At the beginning of last year, 51 percent of the German population was Roman Catholic or Protestant, and in 1990 this proportion was still 72 percent. The downward trend has been observed for a long time, but in the last six years it accelerated more strongly than previously assumed.
According to the estimates of the social science research group (Forschungsgruppe Weltanschauungen in Deutschland - fowid), which deals with the worldviews in Germany within the organizational framework of the Giordano Bruno Stiftung (gbs), this year is the first time in centuries that Roman Catholics and the total number of members of the Protestant Evangelical Church (Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland - EKD) in Germany.
At the beginning of last year, 51 percent of the German population was Roman Catholic or Protestant, and in 1990 this proportion was still 72 percent. The declining trend has been observed for a long time, but in the last six years it has accelerated more strongly than previously assumed, said Carsten Frerk, a researcher at fowid, according to the report of the news magazine Der Spiegel, emphasizing that between 2000 and 2015, churches annually decreased by approximately 0.6-0. They lost .8 percentage points of their population ratio, but since 2016 the annual decrease has been 1.0-1.4 percentage points.
Churches officially publish the latest data for the end of 2021 only in the summer. According to the latest findings, at the end of 2020 there were 22.2 million Roman Catholics and 20.2 million Protestants in the country. By the end of last year, their number could have decreased to 21.8 million and 19.7 million, respectively. This is a 50 percent share of the approximately 83 million population.
The decline in the influence of the two major Christian churches can be attributed to several factors. In addition to the aging of society, efforts to optimize taxes play a role, for example, since the state takes away part of the income of Catholics and Protestants in the form of church tax and transfers it to the church in question, and this can be prevented by terminating church membership.
The child abuse and sexual harassment scandals that rocked the Catholic Church also led to waves of exits, during which it was revealed, among other things, that in the diocese of Munich-Freising alone, between 1945 and 2019, at least 497 children and juveniles had been sexually assaulted.
At the same time, since the number of members of smaller Christian communities, including free churches and communities belonging to orthodox Christian trends, can be counted in the millions, the proportion of Christians in Germany is still over 50 percent, Der Spiegel pointed out in the compilation published on its news portal.
MTI
Photo: Daniel Karmann/EPA/Landov
