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"When governments become neutral towards religion, we see less and less protection of religion and religious activities," he said. "Secularism in the world is neutral at best towards religions and hostile at worst. We're seeing more and more that it is hostile, not just neutral, towards religion."
"We think there's going to be a tightening now of what kind of entities get tax-exempt status," Atkin said. "Maybe churches are no longer going to be viewed as such a positive influence in society -- therefore (maybe) they're not going to be granted tax-exempt status."
"We're seeing more and more, particularly in Western Europe, the countries who are very secular are pushing anti-discrimination and not permitting any religious exclusions," he said.
According to Atkin, additional "trends that are here and coming in the next 5-10 years that have the possibility of impacting the church adversely" include an increase in audits of church financial records as governments searching for more revenue during a global economic downturn and immigration restrictions that stand to severely limit the number of visas available to the church for full-time missionaries.
An example of this is some cities that want to charge full building fees to build a new church building while others don't.
ReplyDeleteThere are some cities in California that do not have a single LDS meeting house because of this policy. Instead they have to build on the borders of neighboring towns.