THE PERSECUTION OF RELIGIOUS MINORITIES IN GERMANY

By Dr. Dennis O'Keefe ©1997

INTRODUCTION

Dr Dennis O'Keefe was a member of an investigative committee, drawn from various religious traditions including Catholic, atheist and Protestant. In this document, extracts of which are included in this paper, the 'First Report of the Committee to investigate discrimination against religious and Ethnic Minorities in Germany', Dr O'Keefe and others uncover aspects of religious and social intolerance which are reminiscent of the 1930s.

Dr Dennis O'Keefe

In general one detects in modern Germany the rather standard bureaucratic elitism and managerialism which typifies most of Europe and to which the British case is a marked exception.

This is characteristic of German politics as a whole and religious policy is only a special case of this. According to Andrew Gimson of The Spectator (22nd November 1997) an unprecedented and revealing flood of books converge in the view that the Bonn Republic is played out. According to Gimson Germany has long been run by a liberal elite which does not know what democratic politics is all about and does not know that it does not know.

In the case of it's religious attitudes Germany shares the mainland European hostility to eccentric religions or perhaps we should more properly say to those seen as eccentric religions.

The difference in fact concerns not whether the religion is seen as odd, but on what follows from this. I think most people in Britain or America probably see the Unification Church and the Church of Scientology as eccentric, indeed many people will perhaps see them as downright odd; but we are inclined to tolerate them - that is the big difference.

I formed the impression that the question of the treatment of religious minorities is one of politics more than religion. Like Britain, Germany is not a very religiously observant society. The big difference between Germany and say Britain or America is that Germany is run by an establishment. (So much so that the state enforces a Church Tax on everyone - unless they agree to sacrifice Christian burial! Ed.)

All societies are, of course, more or less run by an establishment, and the question how much more or less is an important one. The crucial thing is the extent to which there is a dialogue between the establishment and the populace. And dialogue is largely meaningless if the establishment simply takes it's validation from majoritarian sources. In lots of ways the democratic problem is the treatment accorded those who do not accept the general consensus, in this case the general religious apathy.

I have to say that the motivation for the harassment of such diverse groups as Scientologists, Charismatic Christians and Christian Faith-Healers was not at all apparent to me. Ask me why the British and Americans are more tolerant than the Germans and I have to say that I do not know.

Within the various political structures of the German state there are specialist anti-sect commissioners. The overall campaign is spearheaded by a Bundestag Commission of Inquiry (the Enquete Commission) which it seems targets some 600 sects. These include Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons and Scientologists.

The only two officially supported churches in Germany, the Catholic and the Lutheran between them support 140 clergy who specialise as anti-sect experts.

Being an expert on the 'secten' can bring career rewards similar to what you can collect in America for being an expert on Affirmative Action or in Britain for being an expert in Equal Opportunities. You can make your career hounding minority faiths. It has nothing to do with religious conviction - Germany is not a religiously devout society - but a lot to do with a kind of conventional tolerance.

As we are lead to understand it, the establishment in Germany in it's religious dimensions consist of the two big parties and the two big churches and their base is majoritarian apathy.

It seems that many Germans either do not care if eccentric minority religious movements get a hard time or positively approve of the fact if they do.

So church and State interpenetrate and collude in the ill-treatment of minority religions. The policy is both Federal and at State level. Schleswig-Holstein actually passed a law reversing the safeguards provided by data protection to members of certain sects. Germany is not a despotism or a police state of course, so there are rights of appeal, sometimes vigorously pursued. Hearings get stretched out though, so that it is difficult to know what is happening in the overall picture.

What is strange is that a concerted campaign is possible at all. People have lost their jobs and livelihoods and had their good names ruined. There have been orchestrated media campaigns to discredit the so-called sects in question.

Finally there is good reason to think that the German intolerance is the model for what would happen in a unified or Federal Europe. This month the European parliament has been debating a motion urging interference with and regulation of cults and sects.

(Germany has adopted the English phrase 'outed', used usually in connection with the identification of homosexuals, to describe the identification of sect members, but in addition they are excluded from society, i.e. they lose their jobs, their children are excluded from school etc. Ed)