State Church
State churches are organizational bodies within a Christian denomination which are given official status or operated by a state.
State churches are not necessarily national churches in the ethnic sense of the term, but the two concepts may overlap in the case of a nation state where the state boundary largely corresponds to the distribution of a single ethnic group to which a certain denomination is attached as an aspect of ethnic identity. State churches, by contrast, may also be minority denominations which are given political recognition by the state.
Read more about State Church: Denmark, Greece, Iceland, Tuvalu, United Kingdom
Famous quotes containing the words state and/or church:
“The essence of the modern state is that the universal be bound up with the complete freedom of its particular members and with private well-being, that thus the interests of family and civil society must concentrate themselves on the state.... It is only when both these moments subsist in their strength that the state can be regarded as articulated and genuinely organized.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“Exporting Church employees to Latin America masks a universal and unconscious fear of a new Church. North and South American authorities, differently motivated but equally fearful, become accomplices in maintaining a clerical and irrelevant Church. Sacralizing employees and property, this Church becomes progressively more blind to the possibilities of sacralizing person and community.”
—Ivan Illich (b. 1926)