A Musing on Christians in the Public Square
Daniel West
July 1, 1996
TWO PROPOSALS, ONE RADICAL, One modest: The radical one is that Jews should be permitted to keep the Sabbath, meaning that our peculiar penchant for not driving, cooking, writing, using electricity, or doing any other manner of work on Saturdays should be tolerated and even afforded a measure of respect by our Christian neighbors. Though this is indeed a radical proposal historically, few Americans would blink at it. Tolerating alien religious practices, after all, is mandated by the First Amendment and deeply ingrained in the national psyche. From this radical starting point, I have a modest additional request—that to facilitate Jewish observance of Shabbat, those streets inhabited by large numbers of orthodox Jews should be closed off by municipal authorities on Saturdays so that these Jews don't have their devotions interrupted by the sounds of traffic. Now America blinks—and rightly so. Though this second request appears very minor next to the first, when Jews ask for this accommodation—as the Lubavitch Hassids do in Brooklyn—they cross a crucial line. They ask the government to force an inconvenience, admittedly a minor one, on their neighbors to facilitate their religiosity. I raise this example not because Jews frequently cross this line but to highlight how absurd this civic misdemeanor appears when perpetrated by any group other than Christians. Indeed, while religious minorities are generally very careful about not imposing on the larger society through the practice of their values, many Christians blithely expect society not merely to tolerate their values but to bolster them. This, I believe, is the root of a widespread suspicion of Christianity—and Christians—in the public square. No thinking person should doubt ...
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