This sounds incredibly bad. But - it sounds too bad. Two managers fired and none sued? He did not sue? All in a potential company destroying matter? The german courts would reign destruction upon this company if it happened there, and discrimination laws in the US are even harsher.
Remember that Germany is a country where you can't even criticize the right-wing politics of Israel without being branded as an anti-semite. Discrimination against Jews does exist of course, but this brazenly?
From how he describes it, it's not clear that this was descrimination against Jews specifically rather than other religions in general. Christianity gets a lot of special treatment in Germany despite the law ostensibly favoring no one religion over another. If the "seasons greetings" did not include specifically Christian messages ("Christmas" in German doesn't have "Christ" in it and Christmas Day and Easter Monday are bank holidays) I could imagine a discrimination case being hard to win, especially in the absence of unions or at the very least a works council.
I'd argue it does demonstrate a very clear bias and may even be motivated by antisemitism (latent if not deliberate) but there's a difference between what's right and what's legal. Not to mention that precisely due to the influence of pro-Israel groups (and the latent antisemitism too) you probably don't want to be branded as "the Jew who cries antisemite" as that might interfere with your employability.
A blanket ban for mentioning religious holidays outside of christian holidays would fit to bavaria and would even be defendable there (there is the famous case of the crucifix being allowed in school rooms there, but no other religious symbols). It would be seen as a way to limit the attack surface when mentioning one holiday but not the other, apart from the ones which are state-wide. But that's an explainable policy then. It's the firings of the managers that don't match with that, plus the silence.
That puts it too strongly. Yes, that the german state is collecting the money for the church is strange. The biggest political party calls itself christian. Then there is the habit of having religious institutions organize public daycare (kindergarten). Even worse is the Tanzverbot, forbidding public parties around easter, as that evokes fundamentally religious countries governed by church leaders, as in Iran.
But exactly that is not the case in Germany. There is no visible or noticeable influence of religious leaders, of church positions being unmoveable pillars of german politics. Many examples, divorce, abortion, same-sex marriage. With the paragraph above it is obvious that there is some influence, but it paints the wrong picture when looking at society and politics as a whole. The influence of christian fundamentalism on US politics for example is way bigger.
All of this is the effect of having done the separation of church and state over a hundred years ago, 1803 and earlier, but then stopping there. Afterwards there was a coexistence, varyingly strong, but nothing more.
Germans today simply aren't very religious, churches are mostly only visited on Christmas, and even then only by a small minority.
Germany does not have a separation of state and church. That's not something that exists in the constitution. We have a right to freedom of religion (with a bunch of caveats) and we don't have a national religion. But that's pretty much it.
Heck, the Federal Republic of Germany upon its foundation decided to uphold its end on contracts with the Catholic church dating back to the German Empire and even before that by arguing itself to be the "legal successor" of those entities. This results in a bunch of oddities like Germany literally paying money to parts of the Catholic church (for leases, debts and such), churches (and formally church-run organizations even if they're 100% state-funded) being exempt from most labor laws and yes, the tithe being collected by the German tax agency.
However formally this is not specifically tied to Christianity. It's just defined in such a way making it extremely difficult for any other religious group to qualify in the same way after the fact.
> The state even collects the tithe! Separation of state and church...
It's a collection service to simplify processes that costs the religious or philosophical organizations who participate (not all do) about 3% of their revenue.
It increases that revenue by a very much larger percentage because
(1) it is automatic every month and (2) it is opt-out because when you register in a German town for residence your religious affiliation determines who by default will get your money.
Many expats aren't even aware of this and react very surprised when I tell them about this, then they go check their docs and sure enough the church has been siphoning off their money and they are making their own private donations.
And as a final insult to injury: opting out costs money! Not a lot, but still.
(Sounds like you know that, for the others). You can't opt out of this, for regular income. You can only leave the church. And that can cost a bit (seems like up to 60€?), depending on where you are in Germany.
Right, exactly. So if you don't want to leave the church
you're stuck with a fixed portion of your income taken away
whether you can afford it or not. It's - from my Dutch POV -
complete madness. Not that there isn't plenty of things wrong
here but this particular thing about Germany really irks me.
I see in the Netherlands church is financed by donors, which sounds better. But here in Poland we have an even worse variant than in Germany: the Church receives money from the government every year. The quantity doesn’t depend on the number of members. In fact, even though there was a huge wave of apostasies, the amount of money grows asymptotically year after year. So everyone, regardless of membership (no opt-out), has their money given to the church and the amount seems to be going in the opposite direction than membership. That’s strictly worse than in Germany.
That's something the church decided to set up. Being a member of an organization means following their rules, and yes, that can become complex when you're in an organization with many chapters (e.g. international) where each chapter has its own quirks.
As for the fee: it's bureaucracy, and as such, it costs a processing fee. When you join, the church pays for you, when you leave, they don't.
Both of these are decisions made by the church, not the state. Bring it up with them.
The tax office is just the collection agent. That arrangement made more sense when wages were paid in cash, but the employer already diverted your income tax (+ "church tax") for you (and then the tax office routed the church tax portion of that to your registered church, in a time when practically everybody was member of _some_ such organization).
Maybe it should be revised or dropped, but from the government's point of view, that's a loss in income (approximately 0.08 × 0.03 ~ 0.25% of church members' income tax revenue: 400M€ in 2022 less for the tax collectors) for a service that's practically free to implement.
(full disclosure: I'm a member of an organization that chose not to use the church tax scheme for its members.)
Remember that Germany is a country where you can't even criticize the right-wing politics of Israel without being branded as an anti-semite. Discrimination against Jews does exist of course, but this brazenly?