Religion and Morality in Eastern Germany

The geographical idiom ‘eastern Germany’ today refers to a wide range of issues. As a region, it is part of Germany, and is situated at the heart of Europe. At the same time it is still remembered in both East and West as having belonged to the socialist East. It has been considered as opposed to the capitalist West, from which point of view it belonged to the historically excluded part of Europe. Furthermore, the region that once constituted a country in itself is generally depicted as one of the most secular societies of Europe – after the political Wende, no revival of traditional or “new” religiosity was registered, as has been the case elsewhere. 

However, the emergence of the secular in eastern Germany is very specific and linked to its main distinctive features – Protestantism on one hand and socialism on the other. Much has been written on religion in this region from a quantitative-sociological, historical or theological-institutional point of view, but little is known about actual practice today. This project will undertake the study of religion in eastern Germany from ethnographic perspectives. 

NARRATIVES OF SECULARIZATION

Both the concepts of the secular and of secularisation have been subject to major criticism in the past decades. Nevertheless, secularisation has remained the dominant paradigm for studying and analysing religious change in eastern Germany. At least three major scientific narratives of religious decline in this particular region can be distinguished in this argument.

1.    One narrative of secularisation stresses the governmental policies of the past – the Nazi-Regime on one hand and on the other hand “real existing communism”. From this perspective, in East Germany the atheist policy of the communist regime was most successful.

2.    Functionalist-oriented narratives stress that in the GDR, in particular in its final years, the churches were part of the opposition and that after the fall of communism they could no longer play this role, resulting in turn in the decline of religious participation.

3.    A further narrative indicates that in eastern Germany secularisation set in much earlier, well before the political divide into East and West, that is, probably with the Enlightenment and that it was therefore not only the result of communist policy. This long-term perspective follows a Weberian approach to secularisation with its underlying assumption that the more ‘modern’ a society is, the more ‘secular’ it will be.

Social scientists observing the changes in church membership, church attendance and beliefs and practices of a religious character in eastern Germany after the Second World War have demonstrated that there is a general decline in religious interest and involvement. During 40 years of socialism church membership declined from about 90 to about 30 percent. Since the end of socialism there has been no significant change in membership or attendance. While western Germany has also been affected by secularisation processes, this tendency here is much weaker and church membership is much higher, 84.4 percent in 1998. The major change that took place in the Protestant and Catholic churches in eastern Germany after Unification was probably a political one, that is, that they were re-established as public bodies receiving public funding. Still, those persons who are in some way engaged in religion or church life do so as a minority with all the implications this involves (‘wider den Strom’). The secular is thus an inevitable part of any research project on religion and its meanings and practices in eastern Germany. It cannot be assumed that religion is the dominant source of morality. The study of religion must necessarily be linked to considerations of the legal and demographic status of religious communities and institutions.