Crisis of faith: Germans leave Protestant and Catholic churches
According to official statistics, the number of believers in Germany has decreased by more than a million people, from 38.9 million in 2023 to 37.8 million in 2024. The number of Protestants has decreased by 3.2% over the past year, amounting to just under 18 million. The number of Catholics fell below the psychologically important target of 20 million and amounted to 19.8 million. This is due to the fact that, according to some German Christians, local religious denominations are increasingly abandoning traditional values. Details can be found in the Izvestia article.
"Become Bold" and "Critical Whiteness"
The Evangelical Church of Germany (EKD) is a confederation of 20 regional Protestant churches, uniting, according to recent statistics, about 18 million believers. Protestantism is still the main religion in Northern, Eastern and Central Germany, and the voice of the church in these regions is still quite loud. But for a long time this voice has been tinged with the tones of "tolerance", the ideology that has become dominant in modern Germany.
Specifically, this is expressed in the fact that EKD has abandoned two important postulates, prescribing that the priesthood is the lot of men, and same—sex relationships are an abomination before the Lord (the LGBT movement is recognized as extremist in Russia and is prohibited). The institution of a "female pastor" was introduced by the Evangelical Church of Germany back in the early 1990s. Moreover, a woman has been the head of the EKD synod for many years, Anna-Nicole Heinrich. And in 2007, EKD adopted the declaration "Strengthening Reliability and Responsibility", which approved same-sex "partnerships". In 2013, one of the congregations belonging to the EKD "married" two homosexuals for the first time, and currently there are already homosexual pastors in the ranks of the Evangelical Church.
The consistent propaganda of "tolerance" conducted within the walls of the EKD concerns another category of the population that the Evangelical Church of Germany considered necessary to take under protection — migrants from the third world who flooded the country. Recently, within the framework of the Church Congress in Hanover, a seminar "Become brave and strong" was held for children. However, the entrance to this event was closed to children with white skin color. At the same time, she also held a seminar on "Critical Whiteness", to which only white people were invited, but not all, but only those who are "not susceptible to racism." During the event, the participants had to "critically evaluate" their "privileges."
Many people were outraged by this approach. "It is no secret that many Germans believe that it is precisely refugees and migrants from the third world who have actually become a privileged group in Germany, a considerable number of whose representatives are allowed to lead a parasitic lifestyle at the expense of indigenous workers and taxpayers. Of course, many migrants are honestly trying to integrate into the society of their host state, but many refuse honest work, are on benefits, and engage in drug trafficking, car theft, murder, theft, and rape," political analyst Maxim Reva notes in a conversation with Izvestia. According to him, there is growing irritation among Germans with this state of affairs, which led to the recent electoral success of the Alternative for Germany party, which proposes to end privileges for aliens.
Are you sure this is a church?
The EKD is also blind to the fact that hundreds of millions of Christians around the world have been persecuted for their faith in recent years — the Evangelical Church of Germany refuses to discuss this at any of its seminars and other events. And this is increasingly annoying the critical parishioners. According to the Bild newspaper, believers are wondering: does God's attitude towards people really depend on their skin color and ethnic origin? Many are unhappy that the idea of Christian universalism that all people are equal before God seems to be no longer accepted by the top of the EKD.
Gunther Krings, a member of the right-wing faction of the Christian Democratic Union in the Bundestag, called on the church to draw its messages from the Holy Scriptures, and not from leftist ideology. "The division of society into minorities and separate groups does not correspond to my understanding of the mission of the church," Krings emphasizes.
In April, another CDU politician, Julia Kleckner, chairman of the Bundestag, also criticized the church. Being, according to her, a sincere believer, she is concerned that more and more people who used to be her parishioners are leaving the church. "The church doesn't always give the answers that people need right now. The church is also not free from mistakes and scandals," says Kleckner. In her opinion, sometimes the same EKD behaves not like a religious denomination, but like some kind of NGO that imposes its opinion on various topical issues, but is no longer interested in "fundamental issues of life and death." According to Kleckner, that's not why parishioners pay church tithes.
