Is BA Within Its Rights To Ban the Cross?

Is BA Within Its Rights To Ban the Cross?

Nice to have a Christian religious discrimination case to discuss for once! On Monday (20 November), an internal hearing at the UK airline BA concluded that the company had been acting fairly to suspend a Christian employee, Nadia Eweida, from her duties for refusing to stop openly displaying what was described by some media as a ‘crucifix’, but was in fact a rather small cross pendant. BA’s uniform policy is that such items may be worn but must be concealed beneath employees’ clothing. However, Sikhs are permitted to wear bangles and Muslims are allowed to wear the hijab on the basis that it would be impractical for such items to be concealed beneath the uniform.

On one level, BA is indeed acting perfectly within their rights. If that is their uniform policy – one which Ms Eweida was aware of when she started working at BA – then it is legitimate for the company to enforce it. Ms Eweida has been offered an alternative job in a non-uniformed role at BA, where she would be entitled to wear her cross openly; but she has turned this down on principle.

On the other hand, BA’s policy itself appears discriminatory, if not perhaps in law (which would have to be proven) at least in fact. Ms Eweida’s argument is that it is her religious duty, as she sees it, to wear her cross openly to testify to the truth of the Christian Gospel. In this sense, the cross is no different from any other religious symbol that members of the religions involved believe it is their duty to wear openly.

In order to test whether BA’s decision is motivated by purely practical considerations, as they claim, or whether the Christian faith is being discriminated against relative to other religions, it would be interesting to see how BA would handle a) symbols from other religions that could be concealed beneath the uniform (e.g. pendants) or b) symbols of Christian faith that it is equally not practical to hide beneath the uniform (e.g. head coverings as advocated by some Baptist or Brethren fellowships). One suspects, though again this can’t be proven, that in case a), the employee would not be suspended like Ms Eweida, owing to fears of the resultant outcry about discrimination; whereas in case b), it might be thought to be more ‘optional’ for an employee to wear such a head covering than for a Muslim to wear a hijab, although in fact wearing the hijab is thought by many to be purely a matter of individual choice.

I feel that behind BA’s decision is an assumption that Christians in secular Western society should not openly bear witness to their faith in their public roles. It is OK for Ms Eweida to be a Christian so long as she keeps her faith to herself: private and hidden beneath her uniform. Displaying her cross – the symbol of her faith – openly would associate it with her public role as a BA check-in operative, symbolised by her uniform. If you will forgive the pun, it is feared that there might be a ‘cross-over’ in the minds of people encountering Ms Eweida, whereby they could fuse the cross and the uniform, and come to the view that BA was a Christian organisation.

Interestingly, the Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu – who has leapt to Ms Eweida’s defence – has taken a stance which, precisely, reminds BA of the Christian heritage of the country of which BA is nominally the national carrier: "British Airways needs to look again at this decision and to look at the history of the country it represents, whose culture, laws, heritage and tradition owes so much to the very same symbol it would ban".

On the contrary, I would argue, BA has banned open wearing of the cross by uniformed staff precisely because it does not wish to identify itself publicly with ‘Christian Britain’. Would it be stretching things too far to suggest that a specific reason for this reluctance – in addition to the general reason of viewing open witness to Christian faith as inappropriate within a secular context – is that BA fears that by doing so it would make itself more of a target for terrorists? After all, Ms Eweida is a check-in operative, in the first line of defence against luggage that could contain a bomb or some other terrorist weapon. The suspension of Ms Eweida (also, interestingly, of Egyptian Christian origin) came in the wake of the hand-luggage terrorist scare. Could BA have been afraid that a potential suicide bomber could be tempted to let off a device concealed in a bag at the check-in counter, which they might otherwise have been able to smuggle into the plane?

But even without this specific context, it is possible that terrorists could adopt the tactic of blowing themselves up at crowded check-in desks before anyone has carried out any inspection of their luggage. And it would not be surprising that BA would be reluctant for its uniformed employees, especially one in such a high-profile and vulnerable role, to mediate an identification between the airline and the Christian faith that could make it more of a target for terrorists. By contrast, if BA allows Muslims and Sikhs to proudly display the symbols of their faith alongside the BA uniform, this creates the kind of public image that could make it less likely for terrorists to single out BA. BA was, after all, supposed to be one of the airlines that would have been directly targeted by the hand-luggage plot that was thwarted in August because of its association with a Britain that is thought by some Muslims to be anti-Islamic.

If this is the unacknowledged context for BA’s banning of Ms Eweida from openly displaying her cross pendant, then it clearly is discriminatory, even if from a security point of view, it is understandable though something of an over-reaction. But it is discriminatory, even excluding that context, if you accept that Ms Eweida’s choice to wear her cross in this way is as valid an exercise of the freedom of religious expression as the choice of Muslim or Sikh employees to wear the symbols of their religions.

But BA appears not to accept that it has denied a human right to Ms Eweida that it does not deny to employees of other faiths. Rather than seeing this as another case of a cultural secularism that is increasingly prejudicial towards Christianity in a way that it is not towards non-Christian faiths (on the grounds of political correctness and respect for minorities), perhaps it is after all possible to view this as the action of a ‘Christian’ organisation. This would be in the broad sense that our secular liberal culture nevertheless views itself as more Christian with respect to religion and the origins of liberalism itself than anything else. As an integral part of this ‘secular-Christian’ culture, precisely, it is held that more definite, doctrinal Christian beliefs and opinions belong to the private domain and should not be ‘imposed’ on other people in public situations where they have a reasonable right not to be confronted by those opinions. Hence, the public representative of an organisation which does symbolise modern Britain, whether it wants to or not, should not use her role to testify to her Christian faith; whereas no one would object to her doing so in a church meeting, at home or in a non-public-facing work role.

In this way, it is maybe ironically because Christianity continues to occupy a privileged place in the beliefs and culture of modern Britain that Ms Eweida’s stance was viewed as an abuse of privilege and of the unspoken cultural code that requires a separation of religious expression from public life that does not apply in the same way to other faiths such as Islam or Sikhism.