Q&A: Religious and Secular Coercion
Religious and Secular Coercion
Question
In many religion-and-state issues, there are cases where one side is coercing the other, but can you also say that in the opposite case there is coercion as well?
For example, regarding train travel on the Sabbath: on the one hand, preventing it from operating on the Sabbath is religious coercion; on the other hand, operating it on the Sabbath is secular coercion? And there are other examples like this.
What do you do in such a deadlock? Or perhaps there is no problem at all, because coercion of type X is not comparable to coercion of type Y? Or maybe there is simply only one kind of coercion, or perhaps none at all?
Answer
In many cases, this is not a matter of coercion on both sides. Running trains on the Sabbath is not coercion. Whoever does not want to travel should not travel, and whoever does not want to work on the train should not work there. In those cases where both decisions are coercive (each one toward a different side), it seems that the majority should decide, or perhaps one should weigh how important the decision is for each side.