I grew up in a rural village in Germany. The church operated the kindergarten and the retirement home, and ran some youth organizations with stuff like kids' su

I grew up in a rural village in Germany. The church operated the kindergarten and the retirement home, and ran some youth organizations with stuff like kids' summer activities. One city over the church ran the hospital, like, to the point where they had nuns on-site. I never really looked too deeply into it but it always felt weird to me how entangled the church is with what is basically treated as public services and hence public finances, since they still get to apply their religious values to hiring discrimination and that sort of thing. I didn't regularly attend the religion classes, but I did once or twice and they gave me candy for memorizing the ten commandments. Organized religion is a-ok in my book! (In high school, they offered an "ethics" class as alternative to denomination-based religion classes, but I guess in the much smaller elementary school the student numbers wouldn't have justified that.)