One of the advantages of being a historian is knowing historical background current events. This can mean knowing why the rules of something don’t quite seem to match up with the stated purpose – the current American laws about civil marriage being only between a man and a woman are actually a good example: as the judge who ruled it unconstitutional noted, our current civil marriage concepts are anachronistic – or simply not having any idea why they exist in the first place. The role of the church in Germany is one of these.
I got the idea to write this post when I was establishing my residency for a research stay. Even though my visa was for less than a year, the civil servants asked for my birth date, my reasons for coming to Germany, and my religion, among other things. One of those three might be illegal in the United States, in that it was not for statistical purposes and I did not have the right to refuse to answer. I asked why. They told me it was for church taxes.
As far as I know I’m not subject to any normal German taxes, but apparently the church taxes – paid by Protestants and Catholics to their respective churches – exist for everyone and thus if I was Christian I would have to pay. Germany is not exactly the most religious of nations, even for Europe, and the era of confessionalization ended long before the French Revolution. So where does this come from?
After the Reformation, the German states that converted to Lutheranism quickly secularized their churches. They closed the monasteries and convents, took control of church lands, and basically created a state religion on Luther’s principles. Older historiography argued that the princes often converted to get their hands on the church’s sizeable wealth, but we now know that most of this new income went to the new Protestant church, its pastors, its institutions, its catechisms, and so forth. Through the Tridentine period and the eighteenth century, Catholic states followed suit. These did not secularize church wealth, per se, but they certainly extended controls over the churches, priest selections, the uses of the church’s local wealth for wages, church repairs, and charity, and limited outside interventions. But just as confessional identity solidified, the ravages of the Thirty Years’ War, converting princes, and the mercantilist love of higher populations led to tolerated populations that did not follow the local state’s religious whims.
Essentially, unlike the United States, each German state developed significant controls over their churches to the point where it became part of the state in all senses of the term. Tithes were just another form of taxation, in a sense, a literal church tax. Fast forward a couple hundred years and here we are. Germany’s church taxes, still regulated and collected by the individual Länder and not the national government, help maintain (seemingly often empty) churches.
A similar phenomenon continues in the schools. Most schoolchildren here have to take a religion class along with their other classes and it’s still divided among Protestants and Catholics. Those who do not wish to take those (well, their parents do not want it) get to enroll in an ethics class. My understanding is that the ethics class is often considered the one for the lazy students who want the easy grade without working too hard.
Again, this should strike most Americans as very odd and lead to a slightly sickly feeling, like something’s just not right. But again, the early modern German schoolmasters were part of the religious establishment and were thus chosen, paid, and examined by state institutions like the local religious conservatorium. Their major role was to aid the local priest in religious instruction like the catechism and develop strong moral fiber in the lord’s subjects. Each state often had its own catechism too.
Knowing the background might not mean we like the situation more than we did before. I still find the concept of a church tax to be… odd, at the very least. But institutional and historical inertia allows us to understand why it still exists.
Maybe it’s easier to understand if we remember that America’s freedom of religion in the Bill of Rights was meant to avoid a national church. Several states continued to have state churches well into the nineteenth century.