Is a menorah no more than an ornate candelabra? Are Tibetan prayer beads little more than a bohemian bracelet? Is a crucifix just a symbol of secular Western values?

Shockingly, in a recent decision, the European Court of Human Rights answered the last question in the affirmative. The court, in Lautsi and Others v. Italy, upheld an Italian law requiring that all public classrooms display a crucifix against a challenge that this law violated the rights of non-Christians. The reason I want to talk about this decision is not to get into a nuanced discussion of the differences between European and American religious jurisprudence. Instead, it is because I think this decision reinforces, and extends, a troubling development (from my seminarian perspective): the secularization of religious symbols.

As noted by Stanley Fish in a recent NY Times op-ed, the European Court reached its decision by holding that a crucifix has become a “historical and cultural” symbol that now has an “identity-linked,” not religious, meaning. The crucifix, by this reasoning, stands for “the liberty and freedom of every person, the declaration of the right of man, and ultimately the modern secular state.” In fact, the Court went so far as to pontificate that Christianity itself is not really a religion because it, amongst all world religions, does not espouse exclusion of the nonbeliever.

The spurious reasoning of the Court’s Christianity-is-not-a-religion contention doesn’t even deserve comment. Instead, I want to focus on the crucifix-is-not-religious argument. Normally, atheists or members of other religions who feel that their religious liberty is being impeded upon by the state bring legal challenges to the display of religious symbols. In this context, the crucifix certainly conveys strong religious imagery to non-Christians who would face seeing it in their classroom every day. It would reinforce, to them, their outsider status, perhaps also bringing to surface emotions connected to past persecutions of their faiths in the name of Christianity.

But today I am writing as a seminarian. The reason I am so frustrated at this decision, and decisions by American courts upholding as secular displays of the Ten Commandments, Christmas trees, and nativity scenes, is that these decisions fail to appreciate the power of religious symbolism. As both a religious person and a scholar of the phenomenology of religion, I don’t want to surrender the potential potency of these symbols and their ritualized use.

Rituals link one back to a sacred time and sacred story that transcends one’s own particular experiences. And the collective use of rituals and symbols help people feel that their lives are made meaningful in a set of shared cultural expressions. When they do so, they connect their mortal lives to something bigger.

Only ritual can do justice to this shared cultural vocabulary—to help people find themselves as Jews or Christians or Muslims or Hindis or Buddhists, and as human beings, in these events. So I hope, both for those who feel marginalized when other religions receive state endorsement, and for those who care about maintaining the power of religious symbolism, that we as individuals, courts, and the body politic, begin to see religious symbols and rituals for what they can be.