A.In the coming weekend, many people will be singing Christian Christmas carols. The Christmas story is read in some houses, and most churches will only not be fully occupied because the guidelines for combating the corona pandemic do not allow this. Christianity is also omnipresent in public spaces.
Where it is still allowed, the children can visit magnificent nativity scenes at the Christmas markets, and there are hardly fewer angels than Santa Clauses on the chocolate shelves of the grocery stores. It is easy to overlook the fact that the coming Christmas festival is also a farewell festival: It will probably be the last when Christians in Germany are in the majority.
In recent months and years there has been a great deal of talk in the reporting of scandals in the churches, especially in the Catholic Church, of financial scandals and, above all, of child abuse cases and the failure to clear them up. It seems reasonable to attribute the dwindling support of the churches in the population to these events, but that would be far too short-sighted.
Creeping change in society
In fact, an erosion of Christianity in Germany has been observed for decades, which is progressing slowly but persistently, ultimately unaffected by current events. It is a creeping change in society that is therefore not noticeable in everyday life, but is nevertheless fundamental.
The extent to which the church is becoming less important for the citizens has long been shown in the population surveys of the Allensbach Institute for Demoscopy. The proportion of those who state that they went to church at least occasionally has fallen from around 60 percent in the 1960s to below 30 percent today. In 1995, 37 percent of those questioned in an Allensbach survey said they were members of the Protestant Church, compared with 28 percent in the current survey commissioned by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
The number of Catholics among the respondents fell from 36 to 25 percent over the same period. This development has accelerated rather than slowed, so it will be a matter of months rather than years before the number of church members falls below the 50 percent threshold.
Behind the decline in the number of church members hides an erosion of the Christian faith that is even greater. In the Allensbach survey of December 2021, 23 percent of the Catholics surveyed stated that they were a believing member of their church and felt closely connected to it. That corresponds to almost six percent of the total population. Of the Protestants, just 12 percent did so – just over three percent of the population as a whole.
Mind game leaving the church
Most of the members of the two major churches either said they felt very much connected to their church but were critical of it in many ways, or they felt like Christians but did not care much about the church. After all, almost one in seven Protestants even said they didn’t know what to believe or that they didn’t need any religion at all.
So it is not surprising that more than every third respondent who is still a member of one of the large churches said in the current survey that he had already toyed with the idea of quitting. It can be seen that the number of people leaving the church shows only part of the development. Even among the remaining church members, the Christian faith is only deeply anchored in a few.
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