Religious Accommodation and Idola Fori

Demands for religious exemptions from generally applicable laws are commonly discussed along the lines of two complementary approaches. The equal liberty approach implies that those citizens whose exercise of religion is substantially burdened by a law can get an exemption if it does not impinge on the rights of others. The religious identity approach requires exemptions if a uniform implementation of a law may be interpreted as a sign of disrespect for some citizens’ religious identities. I argue that this framework fails to suggest any unequivocal solutions when applied to conflicting rights claims, like in recent cases of religious refusals to provide services related to same-sex marriage (e.g. Miller v. Davis, Ingersoll v. Arlene’s Flowers). It happens because both approaches avoid considering how the demands for religious accommodation are actually justified. What today circulates in the public square under the name of “religious reasons” is best described by Francis Bacon’s metaphor of idola fori (traditionally translated as “idols of the marketplace”), i.e. utterances whose meaning is deemed well-known and self-explanatory, while in fact it is not. Invoking “religion” and “identity” can only signify that a disputed practice is very important to the claimants, but to provide reasons for endorsing or rejecting the practice one must explicate its rationale and address counterarguments. In conclusion I clarify how does this requirement of explication and contextualization differ from Habermas’s idea of “translating” religious reasons into secular ones, and how is it compatible with the famous Rawls’s “proviso” about comprehensive doctrines in public deliberation.