ABSTRACT
Religiosity is the conviction that one has privileged access to the world—one might say, to the truth—and that this is, in fact, the only way to comprehend the world as a whole. The religious person divides the world into that which is accessible to people quest for knowledge, and which is precisely for that reason not the essence, and the other, essential part, to which there must be some other approach. In a secular society, a citizen's access to the public sector is defined solely by that status as a citizen and not by what he/she might think. The chapter witnesses a highly controversial debate about the limits to free expression of religiosity: the so-called headscarf debate. The Federal Constitutional Court ruled that this issue had to be decided by parliamentarians and since in Germany education is in the jurisdiction of the Lander, there are different policies in the various federal states.
