Spotlight on Germany
Germany has about 58 million Christians,
making it the country with the largest Christian
population in Western Europe and second only
to Russia in Europe as a whole. Germany’s
Christian population is also the ninth-largest in
the world. More than 70% of the country’s total
population is Christian, divided almost evenly between Protestants and Roman Catholics.
Germanic tribes such as the Goths, Lombards and Franks were gradually converted to Roman Catholicism
between roughly the 5th and 8th centuries. The formation of the Holy Roman Empire, beginning in the
10th century, served to consolidate Catholic influence across central Europe.
The 16th-century Protestant Reformation, launched by the German Augustinian monk Martin Luther,
divided the territories of what is now Germany into a predominantly Protestant North and a predominantly
Catholic South. This division endures today. (States that belonged to East Germany were predominantly
Protestant, but they saw a substantial decline in religious adherence during communist rule.)
There are nearly 29 million Protestants in Germany today, accounting for about a third of the overall
population, and most are members of the Evangelical Church in Germany (Evangelische Kirche in
Deutschland). Roman Catholics account for a third of the German population, totaling about 28 million.
Germany also is home to more than a million Orthodox Christians and more than 500,000 other
Christians. According to historical estimates, roughly 60% of Germans were Protestant before World War
II, and about one-third professed Roman Catholicism. This suggests that the Protestant proportion of the
population has declined significantly, whereas the Catholic proportion has remained roughly the same.1
Muslims represent the largest non-Christian religious group in Germany. Germany’s estimated Muslim
population in 2010 was about 4.1 million, or about 5% of the total population.2
Footnotes
1 “Germany,” in David B. Barrett, George Thomas Kurian and Todd M. Johnson, editors, World Christian Encyclopedia,
Volume 1: The World by Countries: Religionists, Churches, Ministries, Oxford University Press, 2001, page 299. (return to text)
2 Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life, The Future of the Global Muslim Population: Projections for
2010-2030, 2011. (return to text)