Comment

Muslim Parent Upset Over School Flyer Promoting Church's Easter Egg Hunt

16
J A P4/05/2014 9:04:09 pm PDT

If I had a child in that school I’d be mad. I’m speaking not simply as an atheist who was raised by two non-believing parents, but as someone who grew up in a town that had a large Jewish population. Anything that smacked of even the slightest whiff of favoritism towards Christianity received a push back. The thing about the social pressure inherent in a dominant culture is that its not just one event. It’s the constant drip, drip, drip. So, your sense that you want to look at this event and shrug is spot on. But now pile it up as a childhood of one event like this after another where Christians seem to receive some slight favoritism from institutions. It gives the child a very pointed message about his or her place in the community.

Secularism is a funny concept. Many people seem to interpret it to mean non-religious. Really, it’s a neutral ground that allows us all to live together harmoniously. Although the Jews in our town were not the only non-Christians, the were the only group large enough and organized enough to push back against this sort of thing. All of us benefited from it, I think, including the Christians who learned to consider the feelings of others.

Oh, yes. I went to the Purim festival at the local reform temple every year. I don’t recall flyers ever being handed out in school, though. It’s not the Easter egg hunt itself. Its the teachers handing out the flyers.

It might be worth adding that one aspect of my childhood that I can genuinely look back on with some fondness, and not a small amount of nostalgia, is the fact that as kids so many of us came from different religions but it didn’t affect our ability to be friends.