Transcription
Thank you very much for the friendly welcome. I hope Brother Leib has not completely occupied you now after this impressive exercise. Unlike my two predecessors, I have a small topic: religious education in a religiously pluralistic landscape. I was happy to be told this and will now try to really tighten things up so that you don't have to give up your entire break for my presentation. I have prepared three stages. I want to begin with a few observations that you probably all already know. Then I want to name some challenges, perhaps a bit too sharply exaggerated, and then some desiderata that you may have already fulfilled in your regional churches, but I will present them again. And before I really begin, I wanted to note the time. It is now 5 o'clock, so that you don't start whistling at 4 o'clock and say the half hour is up. Yes, so it starts with the observations. Chapter 1: Pluralization is my topic, a religiously pluralistic landscape. And of course, one must keep a few basic facts in mind. I have done this with this graphic. You see, the landscape is not that plural at all. There are about 300 religious communities in Germany. In Hamburg, they are all represented, but otherwise, it is still heavily concentrated on the Catholic and Protestant churches. And you see a slightly larger hump in the middle, and on Islam. And the red bars, which I have added as a supplement, are meant to make it clear that Protestant and Muslim are not to be thought of monolithically, but rather also break down into splinter groups, currents, and denominations. So, there is plurality, but in my opinion, it is not the dominant feature of the German landscape. The interlocutor who presents himself in the religiously pluralistic landscape is undoubtedly Islam. I come to the second point, and it is announced by the disturbing blue bar on the far right, because these are the non-denominational people. So I would say that the rise of non-denominationalism, which is already at almost 30% of the population, belongs to the religiously pluralistic society in a very central place. That is 26 million people in numbers, of course, represented differently in regions, especially in East and West Germany, still. And this is perhaps extremely important for people who work in the church: very poorly organized. So, the religious studies information service in Marburg reports a rate of 0.3%. This means that only a fraction of the non-denominational people organize themselves and articulate themselves. The overwhelming majority are, in a sense, silently non-denominational, unless you meet them on a train. What is important now is that non-denominationalism, you probably know this too, is not caused by momentary displeasure. It's not like I talk to my pastor and he expresses an opinion that annoys me, so I leave. No, according to the overwhelming majority of religious sociologists, it is due to structural reasons. I have compiled the most important causes here according to Gert Pickel: first, the consequence of societal framework conditions. One can hear many things in that, what Mr. K just presented to us. Second, the consequence of perceiving a value discrepancy between rational modernity and irrational religion. What I perhaps grew up with doesn't fit with what I encounter as a pattern of rationality in the working world, or at school, or elsewhere. And therefore, I discard, so to speak, the weaker component, namely the religious one. And the third, which I find particularly disturbing, is often the simple lack of relevance of religion for the individual's everyday actions and thinking. Religion is irrelevant to my way of life, and therefore I leave the church. It is clear that this must concern us. A third component of the religiously pluralistic landscape: in my opinion, there is no such thing as a religious market in Germany. A market is an exchange business; one goes here, then there. Today I buy sausage, tomorrow cheese. It's not like that in Germany, but perhaps in America, where one changes denomination up to three times in life. According to the latest statistics in Germany, this is an absolute exception. The number of conversions is well below 1% and is usually due to external reasons. For example, a Christian man meets a Muslim woman, wants to marry her, so he becomes a Muslim. It's the other way around even more often, but in any case, it's not a conversion out of conviction. What does exist, however, are massive waves of leaving since 2009. I checked again: about 140,000 people leave the Protestant church annually. That is 0.6%. If you invite me again in 10 years, we will be below 30% of the population with this trend, and one never knows how things will develop. In 2014, for example, the departure rates were twice as high as their normal expected average. So, there is an exit, a departure from religion, but there is no religious market. What does exist, and I think we must confront this much more strongly, I can also say that I must confront it more strongly, is a religious plurality within our denomination. So, where it says Protestant, it is by no means homogeneously Protestant inside, but extremely diverse phenomena. The KMU, which was just criticized, makes this clear in various places. Important factors of heterogeneity are lifestyle. The normal church community in Germany is only attractive to a very specific segment of lifestyle, but certainly not to the one Mrs. Nord spoke about. A second important factor is gender. Women are simply more religious. A third is region. It makes a difference whether I grow up in Hamburg or in Ostwestfalen, where I had the good fortune to grow up. And of course, there is also a wealth of cultural backgrounds. And how dramatic this is, you can see from the migration statistics of the Federal Statistical Office. I have extracted figures from 2014 here. Germans are asked about their migration background, and you actually see two very interesting data points if you concentrate on the bold print: 20% of the population have a migration background nationwide, yes, in Unterfranken as well as in, let's say, Berlin, to avoid always citing Hamburg. Among young people, this rate is even extremely higher; it's already at 30%. One-third of the population has a migration background. And if you look at the countries of origin below, you will naturally see that someone who immigrated from Turkey will not exactly be Protestant. But among those who immigrated from the former USSR, there are indeed many, and from some other countries of immigration as well. And all of this makes being Protestant in Germany more plural than we would have expected 20 years ago, at the time of German reunification. This is, in my opinion, a very important, often underestimated factor. If you look at schoolbooks, I don't know a single schoolbook that makes this kind of cultural background conscious. A fifth factor of pluralization is globalization. I don't want to dwell on this any longer. I have captured the most important thing in this image: an enormous southward shift of Christianity. So, you see in the upper half, where everything is still nicely small, in 1900, most Christians lived in the gray-green area, i.e., Europe. And in 2010, which was already 6 years ago, the majority of Christians live in America and especially in Africa. And this trend is not only continuing unabated, but it is, so to speak, increasing exponentially, so that by 2050, we will probably be a tiny minority of Christians in Europe compared to a booming Christianity worldwide. Now one can say, I don't care what happens in Africa. But it shouldn't be the case, because