Thomas Bores is not religious. He was christened in the Catholic church during his first year on earth, like the overwhelming majority of babies in France. When his parents asked him at age six whether he wanted to go to catechism, he said no, and that was the end of his religious life. Or so he thought.
Decades later when Mr. Bores moved to Berlin, in 2013, he checked the box for “not religious” on his registration form. Two years later, he noticed €550 was missing from his bank account.
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When I arrived in Berlin last year from the United States, I checked the box for “konfessionslos” (not religious) as I registered. That was the end of it, I thought. A few weeks later I received an official-looking letter from the “church-tax office” (Kirchensteuerstelle). It said they needed clarification about my religious affiliation.
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Mr. Frerk describes the German government’s relationship with the church as “intimate.” It’s symbiotic: The tax agency receives about 3 percent of the church income tax as a fee for collecting it. That was about €150 million in 2016.
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This surely must violate privacy laws, I thought, and I found a report on the topic from Berlin’s data-protection official. This 2016 review concluded that because the church-tax offices are not official government agencies, and their employees work for the church, they are not subject to government data-protection laws — even though they are housed in government buildings and receive data from a government agency.
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But when Mr. Frerk sent a letter to Andreas Vosskuhle, the president of the Federal Constitutional Court, asking about his confession, a spokesman declined to answer, saying that religious identity was one of the most personal things about a person. Meanwhile, the court has ruled on numerous occasions that the inclusion of a person’s religious status on tax forms does not violate constitutional law.
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Even Mr. Frerk, the church-tax expert, got into trouble. He was never baptized, never had anything to do with the church, but suddenly received a pay stub that identified him as Protestant. How do you prove a negative? The tax office wanted him to collect letters from every town he'd ever lived in to prove his non-religious status.
So he argued with officials for months before realizing what would solve the problem. He went before a judge to declare his exit. “What church are you leaving?” The judge asked. “I don’t care, any of them,” Mr. Frerk replied. With the official papers in hand, he went back to the tax office. Shortly thereafter he received a letter from the church-tax office, saying, “If you were able to leave the church, that must mean you were a member. We would like you to now pay us the back taxes."