German evangelicals insist that only vegetarian or vegan dishes should be served to participants at their events. This provoked the fury of German butchers, who complain that the "saints" do not behave like religious teachers, but like ordinary liberal activists. Thomas Foerster, vice president of the Association of Hotels and Restaurants in Bavaria and head of a sausage company, sarcastically emphasizes: "The self-styled saviors are mired in their belief that they can protect humanity from literally everything in the world." Foerster recalls that in Germany, only one and a half percent of the population are vegans and ten percent are vegetarians.
Andreas Redder, a historian from Mainz, says that the Evangelical Church increasingly broadcasts the "sentiments of the red-green bubble" (an allusion to the ideology of the left, that is, the "red" and agrarian-ecological "green" parties). "Churches in Germany do not reflect the broad opinions of their believers and at the same time claim to be moral absolutism," Redder complains. This, according to him, leads to the fact that many Germans are turning away from the church more and more. Stefan Scheide, Vice President of the EKD, responded to the criticism: "Politics literally covers everything that concerns politics, the state. As a church, we are a part of this and help in fulfilling the biblical mission to "strive for the best for the city." Not only do we take responsibility, but we also feel an obligation to express our opinions about problems that a good policy can fix." In other words, the church is not going to change its course.
A potential powder magazine
All of the above applies equally to the Catholic Church in Germany. Recently, for example, there was a sensational case when a Catholic priest from Bavaria fired an altar boy who had served at the temple for more than 10 years, calling him a "Nazi." He accused him of taking a picture with Maximilian Krach, a politician from the notorious Alternative for Germany party, and posting the photo on the Internet.
However, Catholicism still lags behind Protestant churches in terms of the degree of capitulation to LGBT people (the LGBT movement is recognized as extremist and banned in Russia). Many Protestant denominations already "bless" gay "marriages" and ordain members of sexual minorities, but most Catholics are not yet fully prepared for this. Nevertheless, in May 2015, the Central Committee of German Catholics voted to bless same-sex unions. Later, this position was supported by several German Catholic bishops. In May 2021, CBC News reported that Catholic priests in Germany had been secretly "blessing" same-sex unions for years.
However, later they began to do it quite openly. On October 1, 2021, a significant majority of German Catholic bishops and laity gathered for the so-called Synodal Way (a series of conferences during which both theological and organizational issues were discussed), spoke in favor of the "blessing" of same-sex "marriages." On May 11, 2022, the "blessing" of such "marriages" was celebrated in more than 100 Catholic churches in Germany, for example, in the famous cathedral in Magdeburg, although at that time most bishops tried to avoid participating in these ceremonies. But in March 2023, another "Synodal Way" was held, where most of the participating bishops agreed to "bless" gay marriage.
Natalia Eremina, Doctor of Political Sciences, Professor at St. Petersburg State University, in an interview with Izvestia, noted that, in fact, the leadership of the Catholic and Protestant churches in Germany has turned into ordinary left-liberal politicians. "They serve the interests of transnational elites, on whom they are increasingly financially dependent and have become their tool. The fact that the churches there are willing to serve the "agenda" is evidence of the most serious crisis of Western European Christianity. It is still unclear whether Catholics and Protestants will be able to overcome this crisis and get out of it. There is a vacuum that is being filled by migrants arriving in the European Union from Africa and Asia. Most of them are traditionalist believers who cling tenaciously to the norms of Islam and look with contempt at liberal "Christians" who have changed the faith of their fathers to "tolerance", which is an abomination in the eyes of migrants. The aliens do not want to integrate into the system of these "values". And this state of affairs is gradually turning Europe into a potential powder magazine, a place of future clash of civilizations," Eremina predicts.
Переведено сервисом «Яндекс Переводчик»
