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.

Yes, that's definitely worse.

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.)

The GEZ is worse ;)

We used to have that here too... as well as TV inspectors, seriously.