GERMANY FUCKING YESSSSSS (slay)

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>BERLIN — Two guitar players strummed and sang in Farsi as a stream of Afghans and Iranians knelt at the front of the church, sipping wine from a shared Communion cup. Most of the congregants had arrived within the last two years, part of the refugee influx that’s brought more than a million asylum seekers to Germany since 2015.

>At the peak of the crisis two years ago, this Lutheran church was holding mass baptisms of more than 200 people at a time, said the pastor, Gottfried Martens. “This church went from just a few hundred members to more than 1300 Iranians and Afghans,” Martens said, “All converts.”

>When Germany opened its doors to refugees in 2015, churches and church-affiliated organizations played a critical role in the response. Most of them took care to separate religion from humanitarian aid, especially those implementing state-funded relief projects. Three years into the crisis, however, some churches are more actively defending refugees, even housing rejected asylum seekers inside churches so that German police cannot deport them, while submitting legal appeals for their cases. Many of these “church asylum” beneficiaries have also converted, a controversial act that’s drawn criticism from Islamic groups and skepticism from German

>Refugees in the European Union are subject to a law called the Dublin Regulation, which requires that asylum seekers process their papers in the country where they entered the E.U. Karimi came in through Italy, so Germany could send him back there through the Dublin Regulation, as it tried to do with 29,507 asylum seekers in the first half of 2017. Yet, only 3,085 of those people were actually deported. One way to avoid deportation is through church asylum, in which people like Karimi live inside churches for six months, after which German law allows asylum seekers to process

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/in-germany-churches-offer-unofficial-asylum-for-muslim-refugees/2017/09/05/