Religions in North Rhine-Westphalia
For historical reasons, North Rhine-Westphalia is an area with a diverse religious landscape . The country guarantees religious freedom through its constitution . In 2018, 32.7% of the population were members of the Roman Catholic Church and 24.0% of the Evangelical Church, around 26,500 were members of Jewish communities, which corresponds to around 0.15% of the population. The proportion of Muslims was estimated at 7 to 8% in 2010.
history
The area on the left bank of the Rhine of today's North Rhine-Westphalia came under Roman rule at the turn of the century . This was the first time the population in this area came into contact with the Roman religion . Through Romanization , the Gallic or Germanic religion of the population in the Roman-controlled areas was gradually pushed back. Since the Constantinian change in the 4th century, Christianity was able to spread rapidly in the empire. Since the Romans never succeeded in joining the areas of Germania magna behind the Rhine and Limes to their empire, Christianity could not spread there either, so that the Germanic religion continued to be practiced east of the Rhine and north of the Limes .
After the collapse of the Roman provinces around 400 managed to Christianized Franks , their power to expand in today's North Rhine-Westphalia. In the Saxon Wars of around 800 they subjugated the Saxons, who were pagan in their eyes and who lived in Westphalia at the time , and forced Christianity on them. The Franks promoted the founding of Christian centers, above all monasteries. Minden , Corvey , Paderborn and Herford became important Christian mission centers in the east of what is now North Rhine-Westphalia. The monasteries and bishoprics also had an important secular function. As administrative centers, they were an important means of securing their power for the Frankish rulers and their successors. The later Ottonian-Salian imperial church system grew out of the state-supporting function of the bishops in the Franconian Empire . From the administrative areas of the bishops and abbots, spiritual territories emerged in the Middle Ages , which played an independent political role in the Holy Roman Empire alongside the secular rulers. The ruling bishops and abbots basically ruled their territories like secular rulers. In today's North Rhine-Westphalia, the largest and most influential of these spiritual areas were Kurköln and the Duchy of Münster . In the Middle Ages, other prince-bishops ruled in Paderborn and Minden over what is now North Rhine-Westphalia. The extreme west of today's country belonged ecclesiastically to the Diocese of Liège .
In the 16th century, Martin Luther , Johannes Calvin and others brought about the Reformation . In the course of confessionalization , large parts of today's country adopted the Protestant denomination , mostly in the Lutheran , partly also in the Calvinist variant. Individual communities joined the Reformation Anabaptist movement . The Anabaptist movement found a particularly radical form in the " Anabaptist Empire of Münster ". The Roman Catholic Church reacted with the Counter Reformation , in the 17th century primarily through the work of the Order of the Jesuits , who had set themselves the goal of recatholization through the construction of magnificent churches and schools as bases for Jesuit education, pastoral care and propaganda. Their work also aimed at influencing the ruling houses; in Jülich-Berg they succeeded in converting Count Palatine Wolfgang-Wilhelm . The principle Cuius regio, eius religio , according to which the religion of the country was determined by the denomination of the sovereign, contained considerable potential for tension, which erupted in the first half of the 17th century in the Thirty Years' War . The denominations of the territories often changed several times during this unpeaceful period. It was not until the Peace of Westphalia that international treaties between the European powers of the time created a relatively stable order of peace, which played a key role in the denominational, cultural and political map of today's North Rhine-Westphalia. Accordingly, Lippe , Minden-Ravensberg , the Bergisches Land , the Brandenburg Sauerland and part of the Siegerland became permanently Protestant , while the rest of the Sauerland, the Electoral Cologne Rhineland, Aachen and the Rhenish areas of the Principality of Liège , the Münsterland , the Paderborn Land and large ones Parts of the Lower Rhine were codified as Catholic . The Catholic areas were predominantly in the spiritual territories of the Holy Roman Empire .
The Age of Enlightenment brought great changes in people's thinking . It promoted a fundamentally new attitude to the question of the legitimation of secular and spiritual power and led to the political demand for the secularization of public life. The French Revolution brought on this intellectual and political basis of the old state systems in Europe to collapse. At the instigation of Napoleon , the spiritual territories and possessions in the Holy Roman Empire were dissolved in 1803 ( Reichsdeputationshauptschluss ). Their downfall was followed by that of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806.
