Germans Are Quitting Church to Avoid Paying Taxes
Jan 21, 2022 2:11:56 GMT
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Post by basmaticathury on Jan 21, 2022 2:11:56 GMT
Little-known fact: Christians and Jews in Germany pay between eight and nine percent of their payroll tax to the church or synagogue every single month. This practice, known as Kirchensteue (“church tax” in German) or Kultussteuer (“worship tax”), sees worshippers help fund the religious institutions they were baptised in and registered with as kids. Those include Catholic and Protestant churches and Jewish synagogues, while Orthodox Christians, Buddhists, Muslims and a few other groups are exempt.
Just to put this in context, that means that someone who earns the average monthly Berlin salary of just over €3,500 before taxes will end up paying more than €46 in church tax. It’s calculated based on your payroll tax, AKA the tax on your income and salaries withdrawn at the end of the month, which in Germany can vary between 14 and 45 percent. In this example, over the course of a year, you will be “donating” €550 to a service you may not even actually use.
In 2020, the Catholic and Protestant churches in Germany collected €12 billion from these slivers of tax, €800 million less than the previous year. That’s because more Germans than ever are opting to quit the church, partly in an effort to escape a tax that’s been enshrined in German law in some form since 1919. In 2019 alone, over half a million people left the church, with numbers dropping drastically for both Catholic and Protestant denominations. A 2021 Report found an additional third of German believers who pay the tax considered leaving the faith last year, too.
One of those ex-attendees is Andrea, 26, who quit the Protestant church in 2020. Her decision came during a Christmas spent with family in Gütersloh, a small city in western Germany. Her grandmother asked Andrea when she’d last visited church. The truth was, she hadn’t stepped inside one since she went on a school trip in 2014. “The fact that it had been so long didn’t sit well with her,” Andrea says. “She told me she’d pray for me. That’s when I made the decision to leave completely.”
Andrea had already been considering doing this for years, since she moved to Hamburg to study, but she could never go through with it. “It was partly laziness, partly ignorance, and partly because I didn’t want to disappoint my granny,” she says.
Carsten Frerk, a humanist and expert on church finances, explained that German Christians are theoretically only supposed to pay the tax once they’ve officially become a member of their church following their confirmation. However, in practice, anyone who’s been baptised ends up having the tax detracted from their payroll at the end of the month.
Just to put this in context, that means that someone who earns the average monthly Berlin salary of just over €3,500 before taxes will end up paying more than €46 in church tax. It’s calculated based on your payroll tax, AKA the tax on your income and salaries withdrawn at the end of the month, which in Germany can vary between 14 and 45 percent. In this example, over the course of a year, you will be “donating” €550 to a service you may not even actually use.
In 2020, the Catholic and Protestant churches in Germany collected €12 billion from these slivers of tax, €800 million less than the previous year. That’s because more Germans than ever are opting to quit the church, partly in an effort to escape a tax that’s been enshrined in German law in some form since 1919. In 2019 alone, over half a million people left the church, with numbers dropping drastically for both Catholic and Protestant denominations. A 2021 Report found an additional third of German believers who pay the tax considered leaving the faith last year, too.
One of those ex-attendees is Andrea, 26, who quit the Protestant church in 2020. Her decision came during a Christmas spent with family in Gütersloh, a small city in western Germany. Her grandmother asked Andrea when she’d last visited church. The truth was, she hadn’t stepped inside one since she went on a school trip in 2014. “The fact that it had been so long didn’t sit well with her,” Andrea says. “She told me she’d pray for me. That’s when I made the decision to leave completely.”
Andrea had already been considering doing this for years, since she moved to Hamburg to study, but she could never go through with it. “It was partly laziness, partly ignorance, and partly because I didn’t want to disappoint my granny,” she says.
Carsten Frerk, a humanist and expert on church finances, explained that German Christians are theoretically only supposed to pay the tax once they’ve officially become a member of their church following their confirmation. However, in practice, anyone who’s been baptised ends up having the tax detracted from their payroll at the end of the month.
