By Bob Allen
A Southern Baptist leader in Maryland denounced a local school board’s decision to eliminate references to all religious holidays on its published calendar for 2015-2016.
The Montgomery County Board of Education voted 7-1 to make the change in response to a request from the Muslim community to give their holy day of Eid al-Adha equal status to Christian and Jewish holidays including Christmas, Easter, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
“This is a reminder that we are in a spiritual battle,” Robert Anderson, outgoing president of the Mid-Atlantic Baptist Network, told the Christian Examiner, a Christian news site based in California.
Anderson, pastor of Colonial Baptist Church in Randallstown, Md., completed two years as president of the Baptist Convention of Maryland/Delaware at the end of the Southern Baptist Convention affiliate’s Nov. 9-11 annual meeting.
Anderson, in his 18th year at Colonial Baptist Church, recently served eight years on the Executive Committee of the SBC, a powerful body that oversees day-to-day affairs of the nation’s second largest faith group. In 2011 he served on a task force recommending ways to increase ethnic representation in a denomination formed in part to defend slavery.
“What is happening is that our government, from our president on down, I’m sorry to say, has shown more tolerance and compassion toward Muslims than Christianity,” Anderson told the news outlet. “You can say anything negative you want about Christianity, and no one blinks an eye, but not Islam.”
According to the Washington Post, Montgomery County schools will still close on the same major religious holidays as before, but in the future they will carry non-sectarian labels like “winter break,” “spring break” or simply a day with “no school for students and teachers.”
School officials said the state requires the system to close on certain days, and others days are added if they show a high level of student absenteeism. Those days tend to coincide with religious holidays, but because of the constitutionally required separation of church and state, the reason for granting them must be secular.
In recent years a growing Muslim population in the area has asked the school system to give equal consideration to Eid al-Adha, the second most important festival in the Islamic calendar commemorating belief in Abraham’s willingness to follow God’s command to sacrifice his son Ishmael as an act of obedience.
Any students who miss class on religious holidays receive excused absences, but Muslim families have argued that students should not have to choose between schoolwork and their faith.
According to the Washington Post, Muslim leaders termed the school board’s Nov. 11 decision both a surprise and a mistake.
“By stripping the names Christmas, Easter, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, they have alienated other communities now, and we are no closer to equality,” said Saqib Ali, a former Maryland state delegate and co-chair of the Equality for Eid Coalition, sponsored by the Maryland chapter of the Council of American Islamic Relations. “It’s a pretty drastic step, and they did it without any public notification.”
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