People, Religion

Religion in Germany plays a fairly small role in society. Church attendance in Germany is much lower than that in the United States. Under German law, all churches are supported by a modest church tax that is collected by the state.

Roman Catholicism was the dominant religion in medieval Germany until the major crises and reformation efforts of the 14th and 15th centuries. After that time, Protestant churches came to power in the majority of principalities of the north, east, and center of the Holy Roman Empire. The actual Reformation began with the publication of the Ninety-five Theses of protest by Martin Luther in 1517. After considerable religious and political conflict, the Peace of Augsburg of 1555 decreed that each ruler of the approximately 300 German principalities could determine the religion of the subjects. The Catholics eventually met the rapid spread of Protestantism with the Counter Reformation, which involved internal church reforms and a stricter interpretation of church doctrine. Religious strife finally culminated in the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), which devastated the country.

Roman Catholics, mainly concentrated in the south, make up about 35 percent of the German population. Protestants, the great majority of whom are Lutherans, make up about 37 percent of the people. Protestants live primarily in the north. Several German Protestant churches form a loosely organized federation called the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD). About 4 percent of the German population is Muslim.

Only a very small percentage of Germans are Jewish. Until the 19th century, the Jewish community was segregated and barred from many activities in most German states. In 19th-century Prussia and with the unification of Germany in 1871, German Jews were granted equal status under the law. At that point, German Jews became integrated into cultural and economic life. More than 500,000 Jews lived in Germany in the early 1930s. By the end of World War II in 1945, most of them had been killed by the Nazis or had fled the country. Only about 40,000 Jews, mostly elderly people, lived in Germany in the late 1990s. With the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, however, some younger East European and Russian Jews began to settle in the larger cities of Germany, particularly Berlin.