Germany’s Protestant Church and the Seeds of a Religious Backlash

Germany is not like America. There is no mass evangelical movement blending Christianity with culture war activism, no figure comparable to Charlie Kirk. But this doesn’t mean the country is immune to change. Beneath the surface, a new, quieter religious backlash is stirring—and Germany’s notoriously progressivist Protestant Church may, paradoxically, be helping to fuel it.

The official church is in crisis. The scale of that crisis was thrown into sharp relief once again during this year’s Lenten season, when statistics published in March confirmed the continuing downward trend in membership. In 2025, a further 1.1 million people left the two major churches, with Protestants leading the exodus: their numbers fell by around 580,000 to approximately 17.4 million. Where in 1992, some 36% of Germans were Protestant, that figure has now fallen to 21%.

No one was surprised. The reasons are surely complex in a largely secular society. What is striking, however, is not the decline itself but the leadership’s response to it—a posture of resignation bordering on indifference. When the already-falling figures were presented in 2024, Kirsten Fehrs, chair of the German Protestant Church Council and the institution’s most senior representative, could offer nothing more than, “We will become a smaller and poorer church.”

Rather than campaign to win members, the leadership appears to have made peace with its growing irrelevance. In recent years, anything associated with the church’s former core mission—spreading the faith and engaging non-believers—has been quietly abandoned, even treated with embarrassment. The very word ‘mission’ has become contested. In a recent opinion piece, the editor of the church newspaper evangelisch.de argued that the term rests on a false distinction between “us” and “them,” and that mission should mean only “walking alongside others”—explicitly not “about recruiting members or church growth.” The instruction in John 20:21—”As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you”—is evidently no longer something the leadership feels obliged to follow.

This blandness runs through almost everything the church leadership produces. Even the Easter message—once the central message of Christianity—has been gutted of its content. Bishop Fehrs’s Easter greeting, posted on YouTube, read more like a self-help video than a proclamation of faith. She described Easter as a “tried-and-tested remedy for all the bad news we are confronted with,” spoke of “the inalienable dignity of every human being” and “hands that are extended to us that do not clench into fists,” and called on her audience to share “the stories of a successful life—because they give us strength.” The name of Jesus was not mentioned once.

But this is about more than cowardice or creeping doubt in the authority of Christian faith, though both surely play a role. The deeper problem is the leadership’s anxious effort to avoid any association with the religious Right. Because it is the religious Right that has, for better or worse, been the most unapologetic defender of classical Christian values, church leaders now find it difficult to articulate those values at all—or to say anything that falls outside the progressive creed to which they have largely committed themselves.

The list of terms deemed suspect has grown steadily longer. ‘Judeo-Christian tradition’ is considered a far-right dog whistle. ‘Traditional family values’ sounds too conservative. ‘Conversion’ is seen as an affront to Muslims: a 2018 position paper on interfaith dialogue stipulated that the goal of encounters with Muslims was mutual understanding, explicitly “not to convert to the other’s religion.” The cumulative effect of all of this is a church that has systematically stripped itself of its own language, running the risk of becoming a small sect of progressive ideologues. 

The progressive turn in parts of German Protestantism is not new, but it has sharpened considerably in recent years, driven in part by the rise of populism. The distancing from America’s religious Right and from Trump became something of a reflex; in 2020, the head of the Protestant Church in Lower Saxony condemned what he called Trump’s “appalling misuse of the Bible” after he was filmed holding one at the margins of an anti-racism protest. But in Germany too, the rhetoric has grown harsher and more exclusionary.

The biennial Kirchentag offers a case in point. At the 2023 gathering, activist and Protestant minister Quinton Caesar delivered the closing sermon to 18,000 people, ending it with the declaration “God is queer.” The event drew criticism, but the 2025 Kirchentag was, by many accounts, little different: critics pointed to workshops such as “An Introduction to Queer Exegesis,” “trans children,” and “Critical Whiteness” as evidence of an institution increasingly absorbed by progressive identity politics.

Deep rifts have also characterized the church’s attitude to migration. For Fehr’s predecessor, Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, Germany’s “refugee year of 2015” was one of the best in the country’s history.  There were images of the churchman on board a private sea rescue ship in Sicily. His critics accused him of indirectly supporting human trafficking networks—a charge made harder to deflect when an Antifa flag appeared on the church’s own rescue vessel, deployed through its united4rescue initiative (Bedford-Strohm later said it should not have been there), though the church even deployed its own rescue vessel. 

Theologians like Eberhard Pausch, Director of Studies in Religion and Politics at the Protestant Academy in Frankfurt am Main, champion what he calls “open Protestantism”—a vision characterized by a profound relativism and a departure from classical Christian teaching. Pausch himself rejects foundational beliefs such as the divinity of Christ and the bodily resurrection. The openness, in other words, is doctrinal as well as cultural.

It is also, notably, selective. While the church extends considerable warmth towards refugees and Muslims—leading functionaries have for years sent Ramadan greetings emphasizing “shared values,” and this year, Fehrs called the coincidence of Ramadan and Lent “a special sign of solidarity“—it has drawn a very different line when it comes to the AfD. Fehrs described the party as one which “has long since declared the dignity of certain groups of people to be open to attack, thereby placing itself outside the foundations of our Basic Law,” and said it must not be given any support.

The church is, of course, entitled to criticize political parties. But what Fehrs articulated was not a critique of specific policies—it was a blanket rejection of a party backed by roughly 20% of the German electorate. Whatever one thinks of AfD voters, writing off a fifth of the country is a strange strategy for an institution trying to arrest its own decline. It also throws the leadership’s stated values into sharp relief: Christian tolerance and forgiveness have their limits.  (Then again, tolerance has always had its limits in the church—the difference is that past dogmatists never considered themselves progressive). 

Unlike disaffected voters who can switch parties, disaffected Christians are unlikely to simply find another church. And yet, something is shifting. Young people especially are turning to free churches. Voter surveys suggest that a significant number of AfD supporters consider themselves Christian. According to one analysis, the party doubled its share of the Christian vote at the last election. Another found that among young church members aged 16–34, the AfD received a higher share of the vote than the CDU, which won the election overall. Meanwhile, the number of people who identify as Christian without belonging to any church is likely to continue rising.

This raises a question: is a new, informal evangelical movement quietly taking shape in Germany—one defined not only by opposition to the established parties, but by opposition to a church that has come to mirror them? And if so, what kind of Christianity might it carry? Whether a renewed turn to Christian identity will reinvigorate the deeper values of the Western tradition—including the liberal and Enlightenment values that tradition helped to sustain—remains genuinely uncertain. But one thing seems certain: It won’t be Germany’s Protestant Church leadership that can offer guidance and moral clarity.