govt qualifying a religion
 

I am trying to find out how the government qualifies a religion as such. Does it need a certain number of followers? What else? Preferably I would like the site to be a .gov one since i need this for a paper. Can someone please help me? I'd appreciate it. Thanks.

You probably won't find one single document of recognition, but rather a whole lot of different court cases and regulations. The Church of Scientology would be a possible case study, because it's quite recent.

Because of the first amndment, there are restrictions on the ability of government to tax religions. For that reason, this .gov publication would be a possible starting place.

http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p1828.pdf

(PDF, 28 pages)

YES! Thank you so much! You have helped me greatly.

Not much of an answer for you, but I don't believe it takes much to "qualify". Across the street from the house I grew up in, there was suddenly a "church". Now, this was a completely residential neighborhood. The address for this church was a typical split level house just up from my house. At some point it was sold to a guy and his family and they registered it as a church. This allowed them to not pay real estate taxes.

i ended up just fudging that paragraph talking about how the government has no set definition of religion and how that makes it too ambiguous to put a plan like faith-based initiative into action.