Belgium recognises Catholicism, Protestantism, Anglicanism, Judaism, Islam and Orthodox Christianity, and pays the salaries and pensions of their ministers along with providing chaplaincies and broadcast time. In 1993 it added a category no other state had formalised in the same way: organised secular humanism, the laicite movement, was granted equivalent funding as a non confessional philosophical community, so that the country now funds the argument against religion on the same basis as religion. Pupils in state schools choose between religious instruction in one of the recognised faiths and non confessional ethics, and the Constitutional Court ruled in 2015 that they must also be able to opt out of both.
Islam was recognised in 1974, earlier than in most of Europe, but the administrative body meant to represent it has been reconstituted repeatedly amid disputes over elections, foreign influence and the state's role in choosing who speaks for a faith it funds, and the government moved in 2022 to withdraw recognition from the Grand Mosque of Brussels over Saudi influence. Two further pressures define the present. The clerical abuse revelations from 2010, including the resignation of the bishop of Bruges, accelerated a collapse in Catholic credibility that had already begun. And the prohibition of ritual slaughter without prior stunning, enacted in Flanders and Wallonia and upheld by the Court of Justice of the European Union in 2020, set animal welfare against Jewish and Muslim practice in a way neither community accepted.