John Rodrigues
On May 26, 2026, the California State Assembly overwhelmingly passed Assembly Bill 2017 (AB 2017) by a 64–1 vote. The bill, introduced by Assemblymember Matt Haney (D-San Francisco), is now heading to the State Senate, positioning California to legally institutionalize theological framework under the guise of progressive inclusivity. What that theological framework is, is alarming.
AB 2017 seeks to officially designate the two major Islamic holidays—Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha—as state-recognized holidays. If passed, public K-12 schools would be legally mandated to grant student absences for these days as “justifiable personal absences,” ensuring zero academic or truancy penalties. The bill also opens the door for local school boards and community colleges to shut down campuses entirely. Additionally, it extends workplace protections to state employees, granting them the explicit right to use accrued vacation or personal leave to observe these holidays without professional or financial repercussions.
For the progressive lawmakers backing the bill, the payoff is clear: it secures political capital, virtue-signals adherence to the tenets of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), and appeases well-funded religious advocacy groups. But beneath the surface lies a calculated subversion of Western principles and a fundamental blindness to the spiritual warfare at play. Do not be misled, this is not being done out of the goodness of anyone’s heart.
By elevating specific religious holidays into state law, this flirts with violating the Establishment Clause by showing blatant favoritism and opens Pandora’s box to competing demands from countless other religious sects (and in CA that could become interesting) seeking the same state-sanctioned privileges.
Additionally, the passage of Assembly Bill 2017 exposes a profound contradiction by granting explicit, state-mandated protections to one faith while at the same time scrubbing traditional Western religious expressions —Judeo Christian—from the culture, as if they never existed; doing so, under the guise of the separation of church and state. If you live in California, this is what we’ve come to expect.
While Christian and Jewish symbols have been aggressively privatized—such as public schools stripping Christmas and Easter of their names in favor of “Winter” and “Spring” breaks—this legislation weaponizes state statute to rewrite school and workplace calendars with a non-Western faith, creating a blatant double standard. From a biblical perspective, this attempt to equalize fundamentally conflicting truth claims within the civic fabric is a dangerous form of syncretism that defies the warning of 2 Corinthians 6:15-16, where we are challenged, “Or what harmony has Christ with Belial, or what has a believer in common with an unbeliever? Or what agreement has the temple of God with idols?”
By framing a theological observance through the lens of a “marginalized identity,” these advocates effectively disarm liberal opposition. Progressive lawmakers—who usually advocate fierce separation of church and state—are being manipulated into institutionalizing religious holidays into secular law. The vocabulary of social justice is being weaponized to codify religious privilege, creating a bizarre double standard where the secular left willingly accommodates a deeply conservative theological framework it would fight tooth and nail if it bore a Christian or Jewish label.
Besides everything already stated, AB 2017 carries profound theological implications for the discerning believer. Scripture repeatedly warns that the true battlefield is not found in legislative chambers, but in the spiritual realm (Eph 6:12), and we keep forgetting this. By codifying holidays dedicated to an ideology that explicitly denies the deity, crucifixion, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, secular authorities are blindly inviting spiritual deception into the foundational institutions of our society. In 2 Corinthians 6:14, the mandate is clear: “Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers; for what partnership have righteousness and lawlessness, or what fellowship has light with darkness?”
By systematically integrating non-Christian religious frameworks into state law, lawmakers are legally forcing public institutions—and by extension, the citizenry—into a spiritual partnership with a system completely incompatible with biblical truth. This is not benign multiculturalism; it is a total lack of spiritual discernment; and it is stage setting. The culture is succumbing to a spirit of delusion, exchanging absolute truth for a counterfeit gospel of humanistic tolerance (2 Tim 4:3). This will not adversely affect only Christians, but all. So much more could be said…
We do not have to guess where this trajectory is aimed – ultimately, we look to the Word and see the world succumbing to a one world religion, the Antichrist, etc. Secondly, we only have to look across the Atlantic to see the immediate effects, Western Europe -specifically the United Kingdom, France, and Sweden, stands as catastrophic proof that making legal concessions under the banner of multiculturalism never ends there. It is a progressive myth that these accommodations lead to harmonious integration.
Instead, history shows that what begins as a simple holiday accommodation inevitably serves as a foothold for what we are witnessing each day. In Europe, these initial concessions escalated into demands for parallel legal systems, such as Sharia arbitration councils, which directly fractures the host nation’s sovereign laws. The end result is not a cohesive, inclusive melting pot, but rather the takeover of a nation by the steady erasure of Western foundational values that built them.California’s AB 2017 is not an innocent gesture of goodwill. It is a dangerous step toward allowing an aggressive theological framework to permanently overwrite the dominant Western culture that made us, as Americans, what we are. If the State Senate fails to halt this bill, California will find out the hard way that when you invite the Trojan Horse of religious law into secular institutions, the host culture is always the one that gets erased.
