Muslims want to add holidays to the school calendar. Christians are pressing to use school gyms and auditoriums for worship. Ultra-Orthodox Jews are demanding that the city stop regulating an ancient circumcision rite.
After 12 years of a mayor who has resisted making concessions to religious groups, New York City is in for a change.
The two leading candidates for mayor — Bill de Blasio, a Democrat, and Joseph J. Lhota, a Republican — have pledged to break with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg on a range of issues at the nexus of government and religion. They say they would accommodate two of the most important Muslim holy days, allow church services on school property, and work with Jewish leaders to ease the city’s supervision of circumcision rituals.
Mr. Bloomberg is well known for his experiments in remaking daily life in New York: bike lanes, smoking bans and restaurant report cards. But he is less recognized for another hallmark of his mayoralty: his strictly separationist approach to matters of church and state.
During his tenure, Mr. Bloomberg has declined to feature clergy at Sept. 11 commemorations and once opposed an effort to expand bus service for Jewish day school students.
In 2009, he rejected a resolution by the City Council to add two Muslim holidays to the school calendar, citing concerns about lost instruction time. But he has also been a champion of religious freedom, delivering a rousing defense in 2010 of a proposal to build a mosque near ground zero.
Now, as they look toward a new mayor, religious groups have long wish lists, including a desire that houses of worship be eligible for federal hurricane relief funds (they currently are not) and that religious schools be allowed publicly funded school safety officers.
The candidates have courted religious voters, attending forums at Jewish community centers, visiting mosques and speaking at churches.
Just this weekend, Mr. de Blasio pledged in a radio interview that he would work to change the relationship between City Hall and Orthodox Jews to “make sure the community feels fully included.”
Mr. de Blasio and Mr. Lhota describe themselves as guardians of religious freedom who respect Mr. Bloomberg’s efforts to maintain the separation of church and state but believe he has ignored the needs of religious communities. And Mr. Lhota suggested Mr. Bloomberg had sometimes encroached on the rights of New Yorkers of faith.
“Government should not interfere with religious practice,” Mr. Lhota said in an interview. “We have a government here in the city that has attempted that on a number of occasions.”
Mr. de Blasio said Mr. Bloomberg had governed as if he had a “blind spot” to faith-based groups. “I don’t think the mayor really understands how crucial it is to protecting the fabric of the city,” Mr. de Blasio said in an interview.
Mr. Bloomberg, who is Jewish, has repeatedly expressed a desire to keep religion and government separate, an attitude common among American Jews. “This business of bringing religion into everything is just bad because if you really believe in religion you should be the person out there championing separation of church and state,” he told a biographer, Joyce Purnick, a former reporter and editor for The New York Times. And the mayor’s spokesman, Marc LaVorgna, said last week, “His actions are guided by his belief that the Constitution and Supreme Court rulings aren’t just pieces of paper.” However, Mr. LaVorgna also pointed to the mayor’s defense of the proposed mosque, despite a public uproar, saying, “The mayor stood up and forcefully defended the bedrock principle of religious freedom while nearly every other politician in this city hid for cover.”
Nonetheless, the changes proposed by Mr. de Blasio and Mr. Lhota would represent a shift in tone for New York, a city home to an array of religions, but often synonymous with secularism.
“There’s an openness that you did not see with Bloomberg,” said James R. Kelly, a professor emeritus of sociology at Fordham University. “They are saying, ‘I really am reaching out. I am more inclusive.’ ”
Mr. de Blasio and Mr. Lhota both come from families with ties to the Roman Catholic Church.
Mr. de Blasio, who does not attend church, was raised in a household that did not follow any faith. His father was skeptical of organized religion, and his mother, the daughter of Italian immigrants, left the Catholic Church as a young woman.
Asked to describe his own religious views, Mr. de Blasio consulted with his wife, Chirlane McCray, before settling on a phrase: “On the line.” “I have a very strong philosophy of life that is not religious,” Mr. de Blasio said. “I have my own spirituality, but it doesn’t take the form of any particular religion.”
Still, Mr. de Blasio said that he was drawn to some aspects of Christianity, and that he admired how religious groups tackled issues like poverty and hunger. As a young man, he became interested in a movement within the Catholic Church known as liberation theology, which emphasizes helping the poor through social action. After graduate school, he worked for a Catholic social justice group that provided humanitarian aid to Nicaragua.
Mr. Lhota was raised a Roman Catholic and attended Catholic schools, though his maternal grandmother was Jewish. His family attended church regularly — even on vacation, he said. He married an evangelical Protestant, Tamra Roberts, and the two now attend All Angels’ Church, an Episcopal Church on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
Mr. Lhota, who has been known to cite Leviticus on the campaign trail, is one of the largest donors to his church. “My religion is intertwined in my life,” he said. Mr. Lhota has said his faith was strengthened in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, when he was a deputy mayor under Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani. “People are inherently religious,” Mr. Lhota said in a 2002 interview published by the American Bible Society. “It’s a shame it takes something like this to invoke God’s presence.”
As deputy mayor, Mr. Lhota was entangled in a religious controversy when Mr. Giuliani threatened to cut funding to the Brooklyn Museum for displaying a portrait of the Virgin Mary that incorporated elephant dung. Mr. Lhota said he was offended by the portrait and considered it a desecration of religion.
The next mayor will be forced to grapple a host of religion-in-the-public-square issues. Both candidates say they support adding the Muslim holidays to the school calendar, although Mr. Lhota would extend the school year by two days to make up for the difference. The candidates would also allow churches to hold worship services in schools — a practice currently taking place over the objections of Mr. Bloomberg, who has fought a long-running legal battle to end it, citing concerns about government endorsement of religion.
Mr. Lhota and Mr. de Blasio have also expressed concern about the mayor’s handling of metzitzah b’peh — a circumcision rite carried out in some ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities that involves sucking the blood from an infant’s wound.
Mr. Bloomberg, citing findings by health officials who say the procedure can spread herpes and has caused some infant boys to die, has tried to regulate the practice by requiring officiants to obtain consent forms from parents. But ultra-Orthodox leaders have argued the city is infringing on their religious rights.
Mr. Lhota and Mr. de Blasio have expressed openness to rethinking the regulation. Mr. Lhota said he would not require consent forms, though he would offer parents information on the risks. Mr. de Blasio said he would keep the consent forms in place temporarily while working with religious leaders to come up with a better method.
Both candidates have said they would like to speed the process by which parents of children in special education programs could receive reimbursement from the city if the children are enrolled in private institutions. And both candidates said they would support using public funds to pay for safety officers at religious schools.