Asking About
Reasonable Accommodation in the Context of Religious Universalism
Queen Mary
University of London, School of Law
April 2, 2013
International Journal of Discrimination and Law, forthcoming
Abstract: Interviews
conducted with leading actors in England asking a range of questions about
religious diversity and the legal framework and, in particular, about reasonable
accommodation, helped identify a number of areas of concern. There was some
doubt about whether specific legal provision should be brought in to guarantee
reasonable accommodation. However, there was broad support for having the
principle adopted in the practice of employers, while some preferred the
current informality rather than the principle being enforced through
litigation. None of the respondents came up with illustrations outside of
Judaism, Christianity or Islam. The results are consistent with recent critical
studies showing that the assumption in social sciences that religion is a
universal has been imported from theology. Religion-based questions only pick
out certain phenomena specific to some cultures and an inevitable skew is
created when asking such questions because they only make sense within an
Abrahamic religious framework. While enabling the identification of some
aspects of culture considered to merit reasonable accommodation on grounds of
religion, the results also pose questions about the adequacy of current,
standard research methodologies which assume that religion is a universal.
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