The interaction of religion and state in Germany

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Vladimirskiy State University named after the Stoletov brothers Vladimir, Russia

The interaction of religion and state in Germany

Vikulov I.Y.

Scientific supervisor: prof. Fedulenkova T.N.

Аннотация

ВЗАИМОДЕЙСТВИЕ РЕЛИГИИ И ГОСУДАРСТВА В ГЕРМАНИИ

Викулов И.Е.

Научный руководитель: проф. Федуленкова Т.Н.

Владимирский государственный университет имени А.Г. и Н.Г. Столетовых Владимир, Россия

Germany is a country with 1300 years of Christian tradition, so as one may expect Christianity is still the predominant religion in Germany. Although the number of practicing Christians is on the decline, the Christian religion in Germany is present in the country's cultural heritage.

About 65% to 70% of the population are followers of the Christian religion in Germany. They are more or less evenly split between the mainstream denominations of Lutheran-Protestantism and Calvinism united in the EKD (Evangelical Church in Germany) and the Roman Catholic Church. Due to the historical development of religion in Germany, these denominations are concentrated in specific regions.

In the course of the Protestant Reformation and the ensuing Thirty Years' War in the 15th and 16th centuries, religion in Germany ended up being distributed according to the preferences of local rulers. Therefore, most areas in the South or West (especially Bavaria and Northrhine-Westphalia) are Catholic while the North and East are mainly Protestant. However, the Communist regime of the former DDR (German Democratic Republic) frowned upon religion in Germany's eastern parts until the reunification in 1990. This explains why the percentage of self-confessed atheists is particularly high in these federal states.

Other strands of Christian religion in Germany are the so-called Free Evangelical Churches, a loose union of congregations adhering to Baptism, Methodism and related faiths such as the Mennonites, as well as the two Orthodox churches. Christian evangelism in Germany goes back to U.S. American missionary efforts in the 19th century. Both the Greek-Orthodox and the Russian-Orthodox religion in Germany became established here with the Greek and Serbian immigrant population in the 1960s and 1970s.

Apart from these smaller Christian congregations, important minority religions in Germany are Islam (about 4 % of the German population), Judaism, and Buddhism (both of which represent less than 1% of Germany's inhabitants).

The atrocities of the Holocaust are overshadowing the history of Judaism in Germany. According to sources from late Antiquity, Jews have been living in Germany since 321 AD. For more than one and a half millennia, the relationship between the Jewish Diaspora and Germany's majority population vacillated between quiet coexistence and religiously motivated persecution, between the Jews' status as social outcasts and their slow assimilation into mainstream society. Before 1933, there were more than 600,000 Jews in Germany. During the following twelve years, the viciously anti-Semitic Nazi regime killed most of those who didn't emigrate.

Today, more than 65 years after the end of World War Two, the Jewish community in Germany counts over 100,000 members. The increase in numbers is also due to Jewish immigration from the former Soviet Union. The majority of German Jews (the more observant and conservative ones) feel represented by the Central Council of Jews in Germany, while about 3,000 liberal Jews belong to the much smaller Union of Progressive Jews in Germany.

In direct comparison with Judaism, Islam is a far more recent religion in Germany. It goes back to the post-World War Two immigration of so-called Gastarbeiter (foreign workers) and refugees. Most Muslims in Germany have a Turkish, Kurdish, Iranian, Palestinian, or Bosnian background, and they have organized themselves in a diverse range of decentralized organizations. These include, for example, the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs, supported by the Turkish government and representative of Sunnite Islam in Turkey; the AABF, an umbrella organization for Alevites from Kurdish regions; the association of Bosnian Muslims, and many others.

For quite some time freedom of religion was not among the most controversial fundamental rights, at least in Germany and other European countries. The controversies between the Christian denominations faded away, partly because an increasingly secular society cared less and less about them, partly because the growing secularization of society prompted the Christian churches to move closer to each other and to emphasize their commonalities instead of insisting on the differences. In addition, the state, which is the addressee of fundamental rights, rarely gave the religious communities cause to worry about their freedom. The churches, in turn, had made their peace with the secular state and were even prepared to accept it as part of God's world plan.

This state of affairs was reflected in constitutional law and jurisprudence. With very few exceptions, the great social and political controversies that reached the German Constitutional Court did not emerge from the field of religion. There were some cases concerning education that drew a lot of interest: school prayer is an example, and there was the famous case about the crucifixes in classrooms of Bavarian elementary schools. But it seems significant that the largest number of cases concerning freedom of religion dealt with the monetary aspect of this right, the church tax, which members of the Christian churches have to pay in Germany and which the state collects together with the income tax.

