Once a majority, Protestants now account for fewer than a third of Germans

[trotsky]

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/12/once-a-majority-protestants-now-account-for-fewer-than-a-third-of-germans/

Germany is the birthplace of Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation, but since the middle of the 20th century, the country has seen a dramatic shift away from Protestantism – one that has greatly outpaced a decline in the share of Germans who are Catholic.



...Declines in the shares of Protestants and Catholics have been accompanied by a rising share of the religiously unaffiliated, who accounted for 30% of Germans in 2010, up from fewer than 4% in 1950. And recent research indicates that the share of Muslims in Germany also has been growing in recent years, due in large part to immigration.

...The recent Pew Research Center survey, which was conducted in 15 Western European countries, also examined attitudes on nationalism, immigration and religious minorities through the lens of religious affiliation and commitment. It found that, in general, Christians across Western Europe are more likely than the religiously unaffiliated to score higher on the Center’s 10-point Nationalist, anti-Immigrant and anti-religious Minority (NIM) scale. A higher score indicates higher levels of nationalism and negative sentiments toward immigrants and religious minorities. In Germany, for example, 29% of Christians score in the upper half of the scale, but only 18% of the religiously unaffiliated do.

Among German Christians, however, Catholics are more likely than Protestants to profess nationalistic attitudes and to express anti-immigrant and anti-religious minority attitudes. Moreover, Catholics who attend church services at least monthly are much more likely than Catholics who attend less frequently (and Protestants at either level of religious participation) to score in the upper half of the NIM scale. But it should be noted that Catholics and Protestants in Germany are concentrated in different parts of the country, which could also help shape attitudes on these topics.

[DFW]

1. Religion has been losing relevance here for a long time now

My wife's parents are practicing Catholics (or were--her dad is long gone now). She remembers children traumatized by priests in her village, and also remembers that Catholic children and Protestant children were told to avoid each other as "evil." The sixties erased just about all of those teachings with my wife's generation, and by the time she had our children, religion had faded into irrelevance. The fundamentals of the origins of the world as taught in the Christian bible come across as mythology. My wife's generation figured out that it was NOT OK for priests and pastors to abuse children or tell them it was a sin to play with kids of other religions.

Germans got fed up with being told what they were NOT allowed to do, whether it was by religious mentors or the all-pervasive state in the east. If "thou shalt not..." is the phrase you most like to hear, today's Germany is probably not the place you want to settle. They still have ten times as many rules and regulations as they need, but a country that values the education of its children is not fertile ground for the continued acceptance of said rules unquestioningly.