The number of Protestants leaving the church has also skyrocketed in the past year: 7,877 people turned their backs on the Evangelical-Lutheran Deanery District of Munich in 2021, which also includes parts of the neighboring districts. In 2020, there were 5,351 people, about a third fewer. The bottom line is that there are currently just over 221,000 Protestants with their main residence in the Munich area.
“We’re right on trend with that,” states City Dean Bernhard Liess, referring to the Germany-wide figures presented last week: According to them, 280,000 people left the Protestant church last year. At the end of the year, for the first time in Germany, fewer than 20 million people belonged to one of the 20 Protestant member churches.
The exit is usually the result of a long process
“The reasons are not so easy to name,” says Liess. In a nationally representative study, the Social Science Institute of the Evangelical Churches in Germany asked both Evangelical and Catholic church members why they were leaving.
The Munich city dean sees the results as confirming “what we’ve heard from the feedback from people”: It was less the concrete reasons that prompted the Protestants to take the step. “It’s more the result of a process that has been going on for a long time and the lockdown was the point for many people where they took the opportunity to realize what was building up in them.”
The Archdiocese of Munich and Freising will not report their exit numbers for 2021 until the summer. But what is already available is the number of people leaving the church in Munich that have been requested from the district administration department (KVR) since the abuse report was published: by mid-March, the authority had registered 6,914 church exits since the beginning of the year – but it is not recorded according to denomination. In 2021 it was still 1975 in the same period. According to a spokesman for the KVR, the demand for dates for an exit has “decreased somewhat”.