Abstract

In the United Kingdom, the advancement of religion had been traditionally regarded as charitable; however, after 2000, legislation in all three jurisdictions removed that presumption. The Charity Commission for England and Wales subsequently consulted on draft supplementary guidance on the advancement of religion and public benefit, and, though the draft was on the whole helpful rather than the reverse, there were several areas in which it was either unclear or capable of improvement. Its deficiencies – and the outcome of the consultation – are examined in some detail. Next is a review of the Commission's more recent decisions on the registration of religious charities before and after the entry into force of the Charities Act 2006, beginning with the decision on the Unification Church. The series is interrupted by a discussion of the Supreme Court's judgement in R (Hodkin & Ors) v Registrar General of Births, Deaths and Marriages [2013] UKSC 77, in which the UKSC held that, contrary to an earlier judgement of the Court of Appeal in 1970, Scientology was to be regarded as a religion. There follows a discussion of the two post-Hodkin registration cases: the Preston Down Trust and Temple of the Jedi Order. The survey concludes with a discussion of the possible future of the registration of charities in England and Wales; in particular, the apparent dissonance between the description of religion given by Lord Toulson in Hodkin and the Charity Commission's rejection of the claim that Jediism amounted to a religious belief for the purposes of charity law.

Charitable Purposes and Public Benefit

In the United Kingdom, the advancement of religion has traditionally been regarded as charitable. The Preamble to the Statute of Charitable Uses 1601 included ‘the repaire of Churches’ as a charitable purpose and in Pemsel, Lord Macnaghten generalised that purpose into ‘trusts for the advancement of religion’ as the so-called ‘third head’ of charity. But parallel to its expansion in Pemsel had been the requirement that, in order to be charitable, a religious trust had to confer some element of benefit on the public. Cocks v Manners – which predates Pemsel – and Gilmour v Coats determined that a bequest to an enclosed religious order was not for the public benefit and therefore not charitable.