According to "Al":
In your article on the financial crises of the Catholic Church in Germany you wrote that you would be interested to learn whether the Protestant churches are experiencing the same thing.
The financial situation of the Protestant churches is even worse because many more people are leaving the Lutheran churches than the Catholic church. By the way, the official, quasi-state churches in Germany are financed only to about 40 percent by the so-called "church tax". About the same amount of money is paid to them directly by the German government. So, despite the strong influence of the religious right in the United States, I think you are still lucky.
"Al" also helps explain the general situation of churches in Germany, something I'm familiar with from having studied there but it's a good explanation so I though I'd share it with readers:
The more established religious organizations have the status of a public body (Körperschaft des öffentlichen Rechts), which gives them some privileges, like collecting church taxes from their members through the tax office and teaching religion classes in public schools to the children of their members.
The two biggest churches in Germany, the Catholic and the Lutheran Churches, enjoy by far the most privileges. They receive not only subsidies that amount to billions of euros each year, even their bishops are also paid by the government. Religious instruction in school is obligatory. However, those pupils who are not members of a church can attend alternative ethics lessons. The teachers who instruct the pupils in religion classes are employed by the churches but receive their salaries from the government.
In some federal states, like Bavaria, every class room has to have a cross on the wall. According to a decision by the constitutional court the cross has to be removed if one of the pupils is offended by it. However, it happens very rarely, because each time somebody wants the cross removed there it a public outcry and the offenders are socially stigmatized. Organizing the yearly church congresses is subsidized by the local governments. Even the nearly bankrupt city of Berlin paid three million euros for the congress of the Lutheran church in 2003.
Many social institutions, like kindergartens and hospitals, are under the administration of the churches but are financed by the government. The employees of these institutions have to comply with the religious rules of the churches. If, for example, an employee of a Catholic hospital gets a divorce he or she can be fired.
Representatives of the two big churches sit in the supervisory boards of the public broadcasting services. As can be expected, criticism of the churches, Christianity, or religion is absent in the broadcasting of the public broadcasting services. By the way, everybody who owns a radio or a TV has to pay a fee to the PBS, regardless of wether they watch public broadcasting or not.
Church taxes are deducted even from unemployment benefits, even if the unemployed person doesn't belong to a church. So even atheists, Muslims or members of smaller churches have to pay taxes to the established churches if they happen to be unemployed. It is only from next year on that this scandal is abolished.
According to the German constitution there should be a separation of church and state. But in reality no political party dares to support this basic principle of a democratic state. The biggest party in Germany is the Christian Democratic Union. In Bavaria the Christian Social Union has won nearly every election since WW2. These two parties mean what their names say. But the other parties are not much better anyway.
The list above could be much longer. These are only a few examples for the lacking separation of state and religion in Germany.
It is a commonplace that Europeans are less religious than Americans. But the facts, apart from surveys, tell a different story. By far most people belong to a religious organization. In 1989, the year before the unification with East Germany, 82.77 percent of the West German population belonged either to the Catholic or the Lutheran Church, 3 percent were Muslim, and a few percent where members of other groups. By far most people still have their children baptized, marry religiously, and pay their church taxes. The main difference between German and American religiosity seems to be that for Germans religiosity is more of a private matter, something that is not shown or spoken about publicly. Some people I have spoken with even deny that they are religious, even though they go sometimes to church and pay their church tax. But anyway, there is no need to show one's religiosity publicly if the public sphere is so much pervaded by religion.
And now the good news: The two big churches are losing members, about 0.5 percent per year. And hopefully, one day the nonreligious will have enough courage to abolish the privileges of the churches.
&nbps;
I want to thank "Al" for providing this information for readers. It's difficult enough to keep up with news about religion in America, but maintaining even a cursory familiarity with religion in other nations is especially difficult. I don't know enough about the history or the local situation and I often don't know the language that the regular news reports are written in.
This is one reason so much news revolves around religion in America — I can't do much more. If, however, any readers outside of America would like to contribute news and commentary about the state of religion in their home countries, I'd love to be able to share it with everyone. I can't fund an international news staff, but perhaps something close could be put together with interested volunteers? A preference is naturally given to anyone who can provide translated quotes from and links to original news stories.
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