Legal Status of Religious Organizations: A Comparative Overview
W. Cole Durham, Jr. Tuesday, 6 July 2010
In many respects, religious organizations are among the oldest communal structures known to human kind, rivaling in their antiquity tribal and clan structures that antedate history. Not surprisingly, the range of organizational structures is as diverse as the range of religions themselves. Indeed, issues of organizational structure are often very significant matters of religious beliefs. Some of the deepest theological divisions in Christian history, for example, have centered on questions of ecclesiastical polity (e.g., whether or not the Pope in Rome outranks other bishops; whether church governance should be controlled by bishops or other hierarchs, whether indeed there should be hierarchical structure at all, or whether church governance should be hierarchical, congregational, connectional, representational, and so forth.) There are of course similar issues in other religious traditions as well.
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