State benefits: Millions ask why and for what

“A mere attitude of denial can no longer be considered a serious position,” said Frieder Otto Wolf, President of the Humanist Association of Germany, today on the negative recommendation of the report of the Finance Committee of the German Bundestag on a motion (Drs. 18/4842), which aims to set up a commission of experts to evaluate the so-called historical state benefits. The motion submitted by the DIE LINKE parliamentary group in May 2015 was rejected by the committee yesterday with the votes of the CDU/CSU and SPD, while representatives of Bündnis 90/Die Grünen abstained from voting ( Drs. 18/11428). On Thursday evening, MPs in the Bundestag will vote on the motion without further debate. (Update: The plenary session followed the recommended resolution.) The expert commission sought to determine the value of payments made since the constitutional mandate to replace state benefits came into force. It should also examine the extent to which losses due to the expropriation of church property in 1803 have been compensated. The expert commission was also tasked with submitting proposals on the consequences to be drawn from the development of compensation payments to date. In 2017, these historical state payments from the federal states to the major churches amounted to around 524 million euros; in total, more than 17 billion euros have been paid since the Federal Republic of Germany was founded. The total annual payments are increasing, while the number of church members is decreasing. As part of the taxpaying community, the growing group of non-denominational citizens and citizens of other faiths are also contributing to the public budgets from which the historical state payments to the churches originate. Frieder Otto Wolf emphasized that the German constitution gives the Bundestag a clear mandate to establish a legal framework for the redemption of historical state contributions. The Left Party and Alliance 90/The Greens had confirmed the validity of this mandate in recent years with their own political positions, so that there could be no serious doubt about the comprehensibility and binding nature of this constitutional mandate. “The question here is therefore quite clearly to what extent the members of the Bundestag have a serious will to take this small step on the way to a contemporary framework for religious policy reorganizations, which have inevitably been put on the agenda in all parts of our country due to the changed and ever-changing ideological landscape,” says Frieder Otto Wolf. “Millions of non-denominational voters rightly want to know why and for whom payments are being made from public budgets for these services,” Wolf continued. All parliamentary groups in the Bundestag are therefore called upon to submit proposals on the subject to parliament if they want to show themselves to be a credible force in the eyes of voters from outside the church. He reiterated the Humanist Association’s call for the historical state contributions to be replaced by a renewal of the legal and contractual basis that regulates the financial relationship between the state and the churches. The network of financial allocations from the state to religious and ideological communities should be revised on the basis of the principles of ideological neutrality and cooperative secularism provided for in the Basic Law. Transparency with regard to the legal basis and amount must be ensured for all state allocations to churches and other religious and ideological communities. “This transparency is an important prerequisite for the functioning of our democratic structures. Establishing it is therefore also a state task, and the members of the parliamentary groups in the Bundestag must not shirk its realization,” said Wolf.