However, this situation has changed since 1989-90. With the disappearance of the East-West-divide, which had pushed all other conflicts into the background, religion and religious communities reappeared on the public scene and began to insist more vigorously on respect for their belief and on living according to the commandments of their creed. As has often been observed, a process of re-politicization of religion is taking place that goes along with a corresponding process of de-secularization of society. Religious issues play an increasing role in the public debate. This development does not leave the law unaffected. European societies face a growing number of conflicts with a religious background. The courts, including the German Constitutional Court, are increasingly concerned with claims based on freedom of religion.

Yet, this is not a revival of the old inner-Christian controversies. Neither is the reason a new hostility of the state vis-а-vis religion or a new identification with a single denomination as was the tradition in many European countries. Rather, the conflicts have their source in the growing multiculturalism of European societies, caused by the immigration of members of non-Christian beliefs. Quite often, these are beliefs that, like the Christian denominations, claim possession of a divine and therefore absolute truth, but, unlike the Christian denominations, have not undergone the process of historicization and contextualization of God's revelation that permits the Christian churches to adopt a more distant attitude vis-а-vis sacred texts and the commandments following from them. Moreover, some religious communities have not learned to distinguish between the error and the erring person, such that it is difficult for them to bridge the incompatibility of religious dogmas by a spirit of tolerance vis-а-vis believers of a different faith. Finally, the immigrants often are not accustomed to the secular state, a pluralistic society, and a law independent from religion.

All this is particularly true for the Islamic religion, albeit not for Islam altogether and certainly not only for Islam. But for a number of reasons the Islamic religion is in the center of the controversies in Europe. The most obvious reason is, of course, that here the vast majority of immigrants are Muslims. For many of them the confrontation with Western norms and life styles and the ensuing experience of the contingency of one's own beliefs and ways of life is deeply disturbing. In addition, many Islamic societies not only remain unaffected by Western modernization, but rather reject it explicitly, and draw the justification for this attitude from their religious beliefs. They are accustomed to a state that proclaims itself as an Islamic state, meaning that no clear distinction is made between religion, politics and law.

As a consequence, new lines of conflicts appear. General laws that do not have religious implications in Western countries or reflect the Christian tradition of the Western world enter into conflict with the religious norms of the immigrants. The German society, like some other societies in Europe, has not yet found a consensus as to how to respond to this challenge. It is torn between the postulate of assimilation on the one hand and an unconditioned acceptance of otherness on the other hand, whereas the immigrants often react by insolating themselves within their host societies. There are also some who prefer to fight the Western way of life and do not always rule out the use of force. One should not forget, however, that for Western countries, formed by Christianity, this is an encounter with their own history. For many centuries, Christian denominations confronted `heretics' and `pagans' with a similar attitude. The history of these countries is full of crusades, inquisitions, ordeals, censorship, etc. It took a long time until a peaceful coexistence of the Christian denominations became a normality, before Christians and non-Christians enjoyed equal rights, and before a pluralism of ideas, religious as well as political, was regarded as legitimate. In order to understand the present situation one has to realize however that the historical development, which is interpreted as progress in the West, often appears as relativism or decadence to the immigrants. It is this difference that gives the conflict its particular severity.

From the German perspective an intuitive first answer might be the following. Politics and religion should ideally be separated from each other. Religion is at its best where it is as little political as possible; politics in turn ought to be as far as possible free from religious influence. For religious groups that do not accept this division we quickly and easily employ the word `fundamentalists'. Politicians who use religious symbolism in their rhetoric or who back up their argument by reference to religious beliefs would appear suspicious.

The separation of the two domains in Germany (as in many other European countries) is by no means as clear as public perception would have it. On the contrary, the state is accorded traditionally the right to support religious communities and to co-operate with them--a right which it may (and does) exert discriminately based on political considerations concerning the public good. This principle has led to remarkable forms of co-operation between state and church in social and health services, in areas such as religious education at schools, theology faculties at universities and the collection of financial contributions to religious communities via the state tax system. At the same time, as the religious landscape has grown ever more diverse in recent decades the difficulties of the political discernment implied in this system have repeatedly been challenged. Only recently Jehovah's Witnesses have won a Supreme Court case granting them privileges which the state had previously attempted to deny them.

