Church and religion are in decline in Germany – a study shows this. The chairman of the German Bishops’ Conference draws a ruthlessly self-critical assessment at the turn of the year.
Most Germans no longer have anything to do with church and religion – that is the sobering assessment of the highest Catholic bishop at the turn of the year. “The loss of members is rapid, the social significance is dwindling,” stated the chairman of the German Bishops’ Conference, Georg Bätzing, in his New Year’s Eve sermon in Frankfurt am Main. “The majority of the population can hardly be approached religiously anymore.”
The Limburg bishop supports his sobering conclusion with a representative survey, the 6th Church Membership Survey (KMU) of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD). For the first time, Catholics were also surveyed. Some results of the study published in November: The majority of the population no longer belongs to either major church. 56 percent describe themselves as unreservedly non-religious. Only a third of all remaining church members say they are definitely not considering leaving the church. Bätzing’s comment: “To suppress or trivialize such developments would be fatal.”
Many people who leave the church say, “It doesn’t change my faith in God.” But the study shows that most people are fooling themselves. Without church practice, without connection to a community, belief in God quickly evaporates. The majority of the children of those who left the country no longer have access to church or religion.
Bätzing: The vast majority want change
Catholic hardliners often claim that believers are turning away from the church because it has made too many concessions to the spirit of the times. The church must therefore return to its traditional teaching. However, the study shows – like many other representative surveys before it – that this is absolutely not the case for German Catholics.
As Bätzing explains: “An overwhelming proportion of 96 percent of Catholics say: ‘My church has to change fundamentally if it wants to have a future.'” And by that they mean a positive approach to homosexuality, more participation for lay people (Not -Clerics), a marriage license for priests and greater cooperation with the Protestant Church. Bätzing concludes: “Reforms certainly do not solve all of the Catholic Church’s problems, but these become worse if reforms are not implemented.”
Renewal processes such as the “Synodal Path” therefore remain urgently needed, as the Ruhr Bishop Franz-Josef Overbeck, known as a reformer, emphasized in his New Year’s sermon. But one should not indulge in the illusion that de-churching can be stopped in this way. “We will have to endure and manage together that an increasing majority in our country does not want to belong to a religious community,” Overbeck admits frankly.
“We’re not finished”
That’s why we urgently need to stop “holding on to a glorified form of national church that probably never existed.” The reason why almost everyone used to go to church wasn’t necessarily because everyone was 100 percent convinced of the existence of a Christian God, but because it simply corresponded to social expectations. It had a lot to do with pressure and rigid morals implanted from above.
Few people will regret that this has now been discontinued. But unchurching certainly does not only mean liberation and self-empowerment. The study also shows, for example, that church members engage in voluntary work to a far above-average extent, for example as refugee helpers. If that goes away, everyday life in Germany will probably get colder. The religious sociologist Detlef Pollack, who grew up in the GDR, assumes that Western societies are much more influenced by Christianity than their residents themselves perceive: “Values such as justice, compassion, humility – or as we say today: fairness, empathy, modesty – have great significance,” said Pollack in a recent interview. “People who come to Europe from outside notice these traces of Christianity very clearly.”
At the end of his sermon, Bätzing himself asked what follows from all the insights. His answer: “We are not at the end. But a very specific social form of church is coming to an end.”
Source: Stern
I have been working in the news industry for over 6 years, first as a reporter and now as an editor. I have covered politics extensively, and my work has appeared in major newspapers and online news outlets around the world. In addition to my writing, I also contribute regularly to 24 Hours World.
