“The Federal Republic’s religious policy is dysfunctional”

Germany’s religious policy is “highly dysfunctional”, said the academic on May 24, 2016 in the public lecture series “Religious Policy Today” at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität (WWU) Münster. The political system and society in Germany are neither prepared for the fact that fewer and fewer people are religious, nor that the forms of expression and negotiation processes in the shrinking religious segment are becoming more diverse and extreme. The special position of the churches puts members of groups of other denominations at a disadvantage. This was also a result of decisions made when the Basic Law was created. In his remarks, the academic traced how the articles on religion and the church in the Basic Law came about in 1949, which have shaped the relationship between the state and the two Christian churches to this day. The incorporation of the relevant passages of the Weimar Constitution of 1919 into the Basic Law was not based on a broadly supported decision, but rather served above all to avoid conflict, as Thomas Großbölting, Professor of Modern History and Contemporary History at Münster University, said. “Religious political orders are not designed on the drawing board of political planning, but are the result of coincidental power and political constellations,” explained the historian. This was particularly true of the so-called “church articles” of the Basic Law: in terms of religious policy, the members of the Parliamentary Council who drafted the Basic Law relied on continuity and conflict avoidance, “by dealing with the question of the allocation of state and church slowly and retreating to old formulas of the Weimar Republic as a compromise”, said Großbölting. “The fathers and mothers of the Basic Law were aware of the explosive power that the question of the relationship between state and church could have in the young FRG,” said the historian. The historian drew a critical balance on the behavior of politics towards a society that had been changing ideologically for a long time: “On the part of the state, there is no active and certainly no proactive approach to the challenge of religious diversity. In politics, administration and public life, people have become comfortable with the religious status quo and then tinker with it when it cannot be avoided,” said Großbölting, author of the book “Der verlorene Himmel: Glaube in Deutschland seit 1945” (The Lost Heaven: Faith in Germany since 1945), which was published in 2013. In view of the “sluggish history of the development” of the religious-political order, there is little reason to see today’s state-church relationship as “particularly worthy of protection or sacrosanct”. “If the political will to change is there, then go ahead,” said the academic.

Source: Cluster of Excellence Religion and Politics