The traditionally sceptical attitude towards religious influence on politics in Europe has been largely due to the heritage of a confrontation between a powerful church and a state trying to assert its secular legitimacy against that power. For a long time, therefore, politics and religion seemed to be a formula for ecclesiastical attempts to dominate the political sphere and the state's need to defend it. At a time, when the final remnants of that mighty institution of yore seem to be losing their grip on European societies those societies begin to realize that that confrontational perspective has been one sided. They suddenly come to understand that religion is fundamentally a power forming people's character and directing their lives, a source of the most deeply rooted values. Precisely those virtues, however, are needed badly within the political realm too. Societies lacking people with strong characters and stable value systems become spiritually and morally poor, however economically rich they may still be. Often these people are inconvenient. They follow the path which they believe is right whatever the obstacles, however many people disagree, quite often in the face of an opposing majority. The vast number of people, who lack such a compass, heightens our appreciation of those who possess it - however inconvenient, however difficult they may be. The astonishing respect and admiration which the world has shown towards the late pope, a man whose views, more often than not, were inconvenient and frequently also out of touch with his time may have been the most distinct recent indication of this tendency. This same tendency is seen also in the fact, much more directly relevant for politics and religion, that in a country such as Germany, where religious affiliation overall is declining, the number of committed Christians among politicians, members of parliament, office holders etc., is steady, by some counts even increasing. This divergence is most apparent (and actually most amazing) in the so-called `new lands', former East Germany. What is the explanation? People realize that religion provides a compass for one's life, a steady and thus reliable basis of core values. Insofar as the individual does not make them up for themselves, they appear to them as binding and unchangeable. Precisely such an attitude, however, may be for a politician (and for other professions) no less important than a wide range of knowledge and the mastery of certain techniques. If it's true, then they are appropriating precisely the assumption that has always been at the center of the American attitude towards religion and politics.

What follows from this insight? Religion needs to be cultivated. It needs, that is, to be subjected to the same kind of treatment. In this case people can argue that the strongest ideas that work on the human mind, such as freedom or justice, are of the same fundamental and ambiguous nature too. They all have the capacity to achieve enormous benefits, but the damage they may work if misapplied is equally enormous. What people do (or certainly what people ought to do) is to work on those forces so crucial for human life and for human motivation to cultivate them by means of education.

The light of current threats to democracy and freedom emanating from fundamentalist varieties of religion, including the danger of an ideological deformation of political decision making, this kind of `religious education', which combines an appreciation of religion with an insight in its ambiguous character, might be a legitimate political concern of democratic societies on both sides of the Atlantic.

Вопросы:

1. Какая религия является основной в Германии? Christianity is still the predominant religion in Germany. About 65% to 70% of the population are followers of the Christian religion in Germany.

2. Какие основные миноритарные религии присутствуют в Германии? They are Judaism and Islam.

3. В какие союзы объединяются мусульмане в Германии? Most Muslims in Germany have a Turkish, Kurdish, Iranian, Palestinian, or Bosnian background, and they have organized themselves in a diverse range of decentralized organizations. These include, for example, the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs, supported by the Turkish government and representative of Sunnite Islam in Turkey; the AABF, an umbrella organization for Alevites from Kurdish regions; the association of Bosnian Muslims, and many others.

4. Являлась ли свобода религии противоречивым правом в Германии? For quite some time freedom of religion was not among the most controversial fundamental rights, at least in Germany.

5. Какие взаимные процессы происходят между религией и политикой в Германии? As has often been observed, a process of re-politicization of religion is taking place that goes along with a corresponding process of de-secularization of society. Religious issues play an increasing role in the public debate.

6. Существуют ли в Германии конфликты, основанные на религиозной основе? European societies face a growing number of conflicts with a religious background. The courts, including the German Constitutional Court, are increasingly concerned with claims based on freedom of religion.

7. Согласно пониманию немецкого правительства, какими должны быть отношения между религией и государством? Religion is at its best where it is as little political as possible; politics in turn ought to be as far as possible free from religious influence.

8. Почему люди имеют скептическое отношение к влиянию религии на политику государства?

9. The traditionally sceptical attitude towards religious influence on politics in Europe has been largely due to the heritage of a confrontation between a powerful church and a state trying to assert its secular legitimacy against that power.

10. Какие шаги нужно предпринять в сторону религии?

11. Religion needs to be cultivated. It needs, that is, to be subjected to the same kind of treatment, which is similarly important, similarly fundamental and similarly ambiguous. What people do (or certainly what people ought to do) is to work on those forces so crucial for human life and for human motivation to cultivate them by means of education.

12. Какое отношение было к политике и религии в Германии? Politics and religion seemed to be a formula for ecclesiastical attempts to dominate the political sphere and the state's need to defend it.

religious policy germany state

Источники

1. Zachhuber, Johannes. Politics and Religion in Germany and the United States: Public Lecture at the Beyers-Naudй Centre of Public Theology // Religion - Staat - Kultur, Humboldt-universitat Zu Berlin (English) Taschenbuch, № 9, 2007.

2. Madeley, John. Politics and religion in the modern world: an overview // Politics and religion in the modern world / Edited by George Moyser. London and New York: Издательство: Routledge, 1991.

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