“A unifying understanding of culture is not created by repressive requirements or incomprehensible restrictions,” emphasized Frieder Otto Wolf, President of the Humanist Association of Germany, in Berlin on Thursday.
The occasion was the criticism by Nikolaus Schneider, Chairman of the Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany, of the protests against the bans on dancing on Christian holidays in many German states. Schneider defended the dance bans in an interview with the Evangelical Press Service. “Are you such unrestrained egoists that the only thing that matters is enforcing what you feel like doing?” said the EKD Council Chairman in a question to supporters of the protests. He called for more consideration for the Christian Good Friday, which has so far been handed down as a so-called silent holiday in many places with the help of state laws. Frieder Otto Wolf welcomed the Council Chairman’s statement that the possibility of celebrating church services does not depend on legal protection of public holidays. In principle, he said, it was also right and sensible from a humanist perspective for people in society to deal with the issues of dying and their own finiteness and to be able to experience moments of concentration and silence. However, Wolf emphasized that the Christian churches could not simply derive comprehensive design claims from the questions of implementation, referring to the new ideological pluralism in many regions. It must also be recognized that many church members no longer follow the customs associated with a Christian confession, or do so only to a very limited extent and in a very individual way. “This raises the question for opponents of legal restrictions as to why the churches are still able to spread their religiosity on these days with the help of laws in such a way that nobody can get past them,” said Wolf. He reminded the audience that it is not only some atheists or church critics who are confronted with the predominantly Christian holiday culture, but also members of many other denominations with different religious holidays. “And as more and more people have lost touch with their religious convictions, as the Chairman of the Council explained in the interview, an open discussion about the forms of state support for public commemoration and holiday culture is overdue. This is a completely normal process.” This should therefore also be seen by EKD Council Chairman Schneider as an opportunity to constructively contribute to the debate on what constitutes the cultural understanding of people in Germany today and what can actually unite them. “Mere indignation at protests against questionable restrictions is not enough. Society’s respect for religious needs can obviously no longer simply be legislated for. You have to earn it.”
