Germany

Germany endured a series of devastating religious conflicts during its early history. German King Otto the Great (936-973) was crowned Holy Roman Emperor by Pope John XII (955-964) in 962, but disputes over who held ultimate authority soon emerged between pope and emperor. These became particularly severe during the Investiture Controversy (1075-1122), a conflict that deeply weakened imperial authority. A small but vibrant Jewish community existed in medieval Germany, but suffered significant persecution and discrimination throughout most of this period. In 1517, Martin Luther launched the Protestant Reformation by challenging the excesses of the medieval Catholic Church. Over the following decades, many German dukes and princes adopted the new creed, igniting a violent conflict with the emperor. The 1555 Peace of Augsburg allowed local rulers to choose either Lutheranism or Catholicism as the religion of their lands. In 1618, a Protestant revolt in Bohemia grew into the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648), which devastated Germany and crippled the Empire’s political viability. The Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years’ War in 1648, further expanded freedom of worship for Catholics and Protestants and weakened the centralized rule of the Empire over its internal principalities. Over the next century, Catholic Austria and Protestant Prussia emerged as the dominant powers in Germany. The Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815) brought an official end to the Holy Roman Empire, but the Congress of Vienna in 1815 created a new German Confederation that included much of Austria and Prussia.

The wars of German unification (1864-1870) produced a German Empire under Prussian hegemony with a Protestant majority and a sizeable Catholic minority. Chancellor Otto von Bismarck (1871-1890) attempted to curb the power of the Catholic Church in Germany. The ensuing cultural struggle, or Kulturkampf, lasted throughout the 1870s and included a variety of discriminatory policies against Catholics. Resistance from the Center Party and other Catholic organizations eventually pressured Bismarck into easing his stance. The defeat of Imperial Germany in the First World War (1914-1918) led to the formation of the Weimar Republic, but subsequent periods of hyperinflation and political polarization made the Republic highly unpopular. The global economic catastrophe of the 1930s further weakened the Republic, and the National Socialist Party, led by Adolf Hitler (1933-1945), rode the ensuing wave of radical nationalism and anti-Semitism to power. The Nazis implemented brutal discrimination against Jews and clamped down on religious freedom, briefly attempting to nationalize worship by forming a Protestant Reich Church. Protestants reacted by creating the underground Confessing Church, led by prominent theologians like Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The racist ideology of Nazi Germany culminated in the murder of six million Jews and millions of other religious minorities and political dissenters in the Holocaust during the Second World War (1939-1945). Following the defeat of Nazism, Germany was occupied and partitioned, with Western powers controlling the west while the Soviet Union held on to the east.

West Germany and East Germany took radically divergent paths in the post-World War II era. West Germany was formed in the Western democratic mold, with religious freedom guaranteed to its citizens. It moved to normalize relations with Israel, including the payment of reparations for the crimes of Nazi Germany. East Germany remained a Soviet satellite state and engaged in a series of policies during the 1950s intended to weaken religion in the country. These were largely abandoned by the 1960s, but secularization remained the dominant pattern. Church-state relations were characterized by mutual toleration, and Lutheran churches were able to obtain concessions from the Communist government to ease discrimination against Christians. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 led to reunification, but the religious atmospheres of the two regions remained distinct. While non-believers currently account for over twenty percent of the population, they enjoy disproportionately greater representation in the east. However, secularization is a nationwide trend, and mainstream Protestant denominations in particular have seen a significant drop in the number of their members. Immigration has led to the emergence of a sizeable Muslim population, particularly from Turkey. Efforts to establish a representative umbrella organization for Muslims, such as those available to most Christians, have been complicated by the diversity of the Muslim community. This has impeded negotiations on issues, including bans in several German states on the wearing of headscarves by teachers.

Germany currently faces a variety of challenges to its established pattern of religion-state relations, due in part to declining confidence in Christian religious leaders. The Catholic Church’s global sexual abuse scandal spread to Germany in March 2010, when a number of allegations of abuse by priests surfaced, which led to an exodus of 180,000 Germans from the Church that year. Trust in Pope Benedict XVI plummeted, in part because his brother, Bishop Georg Ratzinger, was a central figure in the scandal. Church finances have also come under fire in recent years, as the German Church’s estimated $365 billion fortune rivals the Vatican. Under Pope Francis, these expenses have been deeply questioned and increased calls for more transparency, particularly following the revelation in October 2013 of the former German Bishop of Limberg’s vast wealth. The Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD) also faced criticism when police arrested its first female head, then-Bishop Margot Käßmann, for drunk driving in February 2010, leading Käßmann to resign both from the EKD and as a bishop. Efforts to further dialogue and coordination between the German Muslim community and the government took a positive turn during a June 2009 meeting of the Islam Conference, but the Second Islam Conference, held in May 2010, was hampered by the absence of two of Germany’s four major Muslim organizations. In May 2012, the historic city of Cologne was engulfed in violent altercations between political right wing activists and members of Germany’s Salafi movement. Due to their forceful promotion of an ultra-conservative, fundamentalist Islam, the Salafi sect of Sunni Islam has been linked to several global jihadist organizations, leading the German government to consider banning the movement domestically. 2013 has been marked by Chancellor Angela Merkel's reelection bid for a third term, and the German public has been closely monitoring the trial of Beate Zschape, begun in May 2013. Zschape, a member of a neo-Nazi group, is charged with committing hate crimes and murdering a number of immigrants, including eight Turkish men and one Greek individual.

The German system of state support for independent religious institutions assists all religions equally in principle, but has been unable to include some minority faiths. The government has granted most of the country’s major religious communities “public law corporation” (PLC) status, the benefits of which include the ability to collect contributions in accordance with rules similar to tax laws, the privilege to build houses of worship building, and the right to offer denominational religious education in state schools. PLCs also receive funds through the "church tax" system where individuals pay between eight and nine percent of their income tax to an officially recognized denomination of which they are a registered member. Traditions that lack a centrally organized national structure—most notably Islam—have had difficulty attaining PLC status and its benefits. The government has expressed interest in extending PLC status to Islam once the Muslim community establishes a representative body, but German Muslims have failed to collectively accept any of several Islamic organizations as a national representative. Regardless of their lack of PLC status, the government protects the right of Muslims to practice their religion freely. Yet, Muslims occasionally face discrimination in German society, as seen in the controversy in 2007-2008 surrounding the construction of a mosque in Cologne. Scientologists and Jehovah’s Witnesses also face governmental and societal discrimination, though Jehovah’s Witnesses received PLC status in Berlin in 2005.

Religious freedom is a fundamental right enshrined in the German Constitution of 1949, officially called the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany. Article 3 prohibits discrimination on the basis of religious belief; Article 4 provides for freedom of faith, conscience, and creed and guarantees the undisturbed practice of religion and the right to conscientious objection to military service. Article 7 incorporates religious instruction as part of the regular curriculum in public schools, stipulating the ultimate authority of each state to supervise its school system, the right of parents to choose whether their children will receive religious instruction, and protection for individual teachers from compulsion to provide religious instruction against their will. Parts of the document also reflect the religious oppression of past German governments. Article 33 explicitly safeguards religious freedom in public life by declaring that the enjoyment of civil and political rights, including eligibility for public office, is not dependent upon religious affiliation, while Article 116 restores the citizenship to anyone who was deprived of it by the Nazi government on religious or several other grounds.