Shifts in the confessional circumstances of today's North Rhine-Westphalia arose in the 19th and 20th centuries by the profound changes in social, political and economic conditions that are characterized by colonialism , imperialism , nationalism , liberalism , industrialization and other processes of technical progress to started globalizing . In the Kingdom of Prussia , to which today's North Rhine-Westphalia largely belonged after the Congress of Vienna , there was considerable tension in the 1870s between the Protestant government and the Catholic forces in the clergy and the population ( Kulturkampf ), which was reflected in the manifestations of left Catholicism continued to have an effect for a long time. Migration movements of the 19th century, which particularly affected the Ruhr area , and the influx of refugees after the Second World War led to further changes. In the phase of the Third Reich , Rhenish and Westphalian Judaism , which had largely achieved religious freedom after the fall of the Holy Roman Empire, was perished through expulsion and murder . After the state of North Rhine-Westphalia was founded, the legal guarantee of religious freedom was enshrined in the state constitution. As a result of the recruitment of " guest workers " from the 1960s onwards, Islamic communities developed in North Rhine-Westphalia for the first time . Changes in the country's religious diversity also came with the migrants who came in since the 1990s as Europe opened up and globalization increased, including Jews from the territory of the former Soviet Union . Last but not least, the strong decline in religiosity and the increase in conscious non-denomination due to the spread of secular views and lifestyles in Western Europe are significant today . The confessional boundaries drawn in the Peace of Westphalia are still visible.
Distribution of religious affiliation
According to a study by the Ruhr University Bochum in 2006, 75.3% of the North Rhine-Westphalian population were members of a religious community or were active in one where there was no formal membership. Around 24% of the population were non-denominational. Active in Muslim communities (not to be equated with all Muslim believers) were 2.8%, Orthodox Christians 0.5%, the proportion for small Christian religious communities was 1.0%; according to another source, this included u. a. around 0.5% New Apostolic Christians . Eastern religions such as Buddhism , Hinduism came to 0.2%, Jews were 0.2%, new religions and esoteric 1.0%.
Note: Registered members of a religious community or residents of North Rhine-Westphalia who are regularly active in a religious community (e.g. attending events) are included if the religious community does not have formal membership. The proportion of those without a denomination is the arithmetical “remainder” of all who are not part of a denomination.
North Rhine-Westphalia is one of the eight federal states in which more than 50 percent of the population is Protestant or Roman Catholic. In addition to Hesse , Rhineland-Palatinate and Baden-Württemberg , North Rhine-Westphalia is one of the four states of the Federal Republic in which the majority of the citizens belong to a Protestant regional church or the Roman Catholic church, but the difference between these two groups is less than fifteen percent of the Total population.
Official statistics on the number of members in the Protestant regional churches, the Catholic Church and the Jewish communities can be found annually in the country's statistical yearbook. However, every statistic is made more difficult because smaller groups can only rarely be delimited through formal membership, but at most through active participation in the religious life of a group and self-disclosure. Overall, the following picture of the religious landscape resulted:
According to a publication by the North Rhine-Westphalian state government in 2010, the proportion of Muslims was around 7 to 8 percent of the population. Around 80 percent of them are Sunnis . A methodological difference, which partly explains the differences to the above figures from 2006, is the renunciation of the criterion of “regular active participation in a religious community”, but rather the recording of the unconditional self-disclosure of the respondents.
Jewish communities in North Rhine-Westphalia are hardly represented after being expelled or exterminated in the Third Reich . The Jewish communities received growth from immigrants from the former USSR . In 2005 around 30,000 inhabitants (less than 0.2% of the total population) belonged to the Jewish communities of North Rhine-Westphalia. The largest Jewish community in the country is in Düsseldorf ; it is the third largest Jewish community in Germany .
Constitutional provisions
The constitution for the state of North Rhine-Westphalia refers in the first section ( From the basic rights ), Article 4 for the basic rights to the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany . In particular, Article 4 of the Basic Law of the Federal Republic guarantees freedom of religion in Germany and therefore has unrestricted effect in North Rhine-Westphalia. In Articles 19 to 23, the state constitution emphasizes a special, independent and protected position for churches and religious communities. In Article 22, the state constitution explicitly reverts to the Bonn Basic Law by reaffirming the validity of Article 140 of the Basic Law , which in turn regulates the relationship between state and church based on the Weimar constitution and contains further provisions on the free exercise of religion.
