Land and buildings for one could be taxed. Churches bought or were given land ages ago, before there was a Manhattan or Boston, as we today know it. Go ahead and pay property tax on land worth $250 Million when you barely make income to keep the lights on.
That’s how some cathedrals are managed in europe for instance.
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?
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.
By "millennia" you mean "at most 300 years, maybe"?
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.
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".
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.
I'm not sure I understand your meaning. Are you referring to something different from property tax?
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.
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.
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.
You conveniently forget that the church has no qualms about controlling the state in the US
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 thought you were talking about the USA as a whole, my mistake.
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.
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”?
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.
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).