Abstract The political role of religious value systems poses a great challenge in the perspective of safeguarding women’s citizenship rights. This applies to all the contexts where religious law defines civil, political and social rights and obligations in a manner that systematically promotes differential treatment of women and men, girls and boys. It also applies within the framework of secular laws that protect religious freedom such that discrimination becomes a religious group right. My concern in this article is with the limits to equal citizenship that this latter kind of religious accommodation may pose. I discuss some well‐known commonalities between claims to group accommodation which follow from multiculturalism’s minority‐rights reasoning, and claims to accommodation which, quite independent of ‘minority’–‘majority’ statuses, follow from interpretations of the right to freedom of religion. Such accommodations are of particular relevance to the Norwegian state/religion regime, which forms the ‘...