The state constitution also contains in section 3 (title: third section - school, art and science, sport, religion and religious communities ) further regulations on the practice of religion at the educational institutions and on the relationship between the state and religious communities. Article 7 of the state constitution defines, among other things, “ reverence for God ” as the educational goal . The state constitution does not affect the establishment of community schools as well as denominational schools (Catholic or Protestant) and ideological schools (including denominational schools) to (Article 12). In principle, all school types can be set up as each of these school types under certain conditions, in particular if regular school operations are enabled and the will of the legal guardians does not oppose this. However, secondary schools are to be set up “officially” as community schools. The operation of such a school must in any case be guaranteed in addition to the optional establishment of other secondary schools (Article 12). A student's denomination may not prevent the admission of a student, especially if no school corresponding to his denomination has been established (Article 13). The question of the mainstream school was disputed until the 1960s. It was not until 1968 that the state constitution was changed to the effect that denominational segregation of students in secondary schools is no longer the rule. In the Lippe part of the country, a special regulation was in effect until then, which was laid down in the Lippe punctuation (point 9). Upon joining the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, the Lippers were given permission to continue their previous legal situation, which provided for the establishment of community schools as regular schools in Lippe .
Religious communities have the right to their own universities (or to institutions with a university character) for the training of their clergy (Article 16 (2)). The churches are also recognized as providers of adult education institutions (Article 17). The state ensures access to the acquisition of the license to teach the subject religion at its academic universities (Article 15). The religious communities are to be involved in the development and monitoring of the curricula for religious instruction, which is a regular subject in all schools except for the schools of ideology (schools with no denomination), as well as its implementation and the selection of teachers (Art. 14). Pupils can be exempted from religious instruction (Article 14 (4)). The substitute subject is (practical) philosophy .
See also: Religious Education in Germany , School Act for the State of North Rhine-Westphalia
organization
Roman Catholic Church
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The Roman Catholic Church is the largest ecclesiastical group in North Rhine-Westphalia. The church has established the following dioceses in North Rhine-Westphalia:
- Archdiocese of Cologne
- Diocese of Aachen
- Diocese of Essen
- Diocese of Münster
- Archdiocese of Paderborn
The dioceses of Cologne, Aachen, Essen and Münster are part of the church province of Cologne , along with other dioceses outside the country . In addition to the west and north-west of North Rhine-Westphalia, this mainly extends to Hessian , Saarland and Rhineland-Palatinate areas. The diocese of Münster also includes as an exclave the area of the former state of Oldenburg in Lower Saxony. If one only considers the southern part of the diocese of Münster and the abovementioned dioceses of the church province of Cologne, it is true that, with the exception of a part of the archdiocese of Cologne in the Altenkirchen area (Westerwald) , they are located entirely in North Rhine-Westphalia, i.e. on the state borders orientate. The Archdiocese of Paderborn, on the other hand, is less oriented towards the state border. Although it mainly includes East - South Westphalia and Lippe regions, it also includes smaller Hessian and Lower Saxony regions. The ecclesiastical province of Paderborn , whose metropolitan bishopric is Paderborn, even extends far east to Thuringia , Saxony-Anhalt , Saxony and Brandenburg . Some diocese borders still suggest the borders of the medieval territories. However, not all dioceses are steeped in tradition. The diocese of Essen , for example, only emerged in the 1950s as a reaction to the emergence of the Ruhr metropolitan region , whereas the archbishopric of Cologne is one of the most traditional dioceses of all, because Cologne became the seat of a bishopric in the late Roman period. The Archbishop of Cologne is usually a cardinal by church tradition . The beginnings of the Paderborn bishops also go back a long way and go back to the Carolingian Christianization of Saxony . Although the diocese of Aachen was not established until 1930, the episcopal church in Aachen was one of the most important historical sites in the country. In Aachen, Charlemagne founded the tradition of the Aachen Cathedral as the ideal center of the empire and the coronation church of many Roman-German emperors . The diocese of Minden , which dates back to Carolingian times, perished during the Reformation . In 1803 the short-lived and very small diocese of Corvey was abolished as the last Catholic diocese in what is now North Rhine-Westphalia and fell back to the diocese of Paderborn. Smaller areas in the Aachen area were once part of the Liège diocese .
The North Rhine-Westphalian dioceses maintain a Catholic office in Düsseldorf as a contact point for political, social or other denominational actors, in Dortmund they operate the Catholic Data Protection Center .
In contrast to the Protestant Church, the Catholic Church is organized much more hierarchically. Therefore, the perception of the Catholic Church is often focused on the bishops, especially the archbishops. The most famous living North Rhine-Westphalian bishop is probably the former Cologne Metrolpolit Joachim Cardinal Meisner . His fame is also promoted by his often controversial statements. Most recently, Cardinal Joseph Frings from Cologne (among other things because of his comments on coal theft in the post-war winter ) and Cardinal Clemens von Galen from Münster, who publicly opposed National Socialism, are remembered.
Evangelical regional churches
The Evangelical Protestants in North Rhine-Westphalia are the second largest religious group in the state. The Protestant Church in North Rhine-Westphalia is divided into the following three regional churches .
