Secularism and the Calendar: Whose Year Does the State Keep?
The days a state declares public holidays are not neutral choices. Every calendar encodes a set of assumptions about which communities' rhythms matter, and in most liberal democracies those assumptions still trace the outline of a single religion.
The problem hiding in plain sight
In the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, and dozens of other states, the official calendar of rest is built around the Christian liturgical year. Christmas and Easter are public holidays; Eid al-Adha, Diwali, Yom Kippur, and Vaisakhi are not. Citizens who observe those latter occasions must negotiate individual leave, often unpaid, and absorb the social friction of being absent while colleagues are not. The state, in theory committed to treating citizens equally regardless of religion, gives one tradition's calendar a structural advantage it extends to no other.
This is not a trivial complaint. Calendar privilege shapes hiring decisions, school examination schedules, court sittings, and medical appointment availability. A worker who needs ten days of religious observance per year when their employer's default holiday allocation covers none of them faces a real cost that their Christian colleague does not. The inequality is systemic and largely invisible to those it benefits.
What secularism could mean here
Three distinct models compete when secular states try to address this.
The first is the subtraction model: remove explicitly religious holidays from the public calendar entirely and replace them with civic occasions — a republic day, a labour day, a day of constitutional remembrance. France gestures toward this but has never carried it through consistently; Assumption of Mary and All Saints' Day remain statutory holidays. Pure subtraction is politically nearly impossible once habits have formed, and it satisfies no one, since it erases rather than equalises.
The second is the addition model: keep existing holidays and add equivalent ones for other major traditions. This sounds fair but collapses under arithmetic. A state with fifteen significant religious communities cannot add fifteen clusters of holidays without grinding economic life to a halt. Choosing which traditions qualify for addition reintroduces the very hierarchy the model was meant to dissolve — and minority groups rightly notice who gets left out.
The third, increasingly discussed among legal scholars, is the personal allocation model: the state provides a fixed number of personal religious or cultural observance days per employee, drawn from a defined annual leave entitlement, with no state-level calendar specifying their content. Workers choose which days carry meaning for them. Crucially, public institutions — courts, schools, government offices — operate on a civil calendar stripped of religious designation, with staggered staffing to maintain services. The days retain cultural familiarity (Christmas and Easter remain popular as family occasions) but lose their statutory character.
The objections that deserve a hearing
Critics of the personal allocation approach raise three serious concerns. First, cultural cohesion: shared holidays create shared pauses in public life, and those shared pauses do genuine social work. The argument is not trivial. Sabbath-type rhythms may support civic wellbeing in ways that fully individualised calendars cannot replicate. A secular state might still have legitimate reasons to coordinate rest, even if the coordination needn't be religious.
Second, economic asymmetry: low-wage workers in sectors with inflexible scheduling — retail, logistics, care — cannot effectively exercise personal allocation rights if employers face no obligation to honour them. Legal protection of allocation rights costs businesses more in these sectors, creating pressure to employ workers whose religious calendars are cheaper to accommodate. Any credible allocation model requires robust anti-discrimination enforcement to prevent this from reproducing the original inequality in a new form.
Third, the secularist overstep risk: some religious communities argue that state holidays are not privileges but recognitions of cultural heritage, and that stripping them is an act of cultural hostility dressed as neutrality. This is the strongest version of the objection. Secularism that feels like erasure will provoke resistance, and that resistance is not irrational. The appropriate response is not to abandon reform but to be precise about what reform is doing: not denying that Christmas is important to millions of people, but declining to have the state calendar adjudicate which importance counts.
Where the argument actually lands
No existing liberal democracy has fully adopted any of the three models in clean form. Most muddle through — keeping inherited Christian holidays, offering limited accommodation to others, and calling the result neutrality when it is not. That muddle should not be mistaken for an equilibrium. As religious demographics shift, the inherited calendar will face growing pressure from communities who have always borne its costs without sharing its benefits.
The honest secularist position is that the state's calendar should serve civic life, not liturgical tradition — while acknowledging that unwinding a century of embedded practice is slow, contested, and requires compensating for the real disadvantages the transition period creates. What it does not require is pretending the current arrangement is fair.
