Approximately 70% of Germans are religious or very religious. These were the results of a research on religion by the Bertelsmann Foundation made public on December 17. As reported by Kna, a German Catholic news agency, the survey shows there is no tendency to drift away from religion. The situation is more complex than it appears. One German out of six who declares to belong to a Church isn’t religious. While a third of those who claim they don’t feel bound at confessional level, declare themselves to be religious. This is true especially in former Eastern Germany, where hundreds of thousand of people ask themselves religious questions although they don’t belong to a Church. “The long-term extinction of religion in Germany isn’t a closed process”, claimed Martin Rieger, in charge of the Bertelsmann project. The authors of the survey confirmed the flaws in the research: for example, it was not possible to give a detailed picture of the situations of Muslims in Germany due to the lack of appropriate data. This gap will be filled during the forthcoming years. The survey conducted in Germany gave a very diverse and fragmented picture. In the old Länder, 78% declare themselves to be religious: of these, 21% say they are very religious. The situation is different in the ex-DDR Länder: only 36% of its inhabitants define themselves religious. The survey revealed a surprising detail: among the youth who say they are religious, faith is more important than it is for adults. In fact, 52% of those aged 18-29 say they are religious and 14% declare themselves very religious. According to Father Hans Langendörfer, Secretary of the German Bishops Conference, this refutes in a “remarkable” way the theory on the lack of religiousness among the youth.
