What a perfect way for the state to exercise control over religious organizations! You’d quickly end up with every such state sponsored “church” as disruptive to state interests as the Church of England, the Lutheran State Churches of Scandinavia or the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association.

China aside given that it's an authoritarian state I much prefer the control the state has over the church here in Germany, because it eliminates virtually all religious sectarianism and has led to the church having adopted teaching and a curriculum that is largely in line with the basic constitutional law and secular values rather than existing outside of it. Same in the UK or Scandinavia.

One of the reasons Islamic extremism is so hard to combat is because Islam exists largely outside of the control of the state, as backyard mosques can basically preach anything regardless how extremist it is, often deliberately recruiting people out of organizations that try to integrate with the state and society at large. I assume this is similar to radical Evangelicalism in the US.

Parallel societies are bad, they're a breeding ground for extremism.

> China aside given that it's an authoritarian state I much prefer the control the state has over the church here in Germany, because it eliminates virtually all religious sectarianism and has led to the church having adopted teaching and a curriculum that is largely in line with the basic constitutional law and secular values rather than existing outside of it.

The picture you paint of government control over religion sounds very authoritarian to me. As far as “parallel societies are bad”, what happened to “diversity is our strength”?

Diversity is a good thing, that's not changed. But diversity doesn't mean 'anything goes'. There's boundaries in a civil society for a reason.

Religious practice is fine but withholding a secular education from children or ditching modern medicine, or attacking the rights of women or exercising corporal punishment isn't.

I don't see how having the ability to put a stop to it is authoritarian, at least not any more than religious extremism itself is. The alternative to government exercising control over religion is having religion exercise control over government. The problem doesn't go away.

> Religious practice is fine but withholding a secular education from children or ditching modern medicine, or attacking the rights of women or exercising corporal punishment isn't.

Fair enough. That’s not what I thought you meant by “keeping religious orgs in line with state secular views” or whatever. Even still, you don’t need state control over religion to achieve those ends, and indeed in the US where the state is constitutionally prohibited from interfering with religion, these things aren’t problems (at least not to any reasonable interpretations).

The First Amendment strongly prevents something like this in the US. There is no way the state can control a religious organization here and that’s a good thing. Americans secularism >> European “secularism”.

Islamic extremism in your country is not due to lack of state control of their mosques. It’s how you have treated generations of Islamic immigrants (Turks on work visas, no citizenships, open borders with lots of “refugees”, etc). Of course they will make parallel societies. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.

Most Turks in Germany are citizens (requirements are if anything laxer than in the US), and there's practically no religious extremism among Turks, so that's just a wrong claim.

And actually extremism among Turks is absent for the very reason I outlined above. In Turkey there's a long tradition of either religious integration in the state in the Ottoman era which had a strong scholastic tradition, or laicism under Atatürk, so there was very little room for sectarianism.

And yes, a lot of extremism is present among refugees, but that just proves the point, where do refugees originate from? Countries with failing state authority.

> Americans secularism >> European “secularism”.

You conveniently forget that the church has no qualms about controlling the state in the US

Which church?

Mostly Southern Baptists and Evangelicals.

Have you been blind to politics in the past few years? From forcing intelligent design into schools to full assault against planned parenthood etc.

I don’t live in, or generally care about the deep south where the Southern Baptist and Evangelical churches apparently share control of the state, so in a sense yes.

I thought you were talking about the USA as a whole, my mistake.

I could not have hoped for a more perfect illustration of my point. We are in perfect agreement on the outcomes, we just disagree on whether the state being in charge of determining public morality is good or not. You, a product of a state indoctrination system, agree with its values. The same thing happens in other countries where the state has different values.

Religious orgs can still do what they want, they just don’t get to use historical buildings willy-nilly.

Then if we’re talking about the UK, it feels weird to argue about religious buildings ownership in a kingdom, where the Queen has a religious role.

Thankfully the First Amendment prevents America from doing that here. I prefer American secularism over the weird European theocratic states that you describe.

Cool, and all the people have to do this with any property held corporately? Or only groups of people who identify as Christians?

The upkeep of a Cathedral is hella expensive, St.Paul's in London claims its building's upkeep cost is > £5.2M ('more than £10 per minute').

A building ownership tax seems sensible, but I'd be amazed if any Capitalist government considered it.

> A building ownership tax seems sensible, but I'd be amazed if any Capitalist government considered it.

I'm not sure I understand your meaning. Are you referring to something different from property tax?

A better solution is to keep it as it is. It has survived millennia. It's their land and states can renege their promises.

American Indians know that state and federal govt is honest to a fault!

> It has survived millennia.

By "millennia" you mean "at most 300 years, maybe"?

Here in USA. Oldest churches are from the 4th century elsewhere.

For the record: I don't think that priests should be able to buy $50M jets or keep 40% of total land of x country tax free, but they should not be forced to sell buildings because property tax is too high.

Yes. My comment was about "here in the USA" because the grandparent comment talked about churches existing "before Boston".

Churches are routinely handed over to the state or to commercial entities in order to preserve them because church membership is in rapid decline and its very expensive to take care of the church building especially if it has "survived millennia".

edit: got it wrong as per below comment

I assume they meant "here in USA" with regard to the comment about 300 years, but are pointing out that outside the US there exist churches as old as 4th century.

What has survived millennia “as it is”? The United States? It was founded scarcely three centuries ago. The Christian church? Ever hear of the reformation, of Calvin, of Protestantism? I.e. one of the main reasons the United States exists?

It absolutely has not survived millennia. What you call your Christian church today would be unrecognisable to the faithful of a century ago, never mind two, or five, or ten, or twenty. Or are you acknowledging that Christianity is the cult of Mithras, and that it’s still a death cult?

In the UK our local church is physically about 850 years old, But there was a church on the site back in 1086 and presumably before, as it was mentioned in the domesday book. It’s Anglican now, before then it was catholic, maybe it used to be a pagan worship site, maybe in future it will be for the cult of Cummings.

It has severe financial issues at the moment - maintaining the courtyard alone costs £1k a month. I’m waiting for more detailed finances on that.

Maintaining finances for any organisation is a basic bread and butter protection against corruption. I don’t see what harm there is in taxing religious organisations the same way as any other charity.