All regional churches in North Rhine-Westphalia belong to both the Union of Evangelical Churches and the nationwide Evangelical Church in Germany . The sections of the regional churches within North Rhine-Westphalia roughly correspond to the boundaries of the former Prussian provinces of Westphalia and Rhineland and the territory of the former Principality of Lippe . However, due to this division, which is based on historical territories, the Rhenish regional church also includes parts of today's Rhineland-Palatinate Rhineland, Saarland and Hesse . In contrast to the two other regional churches, the congregations in the Lippe regional church are predominantly Protestant Reformed , but - precisely because they were able to form their own regional church due to the history of Lippe - do not belong to the Evangelical Reformed Church like most of the Reformed congregations in Germany . The Lippe Regional Church therefore describes itself as a Reformed Church. All three regional churches - including the Lippe - include both Reformed and Lutheran congregations, and some also Uniate congregations. The regional churches for the Rhineland and Westphalia therefore see themselves consistently as uniate churches , which is also expressed through membership in the Union of Evangelical Churches, of which the Lippe regional church is also a member. The Reformed congregations of the Evangelical Church in the Rhineland are also united in their own Reformed Convention.
Evangelical Free Churches
The first Anabaptist communities were formed in the Rhineland during the Reformation . A leading voice of the Rhineland Mennonites in the 16th century was the printer Thomas von Imbroich . Between 1544 and 1546 Menno Simons also worked in Cologne. Mennonite communities had also existed in Aachen and Mönchengladbach in the 16th and 17th centuries. The Mennonite community in Krefeld , which still exists today, was founded around 1600.
In 1852 a Baptist congregation was finally established in Barmen . Two years later, Hermann Heinrich Grafe founded Germany's first Free Evangelical Church in Elberfeld . The German Brethren movement that emerged in the 19th century also has its roots in North Rhine-Westphalia.
Today there is a wide range of Protestant free churches in North Rhine-Westphalia . In addition to the Mennonites, Baptists and Free Evangelical Churches mentioned above, they include Adventists , Methodists , Evangelical Christians , the Moravians , the Salvation Army and a number of Pentecostal churches . Since 2007, some of the North Rhine-Westphalian free churches have also provided their own free church commissioner with the state government of North Rhine-Westphalia .
In addition to said free churches and communities of exist in North Rhine-Westphalia altkonfessionell authored Independent Evangelical Lutheran Church and the Evangelical Church altreformierten whose community was based in Wuppertal already 1847th
Islam
Most of the Muslims in North Rhine-Westphalia belong to the Sunni Islamic denomination and make up around a third of Germany's Muslims . The highly industrialized and urbanized Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan area attracted many Muslim migrants. As a result, around 20 mosques have been built in North Rhine-Westphalia since 2003 , and more are planned. The mosque construction projects regularly cause heated controversies, and the case of the representative central mosque in Cologne attracted nationwide attention . The construction of the Merkez Mosque in Marxloh , on the other hand, went more smoothly . The mosque in Duisburg, which opened in 2008, is the largest building of its kind in Germany to date. There is no uniform organization of Muslims in North Rhine-Westphalia, mainly due to their cultural, linguistic and ethnic diversity. Since many of the Muslims are Turks or of Turkish origin, DİTİB has developed into the best-known representative of a larger group of North Rhine-Westphalian Muslims, particularly when it comes to initiating mosque construction projects.
Alevis
Alevis , whose older generation came to Germany in the course of recruiting guest workers from Turkey , also form a larger religious community . Around half of them are organized in the Alevi Congregation in Germany . Among other things, it is responsible for the Alevi religious instruction, which has existed in North Rhine-Westphalia since the 2008/2009 school year.
Judaism
Today's Jewish communities in North Rhine-Westphalia are grouped together in the State Association of Jewish Communities of North Rhine and the State Association of Jewish Communities in Westphalia-Lippe . In addition, there has been a state association of progressive Jewish communities in North Rhine-Westphalia since 2012 - a public corporation with the communities of Unna, Oberhausen and Cologne (Gescher La Massoret).
The Cologne synagogue community forms an independent regional association within the Central Council of Jews in Germany , alongside that of North Rhine.
Further Jewish communities in North Rhine-Westphalia exist in Bielefeld , Bochum-Herne-Hattingen , Gelsenkirchen , Paderborn and Recklinghausen .
Buddhism
The Soka Gakkai International operates a cultural center in Dusseldorf.
Non-denominational
The proportion of people with no religion is around 25 percent. Several thousand are members of atheist or humanist organizations, such as the Humanist Association of North Rhine-Westphalia KdÖ.R. or the International Federation of Non-Denominational and Atheists based in Overath . The German Freethinkers Association has two local groups in NRW.
