Luke is an atheist.

At least he says: "Today I probably don't believe in any god anymore." But back then, as a child, it was different.

Because the 31-year-old grew up so religious that he calls the people in his former free church community "almost fundamentalist".

Sarah Obertreis

Editor in the “Society & Style” department.

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Perhaps it was a brief greeting from the past that Luke received when he received his certificate of exit from the church: "I suddenly thought: Oh, now I'm going to hell." But his guilty conscience vanished so quickly that Lukas can laugh about it today.

He doesn't remember exactly when it started, but with every year he got older, he lost a bit of his religiosity.

He left in 2018 - his work colleagues were surprised that someone on their team was still in the church.

He was last at a service in 2020: his sister got married.

He can hardly remember what the pastor said.

why?

Sermons had long since lost their meaning for him.

This week, the Catholic Church published the exit figures for the past year.

360,000.

A new record.

If you add them to those of the Evangelical Church (EKD), you get 640,000 people who left in 2021 alone. So many are turning away that the communities can no longer keep up.

In Würzburg, for example, those who want to leave must wait four weeks for an appointment.

The city increased the number of appointments from 38 to 104 per week in March.

It's a "landslide" development

One reason for the never-ending church fatigue is the handling of the Catholic bishops with the abuse scandals.

But there is another, more fundamental development behind it.

The sociologist of religion Detlef Pollack calls them "landslide-like".

The generation of today's 25 to 35-year-olds has left the church so quickly that even high-ranking EKD representatives believe that the first post-Christian generation is just growing up.

So many young people are quietly ending their church membership that one of the few recent statistics broken down by the age of those leaving shows a clear upward trend in the younger generation.

Eva says right at the beginning of the conversation: "The church is so far away from me." Her parents actually only baptized her for the sake of their grandparents.

Because none of her friends were confirmed, she didn't feel like it either.

She can count on one hand the number of times the 27-year-old has attended a service.

When her mother was in a coma last year, she did what church members would have called prayer: she turned to a psychic force.

She never once thought of turning to a church for comfort.

Instead, her boyfriend helped her.

He left when he was 19.

The research of the sociologist of religion Pollack shows that once they have distanced themselves from the church, even existential crises rarely lead to