4 ms·
Are there any countries where the religious groups are NOT exempt from taxes? I'd be curious if this has been done and those religious groups still managed to r
by seesawtron 6y ago
Are there any countries where the religious groups are NOT exempt from taxes? I'd be curious if this has been done and those religious groups still managed to remain "open to public" while surviving on private donations.
- laurencerowe 6y agoBritain nationalised church property during the reformation.
- skissane 6y agoIt is more complex than that. The Church of England started out as the English branch of the Roman Catholic Church. In that form, it was scarcely a private body – it was the state religion, intimately entwined with the state, with the power to levy taxes, and it ran its own court system with jurisdiction over issues which today would be viewed as essentially secular in character (validity of marriages; inheritance of personal property; crimes committed by clergy), and the state would recognise and enforce that court system's decisions. The property of such a state religion is hardly "private property", it is arguably "public property". For centuries, the King and Pope had intermittently fought over control of it (a situation not unique to England, but repeated across mediaeval Europe). Henry VIII did not see himself as carrying out a state takeover of the Church, but simply as settling that traditional conflict between Pope and King decisively in his own favour.