Religious Taxation and Religious Instruction

In one line

The State may not make you pay for somebody's religion, and it may not teach religion in a school it pays for entirely.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: article 27 provides that no person shall be compelled to pay any taxes the proceeds of which are specifically appropriated in payment of expenses for the promotion or maintenance of any particular religion or religious denomination. Each expression narrows the article, and the first decides most cases: a fee is outside article 27 altogether, because a fee is charged for a service rendered and a tax is not. Article 28 deals with the school rather than the treasury, and distinguishes four kinds of educational institution: one wholly maintained out of State funds, where religious instruction is forbidden outright; one administered by the State but established under an endowment or trust requiring religious instruction, which is taken out of that prohibition; and the recognised and the aided, in which instruction may be given but nobody may be compelled to attend without consent.

Why the law has this at all

A State with no religion of its own has two obvious ways of acquiring one. It can pay for a religion out of taxes everybody pays, and it can teach a religion to children in schools everybody pays for. Articles 27 and 28 close both routes, and they are the operative machinery behind the word "secular": see [What Secularism Means Here].

Both are drafted narrowly, deliberately. Neither forbids the State to have anything to do with religion. Article 27 stops compelled contribution to the promotion of a particular faith, not the regulation of religious endowments. Article 28 stops religious instruction, not the academic study of religions. Missing those two limits is how answers on this topic lose marks.

The provisions

Article 27 is one sentence: "No person shall be compelled to pay any taxes, the proceeds of which are specifically appropriated in payment of expenses for the promotion or maintenance of any particular religion or religious denomination."

Article 28 has three clauses. "(1) No religious instruction shall be provided in any educational institution wholly maintained out of State funds. (2) Nothing in clause (1) shall apply to an educational institution which is administered by the State but has been established under any endowment or trust which requires that religious instruction shall be imparted in such institution. (3) No person attending any educational institution recognised by the State or receiving aid out of State funds shall be required to take part in any religious instruction that may be imparted in such institution or to attend any religious worship that may be conducted in such institution or in any premises attached thereto unless such person or, if such person is a minor, his guardian has given his consent thereto."