Recently the education board of Montgomery County, Maryland, an affluent, liberal suburb of Washington, DC, voted to remove reference to religious holidays on the school calendar. Christmas will be “Winter Break,” and Easter week will be “Spring Break.”
The impetus was demands by Muslim groups that the county schools close for Muslim holidays. Holidays for Christians and Jews have been honored. The two most cited Muslim holidays sometimes fall on already existing school holidays, which on the new calendar will only be called “no school.”
Complete non-recognition of religious holidays by Montgomery County’s school board seems not to please much of anybody. Maryland state law stipulates school holidays for Christmas and Easter but evidently doesn’t require calling them such. Montgomery County began closing schools in the 1970s for Jewish holidays because of high absenteeism.
What should be the right approach of local government towards religious holidays? This county school board, like many others, has cited the local demographic reality. Muslim groups in Montgomery haven’t offered any specific numbers for their faith. A protest in which some Muslims kept their children home from school on a Muslim holiday last year resulted in almost no significant increase of absences.
The Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies did a county by county national religious survey in 2010, finding 12,000 persons in Montgomery County tied to Islamic centers and places of worship, out of a then county population of over 970,000. This number didn’t count all persons who might, if asked, profess to be Muslim, just active practitioners and their families. By comparison, it found 30,000 Jewish adherents, and 315,000 Christian adherents tied to local churches.
Montgomery is more secular and slightly more Jewish than the U.S. as a whole. National surveys typically show about 75 percent of Americans professing to be Christian (not necessarily tied to churches), about 2 percent Jewish, and all other religions together under 5 percent, with 15-20 percent professing no religious affiliation.
Many multiculturalist and secularist ideologues often portray America as far more religiously diverse than it is. As a result, polls indicate that Americans exponentially overestimate how many Muslims there are in the U.S. Surveys usually show Muslims are under one percent of U.S. population, while Muslim groups often insist it’s actually 2 percent.
Liberty and legal equality for adherents of all religions is one of the glories of our country. But holidays and civic celebrations must acknowledge demographics. Often multiculturalists and secularists, for example, complain if civic prayers are typically by Christian clergy, while ignoring that the community’s religious adherents are overwhelmingly Christian in self-understanding.
Free expression and thought in religion means in America that most of that organic expression will be rooted in Christianity, which should imply no imposition or disrespect to non-Christians. Trying to distort that reality by, say, insisting that Buddhist monks must number as frequently as Catholic priests in civic events is patronizing to all concerned parties, and substitutes inflated quotas for genuine understanding.
Prime Minister David Cameron has often in recent years spoken of “Christian” Great Britain, even though Britain is much more secular and religiously diverse than America, and Cameron himself is likely not very devout. He means to emphasize the importance of Christianity as a cohesive, historically culture shaping force in British public life. Multiculturalism as raw ideology is hardly unifying or stabilizing and has little deep appeal beyond academia and some activist groups.
The Montgomery County school board understandably doesn’t want to cave into granting holidays to a multiplicity of very small groups. But its solution so far of secularizing holidays seems uncreative if not craven. The county calendar may celebrate “Winter.” But almost everyone, including probably most non-Christians, will still celebrate Christmas.
Comment by Fran Brunson on November 15, 2014 at 5:39 pm
I Googled the public schools calendar for my own county (with a population of a million), the calendar has “Winter holidays.” The little rural county I grew up in has “Winter break,” so apparently “Christmas” has fallen on hard times.