Hundreds of thousands of Christians in Germany are officially renouncing their faith and exiting their churches in an attempt to escape an unusual change in the tax laws of the country. As many as 200,000 Germans submitted official declarations renouncing their membership at the Protestant Church in 2014, the highest number to have been recorded over the last two decades. While the official figures are not yet available, a similar number of people are believed to have left the Catholic Church as well.
In Germany, church members are legally required to pay tax to fund church services and the government collects these donations. Under the country’s laws, any person that was baptized as a child becomes a member of the church by default and is thereafter obliged to pay a certain tax, which is charged as a percentage of his or her income. This tax has to be paid irrespective of the person’s beliefs and his or her church attendance. Up until now, most Christians were willing to pay the tax in return of the many benefits it brought them, including access to daycare facilities and church schools that were funded by the state. However, the only way in which one cannot pay this tax is by making a formal declaration renouncing his or her membership of the church and this too requires a government fee.
A recent decision, though, to extend the usual 8 or 9 percent charge to a person’s capital gains income or the profit secured from selling an asset, appears to have led to a sharp decline in church membership. This new tax regulation was only the last straw that broke the camel’s back for those who were already considering leaving the church, opined Ruth Levin, who is the spokesperson for the Protestant Church in Disnlaken.
From a legal perspective, church tax on capital gains has been payable for a few years but the German government only recently omitted a loophole that earlier allowed church members to bypass the requirement by simply keeping secret their capital gains income. Even though, in the past, those abandoning the church have often included young adults who lost faith in their parents’ beliefs, over the past one year, most of those abandoning the church include pensioners, who fear this tax will eat into their savings income.
The decision to leave the church can however have a serious impact on the lives of those renouncing their membership. While they cannot be excommunicated or stopped from participating in church services, they can be denied specific rites – from access to church-funded schools to religious burials. Catholics who renounce their membership are prohibited from communion, confession and anointing of the sick unless of course they are on the brink of death.
Photo Credits: Concordat Watch
