You can navigate this country by steeples. Village after village arranges itself around one, and in most of our cities the tallest thing that isn’t an office tower is still a church. For most of our history that was exactly right.
Then you look at the membership rolls. Fewer than half of us belong to a church at all.
That number gets misread constantly, so let’s settle it first.
Leaving a church here is a form you sign at a government office. It records a tax status, not what somebody believes on a Tuesday night.
The Numbers behind the Steeples
Roughly a quarter of us are Catholic, roughly a fifth belong to the EKD (our Protestant umbrella church), about 4 percent are Muslim, and another 4 percent spread across everything else. That leaves close to half the country with no affiliation on file, our largest single group.
Attendance is thinner still. On the Sundays the Catholic Church counts heads, about 7 percent of its members turn up, the Protestant share is lower again, and across all faiths roughly 5 percent of us practice anything regularly.
Which brings us back to that Tuesday night. Plenty of people who signed the exit form still pray, still want a church wedding, and still show up on Christmas Eve. Our paperwork has no box for that.
How Germany Got Its Religious Map
Martin Luther went public with his ninety-five theses in Wittenberg in 1517, and what the Protestant Reformation set loose was shaped less by theology than by princes working out what their subjects were going to believe.
The principle picked up a Latin name at the Peace of Augsburg in 1555: cuius regio, eius religio, whose realm, his religion. Your prince converted, and so did you. Ride a day’s journey into the next territory and the arrangement flipped.
It didn’t hold. The Thirty Years’ War ran from 1618 to 1648 and was the worst thing to happen here before the twentieth century, costing somewhere between a fifth and half the population depending on whose estimate you take. Where the armies crossed twice, entire districts stopped existing.
The Peace of Westphalia ended it by confirming the Augsburg formula and extending it to the Reformed churches. Nobody had won an argument about God. They had run out of people to feed the armies with.
Catholic South, Protestant North, Secular East
Four centuries on you can still read that settlement off a map. The Saarland is our most Catholic state, with Bavaria close behind and Rhineland-Palatinate, North Rhine-Westphalia, and Baden-Württemberg leaning the same way. Schleswig-Holstein and Lower Saxony went Protestant and stayed there.
The east is a different story, and not one about the Reformation. Forty years of a state that promoted atheism, offered the Jugendweihe (a secular coming-of-age ceremony) in place of confirmation, and made church membership a career liability left a mark that has not faded. In Saxony-Anhalt church members are down to roughly one in eight, and in Halle and Magdeburg more than 90 percent have no affiliation at all.
Saxony-Anhalt is the state where Luther was born, in Eisleben, and where he died. Make of that what you will.
The Question on Your Registration Form
Move here and one of the first things you do is register your address at the town hall. There is no opting out, and somewhere on that form sits a field for your religion. Answer Catholic or Protestant and the tax office starts collecting church tax out of your paycheck: 8 percent in Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg, 9 percent everywhere else.
That is 8 or 9 percent of your income tax, not of your income, and the difference trips up almost everybody. Getting back out means turning up in person at the Standesamt (registry office) or the Amtsgericht (local court), paying a modest fee, and signing.
Whether the money explains the exits is something we argue about without ever settling it. Money is the reason people give. Money is rarely the whole reason anybody does anything. ;-)
What the Calendar Gives Away
Want to see where the 1555 border ran? Look at who gets the day off.
Fronleichnam (Corpus Christi) is a public holiday in Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria, Hesse, North Rhine-Westphalia, Rhineland-Palatinate, and the Saarland. Reformationstag (Reformation Day) is the mirror image, kept across the north and the east, and Allerheiligen (All Saints’ Day) follows the Catholic map again. The German holidays page has the full list.
Karfreitag (Good Friday) is the one to plan around. All sixteen states restrict public dancing that day, which in practice means the clubs are shut, and Bavaria runs the ban a full twenty-four hours. Turn up in Munich that evening expecting a night out and the door is locked.
Then there is Augsburg, which has kept its Hohes Friedensfest (High Peace Festival) every August 8 since 1650, marking the day the city’s Protestants won their worship rights back. It has been a legal holiday since 1950, and it applies inside the city limits and nowhere else.
Beyond the Two Big Churches
Islam is the second-largest faith here, and hard to count, because there is no membership register of the kind the churches keep. The estimate most people work from puts residents from Muslim backgrounds above five million, most with roots in Turkey. Orthodox Christianity is growing too, quietly, carried by arrivals from Romania, Ukraine, Greece, and Serbia.
Jewish life here is older than any of it: an edict issued by the emperor Constantine in 321, addressed to the city council of Roman Cologne, is the oldest surviving record of a Jewish community north of the Alps. What the Nazis did to that inheritance needs no euphemism: the communities of this country were destroyed, and six million Jews were murdered across Europe. Immigration from the former Soviet Union after 1990 quadrupled the congregations, and new synagogues went up in Munich, Dresden, and Mainz. Membership peaked in the mid-2000s and has been slipping since, to somewhere around 90,000. Jewish life belongs to Germany, and it is smaller and older than the coverage suggests.
The most unexpected building in this story sits in Hamm, an industrial town in the Ruhr. Tamil refugees from the Sri Lankan civil war began with a prayer room in a basement and ended up with the Sri Kamadchi Ampal Tempel, second in Europe only to the Neasden temple in London. In 2017 it became the first Hindu community here granted the public-law standing the churches hold.
Separation, German Style
We don’t separate church and state the way the United States or France does. Our constitutional lawyers use a phrase that translates to something like a separation that walks with a limp, and once you notice it you can’t stop seeing it.
The tax office collects money on the churches’ behalf. Religious instruction is the only school subject our Grundgesetz (Basic Law) guarantees by name, though nobody has to attend and ethics or philosophy stands in. And then there are the Staatsleistungen, payments the states still hand the churches every year as compensation for property confiscated back in 1803.
Our constitution has required that those last ones be bought out and ended since 1919. They are still being paid. :-)
Caritas on the Catholic side and Diakonie on the Protestant are also the biggest private employers in the country, with well over a million staff between them running hospitals, nursing homes, kindergartens, and hospices. Most of that is financed out of public budgets rather than church tax, which surprises a fair number of us too.
For the buildings rather than the sociology, see the pages on German cathedrals, German minsters, and German abbeys.
In 1633, with plague in the Alpine valleys, the villagers of Oberammergau swore that if the dying stopped they would stage the Passion every ten years, forever. The dying stopped. They performed it in 1634 and have kept the promise for close to four hundred years. You have to have been born there or have lived there twenty years to get on the stage, and roughly half the town does. The next run is 2030.
Book early. And I don’t mean a few weeks early.