Switzerland, the country that asked Nazi Germany, “Say, could you identify all the Jews in their passports so we can make sure not to let them in?”, votes 57.5% to write a ban on minarets into its constitution.
European nations practiced toleration-as-long-as-you’re-invisible for minority religions long after they ended the torturing-heretics-to-death phase. In France, the Edict of Nantes (1598) forced Protestants to worship no closer than 5 leagues (c. 17 miles) from Paris. Even after restoring political rights to Catholics in 1829, Britain still banned Catholic churches having towers or bells. In Austria under the Patent of Toleration (1781), Protestant churches were required to have “no chimes, no bells, towers or any public entrance from the street as might signify a church.” (Benjamin J. Kaplan, “Fictions of Privacy: House Chapels and the Spatial Accommodation of Religious Dissent in Early Modern Europe,” American Historical Review, October 2002.)
Switzerland doesn’t have an established state religion, but now it has a state non-religion.
The vote came as a surprise to the Swiss authorities (somewhat less of one to me), because the polls showed only 37% in support of the ban. There’s a certain twisted logic of invisibility here: if I have to keep my religious bigotry secret even from pollsters, you have to keep your religion secret too.
Many of Switzerland’s 300,000 Muslims are refugees from religious wars in the former Yugoslavia.
Name of the Day: Swiss Justice Minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf.
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