Last year, 280,000 people left the Protestant church – more than ever before. As of December 31, 2021, fewer than 20 million people in Germany, namely only 19,725,000, belonged to one of the 20 Protestant member churches for the first time. That’s around 2.5 percent less than in the previous year, said the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD) when presenting its membership statistics on Wednesday.
In addition to the high number of people leaving, the second reason for the sharp decline was the number of deaths (360,000), which increased in the Corona year. At 115,000, the number of Protestant baptisms has increased significantly compared to the first lockdown year 2020, but has by no means reached the level before the Corona crisis. Around 18,000 people attended.
The year 2020 cannot be compared to other years due to the corona pandemic – authorities were closed for a long time due to lockdowns, exits were more difficult and not a priority for many people – but the numbers were already at a high level in 2019: at that time around 270,000 people were from the Evangelical and 272,771 left the Catholic Church.
The Catholic Church publishes its figures later
It is not yet known how many people left the Catholic Church in 2021. The Catholic Church does not publish its figures until early summer. So far, both major churches had announced their exit numbers at the same time in early summer, now the evangelical church is pushing ahead. 2021 was a particularly difficult year for the Catholic Church, which was characterized, among other things, by the crisis of confidence in the Archdiocese of Cologne over an initially withheld abuse report.
“It can be assumed that scandals contributed to the peak in leaving the church in 2019, especially among the former Catholics,” says sociologist Petra-Angela Ahrens, who has been researching the reasons for leaving the church at the EKD’s Institute for Social Sciences (SI) since 2018. For a nationwide representative study, the SI interviewed both former Protestant and Catholic church members. According to the researchers, the church scandals on sexualised violence against children and the waste of financial resources are the most important specific reasons. For former Catholics, the rejection of homosexuals is one of the reasons for leaving.
Loss of importance of religious self-understanding
All in all, the researchers state that the ex-Catholics at the time they left the church showed a stronger connection to the church than the Protestants and accordingly showed a greater “excitement about these scandals”. This excitement can hardly be seen among the ex-Protestants; on the contrary, the scandals already served to underpin the final decision to leave the church.
In general, however, only a minority of respondents – both Protestants and Catholics – named a specific scandal as the reason for leaving (24 percent among ex-Protestants, 37 percent among ex-Catholics). First and foremost, the exit is a process that often begins with a lack of religious socialization, according to sociologist Ahrens: “A perceived ‘personal irrelevance’ of religion and church emerges as an important factor.” The former Protestants in particular are also concerned with saving church tax when they leave – 71 percent made this statement in the survey.
According to the study, the “primary socialization”, i.e. the religious upbringing from childhood on, for example in the parents’ home, proves to be a particularly important influencing factor. Among the Protestants, this loss of importance of a religious self-understanding is gradually becoming visible over the generations. According to the study, the Catholics, on the other hand, seem to have “completed a real break”: Despite their religious upbringing, they implemented the decision to leave the church and, at the time of the survey, defined themselves as being as irreligious as the ex-Protestants surveyed.
The EKD Council Chairwoman, President Annette Kurschus, expressed concern about the number of people leaving: the appeal of a church does not depend solely on the number of members. “Nevertheless, we will not accept declining membership numbers as God-given.” Among other things, the aim is to use baptism campaigns to specifically address families who have not yet had their children baptized because of Corona. “When a child is baptized, we experience directly how the power of the gospel touches and strengthens people,” says Kurschus. “The blessing accompanies the baptized for a lifetime. This promise is both promising and healing at the same time, especially in uncertain times.”