A group of Slovene scholars with special interest in new religious movements has formed a formal religious group, The Church of Holy Simplicity (Cerkev svete preproščine), to study and explain certain complications in the administrative procedure of registering a religious community with the Slovene state at the beginning of 2004. Due to unusual response of the state, relatively simple and practically orientated project has grown into special case study of "Slovene religious transition" - a 15 years long process, leading from communist supervision and control of all religions towards selective interest of the democratic state for particular churches. The Church of the Holy Simplicity thus became the first small and new Slovene religious community, which has not succeeded in registration, though The Administrative Court of Justice refused all of the state's arguments against registration twice, and though the registration of every religious community was still considered as obligatory by the outdated communist law. The results of the experiment are, of course, included in a new store of knowledge, but they cannot be considered as optimistic: during the period of almost 5 years, the state of law has not enabled a disputable new religious movement to oppose effectively an arbitrary and non-professional attitude of the state.
|