Two Models of Even-Handedness and the Regulation of Religion in Public Spaces

This paper examines the prevalent and influential model of evenhandedness as developed by major scholars Joseph Carens and Alan Patten, and its applicability to the regulation of religion as a whole, and vis-a-vis public spaces in particular. The evenhandedness strategy emphasizes the importance of treating all the state’s citizens with equal concern and respect, and keeps the state strictly unaffiliated with any given denomination. However, unlike the privatization approach the evenhandedness approach does not adopt a hands-off approach with regard to religion. Rather, this strategy adopts a hands-on approach in which governmental resources are allocated to different religious denominations and groups without showing preference to any one religious group, while the government and state themselves, as noted, remain unaffiliated with any one denomination. An important distinction regarding evenhandedness, often overlooked, is that there are two very different kinds of evenhanded approaches that can be found in the relevant literature: the end result and procedural evenhanded models. The end result version of evenhandedness in its application to the religious-identity realm means roughly as follows: the goal of a distributive policy in the religious sphere is that each religious person would be satisfied, as measured by the parameters of his/her given religion, from the noted distribution of religious goods. The procedural evenhanded model, on the other hand, involves an allocation of resources to religious groups, based on, and only on, criteria of fairness and equitableness toward the individuals whose aggregation constitute those religious groups. According to this approach, once the threshold of this (assumed) fair allocation is satisfied, the obligations of the state vis-a-vis religious needs have ended. What happens to those aggregated groups in the religious realm, from that point onwards, cannot justify allocation of further resources from the state. The paper is organized around the end result and procedural evenhanded models, providing a definition, examining their justificatory grounding, policy implications and what we believe are the blind-spots and weaknesses of these models.