Leaving Religion in Germany

Germany has been quietly leaving its churches for two generations. Every year, hundreds of thousands of Germans formally deregister from the Catholic or Protestant church to stop paying the church tax (Kirchensteuer), and the numbers have accelerated since the Catholic abuse revelations and the Synodaler Weg debates of the 2010s and 2020s. For many cultural Catholics and Protestants, this deregistration is the entire deconstruction — they were not really practicing anyway, the family will not punish them, and the move is administrative more than spiritual. The pillar pages on the cultural Catholic exit and on the guilt that lingers will fit a lot of you.

There is a separate, harder exit happening in the conservative Free Evangelical and Pentecostal scene (Freikirchen), in the German Jehovah’s Witness community, and in conservative Muslim diaspora families (especially Turkish, Kurdish, and Arab backgrounds), where the cultural infrastructure does treat leaving as a real rupture. Those exits have more in common with the corresponding US exits than with the average German experience.

And there is an ongoing OTD-style exit happening in some of the smaller Orthodox Jewish communities in Berlin and Frankfurt, with the same texture as the wider OTD experience but in a German-language context with all the attendant complications.