“The still highly topical discrimination of hundreds of thousands of people without a Christian confession who want to work in the education, social and healthcare sectors due to the special privileges enjoyed by church organizations hardly corresponds to an open and modern attitude of faith that many Christian believers in our country stand for today”, said Frieder Otto Wolf, President of the Humanist Association of Germany, on Sunday in Berlin in response to a new study on discrimination through church employment law, which was published on Friday.
The study “Serving Loyally” shows the effects of special loyalty obligations for applicants and employees at church-run institutions based on numerous case reports and court rulings from recent years.
With regard to the new research findings, Wolf said: “The facts presented there can be found to be a significant reason for many moments of strong rejection of the Christian faith and the churches, which today determine people’s thinking and also public debates. Christian believers could and should build on this in order to demand justice and fairness even where churches are involved in society as providers of services.”
Frieder Otto Wolf went on to say that the importance of ideological fidelity and special protection of tendencies in places of central church professional activities must be seen as a legitimate interest. “However, this should not justify or relativize discrimination contrary to human rights, especially in professional life.”
However, such discrimination is still commonplace today, as the study has now shown, when church organizations, despite being largely financed by state funds, impose narrowly defined moral and religious concepts on people working without a mission to preach, which even a growing number of Christians reject as pre-modern, or where employees of other faiths and non-denominational employees are excluded from all employment with church and denominational organizations.
“This cannot be in the interests of enlightened Christians who stand for a tolerant and open society,” said Frieder Otto Wolf. Finally, he called on all humanistically-minded people to always make any kind of discrimination public and at the same time to work towards reforms in dialog with those affected, political stakeholders and liberal members of the churches.
Further information:
Press release on the presentation of the “Serving Loyally” study
