The recent legislative proposal presented to the Senate of the Land of Berlin-Brandenburg on the possible general banning of religious symbols in public offices and hence in state schools has evoked strong reactions and various pronouncements by exponents of the German Churches. In a press release issued on 1st April, the chairman of the Central Committee of German Catholics (ZdK), Hans Joachim Meyer, spoke of a “mistaken path towards secularism”. “The freedom of religion guaranteed by the Constitution also includes the right to display religious symbols”, said Meyer. Wolfgang Huber, president of the Council of the Evangelic Churches, has also called the Berlin Senate bill “completely misplaced”: “it is a terrible misunderstanding to ban all religious symbols from public offices in order to safeguard the ideological neutrality of the State”, he declared, since “the neutrality of the State exists to promote religious liberty. In this way, on the contrary, it is being used to curb it”.
