian, fourteen Jewish, eleven Hindu, eight
Buddhist, eight Muslim, and a scattering of others. Commented a
Star-Ledger article three years ago: “For state officials more
familiar with pedagogy than theology, it can be a challenge to sort it all
out,” and “setting the religious calendars for schools can be a
complex process.”
Empathize with pedagogues and
calendar-makers. Their jobs are indeed complex and the stakes are
high. One wishes that conflict did not always loom, but the price these
officials pay helps breed civil peace in a warring world, a fact that prompts
Thanksgiving Day, when everyone gets off to give thanks, or watch football on
television. Happy
holidays!-----Sightings
comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of
Chicago Divinity School.
Filed Tue - April 14, 2009, 09:09 AM in
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