The Greek Orthodox Church, and our big, fat, Greek-style economic funeral?

This was tantamount to a cover-up. In 2012 Ryan Cragun and his associates, with the benefit of better information on the public record, reviewed the cost of religion to the United States: US Loses Over $71 Billion in Religious Tax ... - Center for Inquiry

But, in fact, the Xenophon inquiry turned on a furphy.

There is no 'public benefit' from religion or any other belief. As has been said many times, the so-called 'benefit' of religion is a 17thC presumption dating from the original charity law of 1601. Four hundred years later, it is irrelevant.

Interestingly, two months before Senator Xenophon's inquiry, the church he personally identifies with, the Greek Orthodox Church, in the face of Greece's major, ongoing financial crisis with the European Union, was obliged to pay taxes.

This extremely wealthy state church, which treats Greece as its own theocratic state, was in 2008-9 the subject a major financial scandal concerning the historic Vatopaidi Monastery.

The monastery was in involved a dubious land swap involving Church and government officials benefitting the Church to an estimated tax-free $1-2B. An abbot was gaoled in 2011.

In the wake of this scandal, maybe as a face-saving operation, on 23 April 2010 many tax exemptions for the Church were repealed. The Greek Orthodox Church now pays

• A tax on their substantial real estate (being, like the Catholic Church in Australia, the largest land holder)
• A 20 per cent rate of tax on rents they receive from their real estate
• A 3 per cent tax on revenues from edifices and leased lands
• An advance payment of tax on their future likely incomes
• A trivial .5 of one per cent on inheritances and donations
• Some stamp duty fees on property sales

So, it seems, Greece has shown what has to happen for a church to concede that it should pay taxes: an economy on the brink of collapse, accompanied by a major church scandal, which requires at least some taxation penance.

Also, the Greek Orthodox Church has emphasized it is continuing to do genuine relief of poverty work even though it is now being taxed. This is important because Australian churches typically say their welfare work would be affected if they had to pay tax, and besides, the value of the work they do can be reconciled to the missing tax-exempt revenue.

This line is known as the 'cross-subsidy' argument.

This line is used constantly despite the fact that (1) many religions do no charitable work at all because they do not have to, because religion itself is legally a form of charity, and (2) many religions just do a cosmetic amount of charitable work which is (3) difficult to assess if their incomes and expenditures are not made public, especially because (4) they have an exemption from reporting their wealth to the Charities Commission and (5) many religious charities of the good works variety receive significant grants from governments for their activities which they forget to mention when they make claims about the charitable works they do.