Church: More than 440,000 people resigned in 2020

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Legal application office in the Higher Regional Court of Cologne

Photo: Rolf Vennenbernd / dpa

More than 440,000 people of Christian faith left the church in Germany last year.

This comes from the statistics of the Catholic German Bishops' Conference (DBK) in Bonn and the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD) in Hanover.

Accordingly, the number of church resignations remained at a high level, both among Catholics and Protestants, but declined compared to 2019.

According to the statistics, Catholics and Protestants recorded around 221,000 and 220,000 withdrawals, respectively.

Together, supporters of both churches still made up 51 percent of the total population.

"Set an example by leaving the church"

According to DBK, the number of people leaving fell by 18.8 percent compared to the previous year.

At that time, almost 273,000 Catholics had turned their backs on their church.

The proportion of people attending church services has decreased from 9.1 percent of Catholics to 5.9 percent due to the corona.

DBK chairman Georg Bätzing described the church statistics as “a reflection of how the corona pandemic affects life in our communities”.

Baptisms, communion celebrations and weddings have been postponed.

At the same time, the church is experiencing a "profound shock": "Many have lost confidence and want to set an example by leaving the church," said Bätzing.

In the Protestant regional churches, the number of people leaving the church fell by 18 percent.

Compared to the previous year, the Protestants also registered only half as many baptisms.

According to the EKD, church tax revenues fell by 5.4 percent to 5.63 billion euros.

Faltering processing of cases of abuse

"Every time I leave the church, I worry and ask what we as a church can do to convince people of the good sense of membership in our church," said the EKD council chairman Heinrich Bedford-Strohm. An online survey on the motives for leaving is to be presented in autumn.

The religious sociologist Detlef Pollack from Münster does not believe that the declining number of exits indicates a renaissance of the churches. Studies have shown that church ties become more important for religious people in times of crisis, Pollack said. However, this does not apply to people who have already distanced themselves from the faith and from the Church. On the contrary, for them the importance of the crisis even tends to decrease. "If you are far away, the crisis can no longer bring you back to faith," says Pollack.

Incidentally, in the event of a crisis, people often postpone personal life decisions - and that includes, in principle, leaving the church.

"You postpone it because you say to yourself: 'I can do that later, now I have more important things to do first." Distance teaching had first priority.

"Deceptive breathing space"

The Catholic canon lawyer Thomas Schüller also expressed himself.

"In 2020 people simply had other worries than dealing with their church and a possible exit from the church," Schüller told the dpa news agency.

"The pandemic was literally about survival, and the churches played no role in that." They would have been given such a "deceptive respite".

Both the Catholic and the Protestant Church were criticized last year for the faltering processing of abuse scandals.

In the Archdiocese of Cologne, for example, the handling of cases of abuse led to a wave of people leaving the church.

However, the crisis of confidence surrounding Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki did not unfold until the end of 2020 and is likely to have an impact especially in the current year.

bbr / AFP