Religious customs
In addition to the national holidays, New Year, Good Friday, Easter, Labor Day, Ascension Day, Pentecost, Day of German Unity and Christmas, Corpus Christi and All Saints' Day are public holidays in North Rhine-Westphalia . This shows, on the one hand, the clearly Christian character of Germany as a whole, which grants a legal status alongside secular, exclusively Christian holidays, and on the other hand the Catholic character of large parts of North Rhine-Westphalia, because with All Saints a Catholic solemn festival establishes a public holiday, whereas a purely Protestant holiday like that Reformation Day was not taken into account.
Confessionalization is particularly evident in carnival. While in Catholic areas, especially in the Rhineland, carnival time is celebrated every year, a carnival tradition is largely unknown in the Protestant areas. Especially between the North German Protestant areas of Westphalia-Lippe and the strongholds of Rhenish Catholicism in the west of the country, the cultural differences that have characterized the "hyphenated state" of North Rhine-Westphalia since its founding become clear during the carnival. The religious division into Protestant and Catholic areas also manifests itself in other areas of tradition. Carol singers are particularly widespread in the Catholic regions, while Sünne Märten is a decidedly Protestant custom. A custom typical of Catholic regions in particular are numerous pilgrimages, including the well-known Telgter pilgrimage and the Aachen and Mönchengladbach sanctuary tours .
One of the Christian (possibly even pre-Christian) customs is the centuries-old Easter wheel race in Lügde, which is a particularly spectacular special form of the Easter bonfires that are widespread throughout North Rhine-Westphalia .
Well-known theologians
See: Theologians from North Rhine-Westphalia
See also
- Religion in Germany
- List of monasteries and monasteries in North Rhine-Westphalia
- List of old synagogues in North Rhine-Westphalia
Web links
- State Treaty (PDF)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Statistical Yearbook NRW - 2019. Landesbetrieb Information und Technik Nordrhein-Westfalen (IT.NRW), accessed on February 5, 2020 (see chapter "Education and Culture").
- ↑ Muslim life in NRW . Ministry of Labor, Integration and Social Affairs of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia 2010, p. 34, accessed on June 30, 2020
- ^ New Apostolic Church in Germany: Figures, data, facts 2006
- ↑ Volkhard Krech : What do the people of North Rhine-Westphalia believe? First results of a study on religious plurality , Ruhr University Bochum, 2006
- ↑ Chair for Religious Studies at the Ruhr University Bochum; Volkhard Krech: religion plural
- ↑ Table 3: Protestant church members, Catholics and population by federal state on December 31, 2018
- ↑ Statistisches Jahrbuch NRW - 2011. Landesbetrieb Information und Technik Nordrhein-Westfalen (IT.NRW), accessed on May 3, 2012 (see chapter "Education and Culture").
- ^ Muslim life in North Rhine-Westphalia. (PDF; 4.6 MB) Ministry of Labor, Integration and Social Affairs of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, November 2010, accessed on August 17, 2015 .
- ↑ State Office for Data Processing and Statistics North Rhine-Westphalia: Increasing number of members of Jewish communities in North Rhine-Westphalia ( Memento of the original from December 6, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Suska Döpp: Jewish life in NRW , WDR ( Memento from December 4, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
- ^ Reformed Convention in the EKiR. Evangelical Church in the Rhineland, accessed on May 3, 2010 .
- ↑ Klaus Schmidt: Faith, power and freedom struggles. 500 years of Protestants in the Rhineland . Cologne 2007, p. 56 .
- ↑ William Niepoth: Monchengladbach (North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany) . In: Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online
- ↑ Free Church Policy Commissioner NRW. Free Church Policy Commissioner NRW, accessed on May 3, 2010 .
- ^ Ministry for Labor, Integration and Social Affairs of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia: Muslim Life in North Rhine-Westphalia mags.nrw.de (PDF; 4.6 MB), Düsseldorf, November 2010; Retrieved March 26, 2011
- ↑ FAZ.net; Martin Schiller: Mosque construction. Decision in Cologne
- ↑ alevi.com: Alevi religious instruction in NRW
- Jump up ↑ Die Welt: Liberal Jewish communities found national association
- ↑ Internet address www.lvjg-nrw.de
- ↑ Archived copy ( Memento of the original from May 3, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. SGI-D regional cultural centers
- ^ Homepage of the Humanist Association of North Rhine-Westphalia
- ^ Homepage of the International Union of Non-Denominational People and Atheists
- ↑ nordrhein-westfalen.freidenker.org
Coordinates: 51 ° 29 ' N , 7 ° 33' E