Por the first time in its history, less than half of the German population is a member of one of the two great historical Christian churches. At the end of 2021, according to figures from the Federal Statistical Office, the Catholic Church had 21.6 million members and the Protestant Church (the federation of Protestant Lutheran, Reformed and United Churches, EKD) 19.7 million, i.e. 26% and 23.7% of the population respectively. In 2021, the Catholic Church recorded 360,000 “Church departures”. The EKD, for its part, 280,000. Affiliation to a Church meaning the payment of a religious tax, the “exit” therefore makes it possible to no longer be subject to it, but deprives of the services of the Churches (Jews who are members of a Jewish community affiliated with the Central Council of Jews in Germany also pay a worship tax, this is not the case for Muslims, on the other hand).
These departures go hand in hand with a significant decline in church attendance for several decades. For Germany as a whole, in 2021, the rate of Sunday practice was 4.3% among Catholics and some 3% among Protestants. In 1953, 80% of marriages in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) were celebrated within one of the two Christian churches. In 2019, this was only the case for 18.4% of them.
How to explain this continuous decline of Christianity and the unprecedented increase in the number of people without confession in a country long marked by Christian Churches in a situation of monopoly? In the aftermath of the Second World War, the number of departures from Catholicism and Protestantism reached a first peak in the FRG in 1970, before making a spectacular leap the day after reunification. In 1992, there were 361,256 departures from the EKD and nearly 193,000 among Catholics. After a relative stabilization, these figures have started to rise again to reach new records in recent years.
Calls to order
If the number of “outings” has long been higher on the Protestant side, where the ties have always been more relaxed between the faithful and their Church, this is no longer the case today. The massive departures recorded since 2010 among Catholics are linked in particular to revelations about the scandals of pedocrime and sexual assault in various German dioceses. It is not certain that the reform proposals relating to the governance of the Catholic Church, the celibacy of priests or the role of women and the laity, presented by the German bishops and laity, in March 2023, after three years of synodal journey, find favor with the Vatican. The pope’s calls to order have indeed “damped” the hopes of many Catholics.
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