The following article is from our June 2006 issue.

Germany's Faith Is Not Yet Dead. Sunday services are still scantily attended, but religion is seeing a resurgence. By Uwe Siemon-Netto

According to a preconception widely held in the United States, Western Europe has become a hopelessly heathen continent. And indeed, Germans, Scandinavians, the Dutch, the British and the French attend church services much less frequently than Americans. But according to other indicators, the church's situation in the Old World does not seem nearly as dire. There are increasing signs that a religious renewal might be in the air and that the demand for a return to Christian values is growing.

Ever since Dresden's rebuilt Frauenkirche, or Church of our Lady, was consecrated on Reformation Sunday last year, stunning things have happened in this largest Protestant sanctuary in Germany. One million people have visited this glorious baroque edifice since it opened its doors to the public on Oct. 31. Most of these tourists were Germans from the former Communist East Germany, which had become thoroughly de-Christianized in 56 years of atheist dictatorships, first Nazi then Marxist. But if you think they all just showed up merely to gawk at a place of sublime beauty, think again.

"One-third of these visitors stayed for our daily worship services," reported Grit Jandura, the Frauenkirche's spokeswoman. On workdays, two offices are celebrated, each with a hymn, a homily, prayers and sacred music stirringly played on the church's huge 4,873-pipe organ. For the first of those two services, which begins at noon, every one of the building's 1,800 seats is usually taken. Similarly, the two Sunday liturgies rank among the most popular in the country.

Such are the spiritual needs of many visitors that, starting in June, 10 ministers will avail themselves in this church to hear confessions from strangers and discuss matters of faith with them, according to Jost Hasselhoff, a spokesman for the Frauenkirche's clergy. On Easter night, 18 adults were baptized here; most were raised in East Germany's godless milieu but accepted the Christian religion by a curious detour that seems symptomatic for many conversions in the former East Germany and elsewhere in Europe. "It often happens that parents do not wish for their children to be raised as godless as they themselves were under Communism," said Klaus Kaden, the former superintendent (regional bishop) of the nearby city of Pirna. "So they immerse themselves in catechetical studies and eventually ask to be baptized, often at the same time as their kids."

It would seem foolhardy to interpret this turn of events as the advent of a new awakening; still, it signifies a fascinating trend, European theologians and sociologists of religion agree. Tens of thousands of adult baptisms occur in the night before Easter throughout the old Continent and especially in France, the most secularized nation in Western Europe. And the numbers go up year after year.

"This corresponds to the phenomenon that many parishes have had to start waitlists for adult catechism classes, and that our theology courses are booked to capacity," said Jean Joncheray, former vice rector of the Catholic University of Paris. "Most students are not here to become priests; they simply desire a theological education."

For several years now, Paul M. Zulehner, dean of the University of Vienna's Catholic Divinity School and a renowned sociologist of religion, has noted a significant increase of "spirituality" in most of Europe's urban centers. This, he cautioned, does not necessarily mean a Christian revival; neither does it exclude a resurgent interest in the Christian message, though.

This seems to support the contention by U.S. theologian and sociologist Alvin Schmidt that religiosity has since antiquity been subject to cyclical developments throughout Western history, although the cycles are clearly not synchronized on both sides of the Atlantic. This leads to the question: Does the Old World experience an upswing in faith that has so far gone unnoticed in the United States because Americans study different indicators for religiosity than Europeans?

To judge a nation's faith fairly requires more than the analysis of weekly church attendance, European specialists suggest. True, some 40 percent of all American church members participate in worship services at least once a week, compared with 9 percent of Christians in Germany, for example. But this says little about the different ways faith impacts the comportment of different peoples. Take the abortion issue: An American woman is three times more likely to have an abortion than a German woman, international comparisons show, and while half of all marriages in the United States break up and the divorce rate of evangelical couples is particularly high, "only" 41 percent of German husbands and wives separate.

Furthermore, while Christianity is often ridiculed by the media in Europe, "Christianity's accomplishments seem to receive more reverence from the educated classes in Europe than in the United States," observed the Pastor Albrecht Immanuel Herzog, head of a Lutheran publishing house in Bavaria. "We don't experience the anti-Christian stridency we often observe at many American liberal arts colleges," he said in response to a report that a journalism professor of a renowned college of communications in the American Midwest forbade his honors students during a visit to France to write papers about religious developments in that country. "I don't believe a German professor would be that narrow-minded."

While Americans are told they are much stronger believers than their European cousins, polls do not show such great a difference. True, there seem to be few genuine atheists on the western side of the Atlantic. But when asked about the nature of their deity, only 69 percent of Americans identify God as the omniscient and omnipotent Creator worshiped by Christians and Jews. This corresponds almost precisely to the beliefs of Western Germans (70 percent) - religion in the formerly communist East is a much more complicated and diffuse matter - and is not hugely different from the beliefs of the French of whom 60 percent affirm the Judeo-Christian God.

Moreover, there are powerful signs that especially in Germany "the trend runs clearly in the direction of religion," according to Renate Köcher of the Institut für Demoskopie Allensbach, one of the country's leading pollsters. For instance, the share of Germans saying they derive comfort and strength from their faith has jumped from 35 to 42 percent in the last 10 years, and the jump is particularly noticeable among young adults (18 to 26 percent), Köcher said.

For decades, young Germans had habitually expressed a low regard for pastors and priests. Now ministers rank second only to physicians in their estimation, according to a recent youth survey. And whereas in 1995, 30 percent of Germans said they distrusted the Protestant denominations - and 45 percent, the Roman Catholic Church - these figures dropped to 24 and 43 percent respectively in 2005.

A full third of all Germans has developed a keen interest in matters of faith, compared with only 24 percent a decade ago. This is a complete reversal from the situation that prevailed 10 years ago. Then, 32 percent were not at all interested in religion, while 24 percent were.

A dramatic indicator for religion's return in Germany is what is happening in politics. It seemed only yesterday that former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and several of his cabinet members stunned the German public by eschewing the customary formula, "so help me God," when swearing their oath of office. Under Schröder's Christian Democrat successor Angela Merkel, a practicing Lutheran, a converse development is making headlines - the unabashed profession of faith by her family affairs minister Ursula von der Leyen.

Von der Leyen is a physician, an economist - and a mother of seven. Recently she appeared before the media in the company of Cardinal Georg Sterzinsky, archbishop of Berlin and Bishop Margot Käßmann, a woman who heads the huge territorial Evangelical Lutheran Church of Hanover, and announced a "covenant for the upbringing of children" based on traditional Christian values, an event unimaginable in the United States even under the presidency of George W. Bush.

Of course there was much hue and cry. Some commentators wondered aloud what had happened to the principle of the separation between church and state, a principle, mind you, never really stringently enforced in Germany whose constitution affirms in its very first sentence the German people's "responsibility before God and man." But it seems, as the Germans like to say, that the train has left the station. Like in France, where two years ago the newspaper Le Figaro extolled "The Return of the Christian Intellectual" in an eight-part series, prominent Germans are no longer ashamed of speaking about faith.

This applies particularly to the nation's popular president, Horst Köhler, who habitually invokes the Almighty by saying "God bless Germany." Thus it seems fitting to paraphrase Mark Twain: The rumors of religion's death in Germany have been premature.

- Uwe Siemon-Netto, a veteran German foreign correspondent and Lutheran lay theologian, is scholar in residence at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, MO.