What would the government in Germany say if the management of a mosque stood up and announced: the police want to deport someone? No way! We simply accommodate people who are obliged to leave the country in a separate apartment in our mosque in Duisburg-Marxloh, we shield them, close the door, no police are allowed in there, no matter what the secular administrative courts may have ruled on this deportation case. We don’t care. Imam is boss.
One may assume that there would not be quite as much understanding as there is for the practice of church asylum. This practice is such that the police in Germany tolerate it when the churches protect people from deportation. The police will then politely stand outside. The former Interior Minister (and current President of the Evangelical Church Congress) Thomas de Maizière, CDU, was beaten a few years ago for comparing church asylum with Sharia, Islamic law, for this reason. He has been accused of hate speech. He already had a point. No matter how you feel about deportations and the fact that churches in this country sometimes courageously prevent them: they are actually putting their church law above state law.
And what would the state say if orthodox Jews bought a company in this country and then announced: From now on, all our new employees, regardless of whether they are Jewish or not, have to adhere to the basic principles of Jewish lifestyle in their private life as well! No pork and no driving on Shabbat, please. Otherwise they will be fired. Oh yes: We will no longer have works councils in the future, legal regulations or not, we know better. And: The right to strike, a nice thing actually, even enshrined in Article 9 of the Basic Law, will be deleted.
One can assume that German labor courts would not accept it quite as readily as they do if church welfare organizations such as Caritas or their Protestant counterpart, the diaconia, nursing services or old people’s homes and subject them to their regulations. Church labor law is a parallel world. Wherever a company is allowed to call itself “religious”, this means a journey through time to the labor law of earlier days: There are no works councils, and the “employee representatives” appointed instead are mainly equipped with the right to listen. Strikes also do not go well with the special bond in a church “community of service,” they say. The Federal Constitutional Court even gave its blessing to this in 2014. It ruled: A Catholic hospital in Düsseldorf was allowed to fire a chief physician because he had married for the second time after a divorce.
The state collects the membership fees for the churches
After all, what would German politicians say if an Islamic clergyman were publicly criticized in this country because he is allegedly involved in a network of covering up and enabling sexual assaults on children and young people – and at the same time he was chairman of the Want to stay on the Broadcasting Council of Bayerischer Rundfunk, the powerful body that appoints directors and monitors whether journalists are fulfilling their “public service mandate”?
Sorry, that was a joke question. There are no Islamic representatives among the 50 members of the Bavarian Broadcasting Council, who, according to Article 6 of the Bavarian Broadcasting Act, are supposed to represent the “significant political, ideological and social groups” in the state. Instead, there are only “two representatives each from the Catholic and Protestant churches, whereby the church women’s organizations must be taken into account, as well as one representative from the Jewish religious community,” as the law states. The chairman from 2014 until a few weeks ago was Lorenz Wolf, the official, i.e. church judge, of the Archdiocese of Munich-Freising, who only resigned from allegations of sexual abuse after weeks of protests urged to retreat. “Until further notice,” he added.
That’s the legal situation. The two Christian churches enjoy privileges that other, numerically significant, religious communities in Germany do not enjoy. This unequal treatment is widespread, it can be found in the education system, in labor law and of course in tax law, where the state collects the membership fees for the churches. Perhaps, according to the legal scholar Eric Hilgendorf, whose standard work on the law on religion and belief was recently published in a new edition, the churches would have a stronger incentive to “appear more customer-friendly” if they had to take care of their own financing.
The Federal Republic prefers one religious community to others. It hasn’t been noticed for a long time because the other religious communities in this country played such a minor role. But the larger the religious minorities become and the smaller the group of church members on the other hand, the more obvious this injustice becomes. Today, the state often counters the non-Christian communities with the following argument: you are not organized centrally and hierarchically like the churches, we lack clear contact persons with you, which is why we cannot accommodate you as much. But that’s a weak argument. The state must not demand that Muslims and Jews position themselves in the same way as Christians so that it respects them just as much. Just as he must not ask women to first become like men before granting them the same rights.
Some church representatives are beginning to show understanding
European judges have long wondered about the privileges of the churches in this country, but there are still employment contracts in Germany that prohibit church employees from entering into same-sex marriages. So far there have only been isolated objections from the European Court of Justice, which have not yet shaken German canon law, this historically grown network of old agreements with the state. But it’s already beginning. Some church representatives are also beginning to show some understanding. Individual dioceses, such as Hildesheim and Würzburg, have already declared that they no longer want to use their legal power to keep employees excessively small for the time being. They are gestures of humility now that the Catholic Church has come under so much criticism for the abuse cases that are coming to light.
A leveling of the legal privileges of the Christian churches is needed – this is important – not only now and suddenly as a punishment for the abuse scandals. It’s been a long time coming, simply to restore fairness to all believers in the country, whether they have different beliefs or not at all. In a state that guarantees its citizens freedom of religion, it is not a question of whether the state has particular sympathies for individual worldviews. It’s about the state maintaining neutrality towards worldviews. That means equidistance.
Especially since the privileges of the churches go even further: everyone who pays taxes in Germany helps finance the salaries of bishops and church employees. Not through the church tax, but: the state recently transferred more than 590 million euros, still as compensation for church property expropriated in 1803. In some dioceses, these state subsidies account for almost a third of the budget. The imam pays for this, and the ultra-Orthodox Jewish entrepreneur pays for this (some of whose mosques and religious communities also benefit from public funds). But also Buddhists and Baha’is, atheists, agnostics and people who have left the church to no longer help finance its structures.