Christmas is a celebration of rituals: Wax candles or fairy lights? Giving presents before dinner or after? Sausages with potato salad or rather goose with dumplings? Coordinates like these mark a successful Christmas Eve for many people. However, one ritual seems to be faltering: going to church.
In a representative survey by the Bundeswehr University in Neubiberg, only 15.4 percent of the approximately 1,200 respondents stated that they wanted to go to church on Christmas Eve. In the pre-pandemic year 2019, 23.6 percent of those surveyed still mentioned going to church as a scheduled Christmas Eve activity.
“The pandemic has changed many routines,” says study leader Philipp Rauschnabel. That could also apply to Christmas: “After two years of contact restrictions and waivers, many people may have noticed that they can get by without a service on Christmas Eve.” Christmas Eve is already tightly scheduled and stressful – many would rather watch a film than go to church.
According to the study, Christmas films such as “Cinderella’s Three Nuts”, “Home Alone” and “The Little Lord” are actually part of Christmas Eve for almost half of those surveyed. So television instead of altar and crib? Peace be with you, but also Netflix?
Corona acts as an amplifier of a trend that is not new
At least what church representatives feared at the beginning of the corona restrictions on church services seems to have happened: many people have apparently given up going to church. However, Corona only acts as an amplifier for a trend that is not new.
The Liturgical Conference of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD) already presented a study on going to church in 2019, according to which the classic Sunday service only reaches a few church-bound insiders anyway. According to the Religion Monitor recently published by the Bertelsmann Foundation, in 2022 only 14 percent of people will attend a church service at least once a month. Ten years ago it was still every fifth person.
But Christmas Eve was always the exception. “Christmas Christians”, i.e. all those who only find their way to church once a year, have not been mocked for a long time. Gone are the days when they were reprimanded from the pulpit for not appearing for the rest of the church year. Most priests and pastors come up with special services for Christmas Eve, low-threshold offers for people who are far from the church, they work twice as hard in their sermons – after all, Christmas Eve is the most important marketing day of the year.
All the more dramatic when the churches remain empty even at Christmas. The Christmas study did not ascertain how many people prefer watching Christmas services on TV to going to church in person. Incidentally, in the Religion Monitor, a large majority of respondents affirmed the statement that one could continue to be a Christian even without a church. Religion expert Yasemin El-Menouar says: “For many people, the equation ‘religious equals church’ no longer applies.”