4 - 2002

New immigration policies

Immigration and religion

by Ulrich Ruh

The religious landscape is among the aspects of our lives which are being changed by immigration. Most non-Christian immigrants have been brought up to be devout and want to practise their faith. Is this a threat to inter-religious peace? Hardly. Nevertheless, these immigrants pose a question to the largely secularised, traditional church religion which we take for granted.

Will future immigration change, among other things, the religious character of Germany? In the current discussions, within political parties as well as elsewhere, about controlling and limiting immigration, about quotas and promoting integration of immigrants, about multiculturalism and the cultural adaptation which has been achieved, this question is not in the foreground.

But it would be worthwhile to pay more attention to it. One reason is that religion and the churches in the Federal Republic of Germany, as in other European countries, are in the process of changing in any case, and the outcome is uncertain. Another is that the religious landscape here in our country and elsewhere in Europe has already been changed, or at least influenced, by immigration during the last half century.
It began after World War II with the Germans expelled from their homelands in the east, who came by millions to western Germany and changed the proportions between Christian confessions. The prevailing confessional tendencies in Lower Bavaria and the East Frisian Islands were not changed. But in areas which had been almost totally Catholic, new Protestant parishes appeared, and in the classically Protestant homelands there were now new Catholic parishes. After the first internal migrations caused by industrialisation, the expulsion of Germans from Silesia, Pomerania, East Prussia and the Sudetenland was the second push which loosened the confessional boundaries in Germany, many of which had remained tightly drawn since the 16th century.

Then came the recruitment of ”guest workers” from southern Europe, who were needed by the ”Economic miracle” in the Federal Republic. Among them were not only Italian, Spanish and Croatian Catholics, but also many Greeks and Serbs of the Orthodox faith. This led to a marked strengthening of the Orthodox presence in Germany, which had previously consisted  mainly of Russian churches in the resort towns between Baden-Baden and Bad Ems and Russians who had emigrated following the October Revolution. Today it has become standard for Orthodox liturgies to be among the Sunday worship services broadcast on television, and the Greek Orthodox Metropolitan for Germany is an expected guest on state as well as church occasions.

With the Turkish workers and their families who joined them, large numbers of Muslims came to live in Germany for the first time, especially in the industrial urban population centres. However, it took a long time for the Turkish guest workers, like other Muslims who came to Germany, to be perceived as Muslims. The discovery of Islam as a religious factor, and consequently as a challenge to the society as well as the churches, came later in the Federal Republic than it did in France and Great Britain with their colonial traditions. By now the Muslims have numerically become the third largest religious group in Germany, after the Catholic and Protestant churches.

Jewish congregations in our country have also grown significantly in the past ten years, because of immigration from the former member states of the Soviet Union. Today, Germany has the third largest number of men and women of the Jewish faith in Western Europe, after France and Great Britain. Numerous Jewish congregations have been re-established, others have had enormous membership increases.
The changes in central and eastern Europe have also affected the religious landscape in Germany. For one thing, ethnic Germans returning from the former Soviet Union to resettle in Germany have brought new accents to the Protestant free churches; some of these returnees have founded their own Protestant congregations, where they can practice the forms of worship to which they were accustomed in their former homes.

On the other hand, internal migration from the former Communist east Germany has led to increases in the number of people without religious affiliation in areas of west Germany which were previously hardly affected by this phenomenon. Thus, for example, even former bastions of the traditional churches are seeing increased numbers of unbaptised school children. As diverse as these immigration processes during the last half century have been, they have never seriously threatened religious peace in our country. So far, Germany has been spared such events as the public protests of Muslims in England against Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, or the campaigns against the building of mosques led by the Northern League in Italy.

Compared with the disputes over Islamic headscarves worn by French schoolgirls, the quarrel about a Muslim teacher wearing a headscarf here in Germany was a mere trifle. At the beginning of a new century, Germany is a country without an explosive atmosphere in the area of religious politics. This, of course, has a lot to do with our country’s history and the resulting influences in religion and church. Germany has been and still is typically dominated by two large church confessions which enjoy equal rights. Thus it might be said that the need to sort things out occurs only around the edges.

In addition, the laws of the state regarding churches steer a middle course between a tradition of laicism and that of the state church, thus largely avoiding potential for conflicts which is present elsewhere. Finally, the attitude towards religion in German society is a mixture of ignorance, indifference and liberality; ”we” have no objection to religion and religious communities, as long as they keep within normal limits and don’t impose their messages and way of life too strongly on other individuals or the general public.

Could any of this change be due to immigration? In trying to answer this question today, one finds oneself dealing with many unknowns. In particular, there is no way of knowing how many immigrants, in which categories, Germany wants to accept, or will accept, in the next few years or decades. And it is not yet clear where these immigrants will mainly come from: central and eastern Europe? North Africa and the Near East? Asia (India) or Latin America?
In any case, however, most of such men and women will have had one or another religious influence in their lives. There are few areas of the world where the importance of religion in one’s personal life and in society has decreased to the degree it has in western Europe, which for several centuries has been going through a process of secularisation at many levels and in many forms. This process has certainly affected other parts of the world which are influenced by European culture and civilisation, where it has, however – the best example being the USA – taken a different course.

The regions gegraphically nearest to Germany where immigrants might come from would be eastern and southern Europe on one hand, north Africa and the Near East on the other. As a rule, potential immigrants from eastern Europe would be Catholic or Orthodox, the inheritors of decades of Communist rule which tried churches and their members harshly, and left behind a spiritual and cultural vacuum which now presents a powerful challenge to the faith and the church. Possible immigrants from the Maghreb (north Africa), with its rapidly growing, very young populations, would normally be Muslims, thus would strengthen the Muslim community in Germany, with its mainly Turkish influence, but perhaps change it as well.

Another picture would result from increased immigration from more distant parts of the world, in which often a great diversity of Christian churches or groups and as many non-Christian religions are found. Of course, whether the religious diversity in these regions would be reproduced in like proportions among emigrants to Germany, no one can say. Most likely those Christians who came to Germany would not fit readily into the mainstream of our unobtrusively ”establishment” Catholicism or Protestantism. There are already African and Korean congregations in our big cities which are maintaining their own forms of Christian expression.
Thus the religious map of Germany will change according to the numbers of immigrants and the religions they profess, without causing any dramatic shifts. Christians of the two main confessions will continue to be the most numerous religious group in Germany; most likely their losses from people leaving the churches will be greater than any shifts due to immigration by people belonging to non-Christian religions. The mosaic of Christian churches, communities and groups will probably become more varicoloured than it already is now. But here too, the numerical dominance of Catholics on one hand and the Protestant regional churches on the other is unlikely to change.

Serious problems with religion, or with laws of the state regarding the churches, are hardly to be expected as consequences of increased immigration, even though much has still to be clarified with regard to Muslims in Germany among others. But there is no reason in principle to oppose Muslim religious instruction as a regular subject to be taught in German schools, and in the near future there could also be Muslim military clergy in our country, as there already are in other European countries. Overall the laws of the state regarding religion are flexible enough to deal with the challenges of a more diverse religious landscape.

Perhaps the discussion of a concept for regulating immigration, and then the immigration which ensues according to this concept, can itself contribute to renewed, more serious and better informed reflection on our own religious history with its ruptures and new beginnings, on the role of religion in a liberal society, and the mission of the churches. Religion is, after all, not only a private matter, but also an ongoing public concern.

Dr. Ulrich Ruh is editor-in-chief of the monthly journal Herder Korrespondenz. This article, here abridged, appeared in the June 2001 issue.