Losing My Religion as a Natural Experiment: How State Pressure and Taxes Led to Church Disaffiliations between 1940 and 2010 in Germany

Abstract

The sociological literature has produced a remarkably consistent picture of the quantitative patterns of religious disaffiliations in Western countries. This article argues, and demonstrates, that strong changes in a social context may lead individuals to disaffiliate rapidly, leading to very different aggregate effects from those in the “western model.” We use the unique situation of the separation of Germany from 1949 to 1989 and its subsequent reunification as a “natural experiment” to show just how much the relationships routinely found can be disrupted under changed conditions. The state socialist “treatment” affected religious disaffiliations in East Germany profoundly as it (a) made disaffiliations 10 times more probable in the East than in the West in the 1950s and 1960s, (b) shielded East German church members from factors that led to mass disaffiliations in the West in the late 1960s and early 1970s, (c) reversed the education‐disaffiliation link in the East, thus making disaffiliation more likely among the less educated, and (d) led to an especially strong increase in disaffiliations in the East right after the reunification

Religious residue: The impact of childhood religious socialization on the religiosity of nones in France, Germany, Great Britain, and Sweden

“…In fact, the percentage of nones, whether raised with or without religion, was remarkably stable in Sweden in 1998–2018. In Germany, the high rate of increase in the proportion of disaffiliates may be attributed to a desire to avoid paying the church tax (Stolz et al., 2021 ).…”

Towards a Society of Stable Nones: Lifelong Non-Denominationalism as the Prevailing Pattern in East Germany

“…Most research that explicitly deals with the nones refers to the situation in Western European countries or in the non-European "Western" world (see Baker and Smith 2009;Bullivant 2017;Clements and Gries 2017;Hayes 2000;Hout 2017;Hout and Fischer 2002;Lim et al 2010;Merino 2012;Scheitle et al 2018;Schwadel 2010;Tanner 2022;Wilkins-Laflamme 2017, 2020;Vernon 1968;Voas and McAndrew 2012;Wilkins-Laflamme 2015;Woodhead 2016Woodhead , 2017; for a global overview, see the report by Balazka 2020). Nonetheless, there have been an increasing number of studies published primarily in German over the past 25 years on the characteristics, situation, and development of the nones in East Germany (often in comparison to West Germany) (see, for example, Neubert 1998;Pickel 2000Pickel , 2003Pickel , 2013Pickel , 2014bPickel et al 2019;Pittkowski 2006;Storch 2003; in English, see, for example, Hardy et al 2020;Stolz et al 2020).…”

“…The GDR and later East Germany provide a good example of how the interplay of various factors could lead to a comparatively early, all-encompassing, and lasting dechurchification of society, and some of the same factors came into play there that are also cited when it comes to explaining how the "nones" have gained in strength in "Western" societies: namely, increasing existential security, the questioning of firmly established worldviews through "cognitive contamination" (Berger 1967) as a result of cultural-ideological pluralization, the church's loss of authority in questions, for example, of lifestyle as a result of individualization and changing values, the competition between churches on the one hand, and ideologically secular providers and leisure activities on the other, and resistance to the political interference of church authorities in political questions (see Bruce 1996;Chaves 1994;Pollack and Rosta 2017;Schwadel 2010;Stolz et al 2020), but here, as in other post-communist societies (see Tomka 2005), there is also, of course, the very decisive and lasting factor of "enforced secularization" (Meulemann 2004), i.e., the political repression of churches and religion as a whole by the ruling state-socialist regime (for a detailed account of this, see Pollack 1994). That the processes of secularization had a particularly strong effect here in comparison to many other post-communist states is in turn attributed, among other things, to the fact that East Germany was a country strongly shaped by Protestantism.…”