1 - 2004

Religious diversity in Germany

Fears for Western culture

by Matthias Drobinski

It is surprising what a vehement discussion can be aroused by one simple sentence from President Johannes Rau. The President, who has deep spiritual roots in the church milieu, said that if a Muslim head scarf is considered a missionary or political tool, then this also applies to monastic habits and crosses.

Numerous church representatives were outraged, saying, these headscarves cannot be compared with the habits of our orders! So were politicians, from Bundestag (Parliament) President Wolfgang Thierse, a Social Democrat, to Edmund Stoiber of the Christian Social Union. For Hermann Kues, the Christian Democratic Union's church relations official, to remove Christian symbols from the schools would be the same as "scrapping our cultural heritage". - There are things to be said both for and against Rau's opinion. In his favour, his opinion is not different from that of the Constitutional Court, in its ruling on the head scarf: No ban should lead to unequal treatment of different religions.

Against him it must be said that the era is past when it was a political statement to identify oneself as a Dominican or a Jesuit (so is the era in which "to take up the cross" meant to sharpen one's sword and kill as many Muslims as possible). Nevertheless, the head scarf today is a highly ambivalent symbol. It can be a confession of faith, sign of oppression, or symbol of the struggle for an Islamic society. In this country there are currently 16 teachers who wear the head scarf without any complaints; one who was forbidden to do so fought it all the way to the Constitutional Court. It is the affair of a very small minority.

Don't foreigners in Germany have more urgent problems: poor command of German language, bad education, high unemployment? But the unending and emotional dispute over the Muslim head scarf, which not only we Germans but almost all Europeans will have with us all year, shows that the quarrel has deeper causes. CDU church relations official Kues made the point tellingly, in his concern for our cultural heritage: it's the fear that something is being lost, if a teacher is allowed to give lessons wearing a head scarf, or if teaching staff are forbidden to wear religious symbols at all. That something is called "the Christian West" or "Christian influence"; it has also been called the "leading culture". It signifies a basic human need, to have something to hold onto in life which we don't have to look for again every morning. That we will find more which is familiar than which alienates us; that, whether or not we have especially kept up with it, we can pass this scheme of things on to our children and their children. If you call that reactionary, narrow-minded or provincial, you don't understand much about people.

But our grip on life is slipping and the scheme of things is crumbling, even though two out of three Germans still belong to a Christian church, at least formally, and the 3.2 million Muslims haven't made this a multi-religious country. The processes going on within western societies have begun to alienate their inhabitants from the culture of the Occident. A third of all Germans has no church affiliation; the loss of religious knowledge and the secularisation within the church is even more dramatic. The carriers of Occidental culture have a sense of insecurity and loss; can the church structures be kept the way they are? What happens to religious instruction in schools, military chaplaincies, church taxes, if Christians become a minority in the country?

At the same time the need of citizens for meaning, something to hold onto, grows the more they are forced to be flexible. How shall we orient ourselves in a world where everything is in flux, in these days of terror alerts, cuts in social welfare, hopes for an economic upturn?

... Theodore Adorno once made a connection between a person's capacity to deal properly with the new, unaccustomed and foreign and the strength of that person's ego. This can be applied to countries too. The more conscious a society is of its values, the easier a time it will have in dealing with whatever is strange, and in seeing the dispute about the head scarf for what it is: The question of whether a tiny minority should be allowed to display its religious convictions even in schools. Indeed, this does need to be examined carefully.

This opinion, here slightly abridged, piece appeared in the Süddeutsche Zeitung on January 8th 2004, national edition, page 4.