Why Should we Not Give Exemptions to Pastafarians?

Liberal secularism attempts to both exclude religion from politics and protect individuals’ right to religious freedom. To strike that balance, many liberal secularists have tried to justify religious exemptions on the basis of objective, ‘public’ reasons. Yet the same liberal secularists maintain a subjectivist view of religion, which is pivotal to avoiding the charge of being too narrow in its view of religion such that it unfairly excludes certain modes or traditions of religion from exemptions. Following Laborde (2014), we might call this the egalitarian approach to religious freedom. Its subjectivist view of religion, however, leaves the egalitarian approach vulnerable to the charge of being too broad in the exemptions it affords to religions that common sense tells us ought to be excluded from exemptions (e.g. ‘Pastafarians’; ‘Jedi’; and perhaps ‘Scientology’). To avoid excluding them on a merely ad-hoc basis, they may be excluded on a principled basis using provisos such as ‘sincerity’, ‘cogency’ or ‘seriousness’. Indeed, this is a common strategy in many legal cases. This paper argues that: (a) such provisos cannot be adequately reconciled with the subjectivist view of religion; and (b) in any case, would undo the public justification of many – if not all – religious exemptions. The upshot is that the dominant liberal secularist approach to justifying religious exemptions faces a dilemma: either it must bite the bullet and give exemptions to Pastafarians and the like, or it must abandon the subjectivist view of religion, leaving itself open to the charge of unfairness.