What the French Ban on the Hijab Tells Us About America

​Diaba Konaté, the defensive player of the year for the Big West conference as a point guard for the University of California, Irvine, was born in Paris. She won two silver medals and one gold medal for her home country’s under-18 national team. But she was forbidden from trying out for the Olympic team in her native France because she wears a hijab – a sign of piety and modesty – while she plays.
 
“I can’t fully express my faith and pursue my athletic aspiration,” Konaté said.
 
On the surface, the decision by the French Federation of Basketball to forbid its Muslim female athletes from wearing the hijab in their competition and official ceremonies is a strictly French affair. It is based on the somewhat strained theory that French athletes are public servants, and therefore are subject to the nation’s spirit of laïcité, or strict secularism, that shuns any visible or vocal expression of religious belief in the public sphere. This doctrine is taken to an extreme in France, where any politician who so much as evokes a religious perspective on a public issue is held to have committed a serious faux pas.
 
This French doctrine, first enshrined in law in the early 20th century, seems to be a distant echo of the radical and violent anticlericalism of the French Revolution, as well as an expression of the rationalism of the Third Republic. The result today is official hostility in France to students who wear crucifixes, kippahs, turbans, and hijabs.
 
Before we congratulate ourselves for being broader minded, keep in mind that in many official quarters of the United States religion remains a suspect characteristic best quarantined from larger society. From Colorado to Maine, religious schools have had to fight in court to defend their right to have the same access to public funds as other private schools. In Arizona, an elementary school district attempted to ban student-teachers from Arizona Christian University based solely on religious affiliation. In Minnesota, the state legislature blocked fully accredited religious schools from offering college credit courses to high schoolers. In Mississippi, an elementary school student was disciplined for wearing a mask during the Covid era that said “Jesus Loves Me.”
 
The good news is that administrators backpedaled in these cases. There are also affirmative wins as well. In Pennsylvania, Gov. Josh Shapiro last year signed a repeal of a Blaine Amendment-era law forbidding public school teachers from wearing “religious garb,” such as a hijab or kippah. And the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022 famously upheld the right of a football coach to pray on his own time after a game.
 
While the American experience is a far cry from attitudes in France, many in U.S. officialdom still seem to believe, as the French do, in a “wall of separation between church and state” – a wall not to be found in the U.S. Constitution but in an 1802 letter President Thomas Jefferson to a group of Connecticut Baptists. Our Constitution mandates no establishment of religion or religious tests for office. This wise policy has kept America free of the religious wars and turmoil that once engulfed Europe. But it is not a “wall” that treats any semblance of religious expression in what one wears, or prayers for over lunch, as an infection to be isolated.
 
American public schools and other secular institutions are enhanced by this pluralism, including the right to wear or not to wear items that are central to one’s beliefs. Let’s hope that in time the French come to recognize the wisdom of American pluralism, rather than Americans embracing the anti-liberal, strict secularism of Paris elites.