The President of the Humanist Association of Germany, Frieder Otto Wolf, today described the first final report of the Bündnis 90/Die Grünen commission “Weltanschauungen, Religions and the State” as an important and valuable step towards a contemporary religious policy. The report was presented in Berlin on Thursday by Bettina Jarasch, lead director of the Religious Policy Commission and member of the Federal Executive Board, and Green Party Federal Chairwoman Simone Peter. “The report has raised the bar for all discussions about a future-proof relationship between the state and religious and non-religious citizens. In future, no party that recognizes the equal rights and equal treatment of people with and without religious denominations as a current and permanent political task should fall behind the positions and proposals formulated in the report,” said Wolf. The report presented today is the first to comprehensively formulate concrete proposals and positions on shaping the relationship between the state and a religiously and ideologically pluralistic society in line with the times, on reducing discrimination in employment law, on the transparency of church finances and on procedures for dealing with fundamental ethical issues. The report is the result of more than two years of work by a 24-member commission, which was set up by the federal party executive in 2013 at the suggestion of the Secular Greens working group. The report is to be presented to the federal delegates’ conference of Bündnis 90/Die Grünen for approval in the fall of 2016. “We believe that many of the proposals contained in the report on current religious policy issues point the way forward,” continued Frieder Otto Wolf. Wolf referred, for example, to the explicit mention of the need for the inclusion and participation of non-denominational people and non-religious ideological communities, for example in public broadcasting bodies, as well as to the criticism of the status quo of the privileged situation of churches in labor law formulated in the report. The background to the growing need for legal reforms, but also for readjustments in political practice with regard to the equal treatment and inclusion of citizens with no religious denomination, is a steadily increasing number of non-religious people and a growing plurality of ideologies within and outside the denominational communities. The Humanist Association of Germany is committed to equal, self-determined and non-patronizing coexistence for all citizens and against discrimination based on religious or ideological beliefs. “Of course, we continue to see various areas in which the debate on a contemporary relationship between the state, religion and ideologies cannot be concluded even with this fine report,” says Frieder Otto Wolf. “Here we will continue to seek dialog with Bündnis 90/Die Grünen and provide impetus.” In his view, however, all other democratic parties must now feel challenged to provide concrete information about their stances on the issues listed in the report. “Not only as an association, but also as individual voters, we can and should demand clear answers to such questions even more actively in future,” Wolf concluded.
Further information
“Glass walls” report on the discrimination of non-religious people in Germany
