n keeping with what experts had been saying for a long time, in October 1993, the Church of Scientology International (CSI), the mother church of the Scientology religion, and more than 150 affiliated churches, missions and social reform organizations in the United States were recognized as fully tax-exempt religious organizations by the Internal Revenue Service, America’s federal tax agency.
That sweeping statement does not begin to describe the drama behind the Church’s 40-year battle to win recognition from the U.S. government as a religious and charitable organization.
How little the magnitude and import of this recognition is grasped by the German government is illustrated by the reaction of its embassy in Washington, D.C. Just over three weeks after the IRS issued its ruling, an embassy official named Reimann sent a “briefing” on the IRS decision to his Foreign Affairs Office in Germany.
Although Reimann pretended to present a factual analysis and summary of the tax-exempt ruling, all he really did was summarize misrepresentations and falsehoods that had appeared in American newspapers. From those he extracted the passages which were clearly negative. He conveniently overlooked the many more articles that appeared in the most prestigious newspapers around the world and failed to inspect original information at its source.
More importantly, he also ignored completely an official briefing on the ruling that had been sent to his embassy by the IRS itself.
Had Reimann really done a professional job and included the information sent to him by the IRS, as he would have done had he been carrying out his duties responsibly, he would have come up with a different, correct result.
Reimann’s letter illustrated the bigotry demonstrated toward Scientology by German government officials, and showed that he didn’t want to be any more informed about the rigorous exemption process that the Church had undergone than a newspaper reporter scanning the wire services for a story. Moreover, it proved that even when presented with overwhelming evidence of the Church’s bona fides, the German government improperly continued to apply a different standard to the Church of Scientology than to the established, state-supported religions.
In these assaults upon an American religion, the German government has chosen to ignore that churches of Scientology in Germany operate according to the same policies and engage in exactly the same activities as churches of Scientology in the United States.