in my opinion, it is a religious education opportunity, and frankly, it is also an important point of discussion for all of us: Why are Christianities growing in the Southern Hemisphere under precarious living conditions, and why are they seemingly shrinking with unstoppable continuity in our so rich, you have described many things, Mr. [Name], in our rich, but somehow also self-satisfied – no, I'm not allowed to say self-satisfied anymore – but somehow well-rounded country, let's put it that way. Yes, this is just the thesis for it: Christianity will no longer be a European-American religion, but it will be global. Yes, and the sixth and last factor of plurality that I would like to briefly mention here is the forced voluntariness. Two books have particularly impressed me: Charles Taylor's "A Secular Age," 1000 pages essentially to underscore this thesis: Christianity is an option. Now you can say, I would have come to that with a little thought too, but he makes it very impressively clear and has a double message: Christianity is only an option now, but one can also say it is still an option. And our task as advocates of religious education is, in my opinion, to make this option plausible and stronger for each individual. Nevertheless, if one summarizes what I have marked here in six brushstrokes somewhat boldly, it is already negligent enough, then one arrives at reasonably impressive results. We will have to adjust demographically to the fact that we have had the status of a Christian majority population for a long time, and from 2030 onwards, we will no longer have it, Protestant and Catholic together, and in my opinion, also the Orthodox. If we are less than 50% of the population, legally this means that we will be increasingly leveled into the majority of religious communities. We are seeing this nicely in Lower Saxony right now, where a contract is to be signed with the Islamic community, and there is a struggle with all means to ensure that Islam still stands a little below Christianity, and others do not want that at all. And then one has, in my opinion, a foretaste of what awaits us in the legal sphere as well. The privileging of churches will certainly be consistently reduced in all possible areas by 2030, with the support of the highest courts. Systemically, this also means that everything we say about educational issues, which is still quite a lot, will have less and less steering power because we will only be speaking for half the population, if at all. And everyone knows, unlike with Islam, that our people are more or less distant anyway. Yes, this is of course registered very attentively in public perception, and the reach of our statements will be further reduced. Organizationally, this also simply means that participation numbers will collapse on all fronts, in religious education, in schools, especially in certain regions, but also in adult education, in the Kita sector, and so on. I don't mean this only negatively, by the way, but I want to get to the point that it is also an opportunity, but we must first realize that these numbers will decline. This is not by chance either, but it is systemically caused. And therefore, there will be increased pressure towards ecumenical cooperation. In schools, it is already palpable everywhere, but in other areas, in my opinion, it will also lead to the result that religious education will first and foremost make known arranged religion didactically. In other words, it can no longer rely on the learners themselves having had deep experiences with religiosity, but religious education in school will increasingly be connected with the first encounter with religion and, above all, with thinking about religion. And this will probably also be the case in Kitas, if Kitas are still brave enough to engage in religious education at all. Yes, and finally, this whole thing naturally also has a content-related component. We are facing an unprecedented loss of plausibility of religious interpretations of reality. This has nothing to do with Protestant or Catholic; it affects any religious interpretation of reality, in my opinion. And we have to contend with competition among ourselves. Yes, of course, my Protestant interpretation will encounter a Catholic one, perhaps also an Orthodox one, whatever. But it is increasingly also about competition with the secular paradigm. And in my opinion, it is palpable in schools that our religious education in general – positive exceptions always confirm the rule – in general, does not manage to permanently dispel the reservations that arise from secular forms of rationality. I even fear that religious education often avoids this question, with the result that this conflict remains unaddressed and then, at the first best opportunity, is answered with leaving the church. This brings me to the second point: Challenges for religious education at various learning locations. Since 2014, we have a new, nice EKD memorandum that clearly shows that in view of religious pluralization, it is the task of each individual to orient themselves religiously, if the individual is as reflective as they should be. I fear some will think, this is too complicated for me and doesn't contribute much, so I'll leave it at that. Nevertheless, the general educational task remains that one should orient oneself religiously as an individual. Even more so, I would say, the community is obligated and faces the task of imparting religious orientation. Interestingly, one can learn this precisely ex negativo from the example of France. There, due to all the terrorist events, an unprecedented awareness has arisen that religious education in schools might actually be necessary to somehow bring together the diverging parts of the population and to build up mutual knowledge. In this sense, I see religious orientation as a truly enduring task for the community that the school must face. For religious communities, however, it is about something else in my opinion. Religious orientation is too little here, to put it quite simply, because it's not about orienting oneself from a distance, but about working on one's own identity. This is also an unending process, should it ever at least begin, and there should be as many impulses as possible to keep this process alive for as long as possible, as far as religion is involved. Therefore, I see a challenge in creating interfaces for the question of religion at all, given the increasingly life-course biographical steering of my own life, and then answering the possibly arising question as punctually as possible. Yes, this is of course the squaring of the circle. If someone experiences a bereavement and considers a religious interpretation of this experience in this context, then an offer of interpretation should be made to them as punctually as possible. People feel that too. Occasional services are the area of church practice that is booming immensely, because precisely here such an interface is perceived where people still consider no one else but the churches to be responsible and competent. The religious speakers are predominantly pastors whom we sorted out in the 90s. But this is the task, so to speak, to provide information as punctually as possible when religiously connotated questions arise. Second, we all feel an enormous pressure for a rational way of life. This was also very impressively highlighted in the introductory presentation, in my opinion. On the other hand, we realize that we perhaps express our individuality best aesthetically through our clothing. With me, for example, my beautiful tie was immediately praised as soon as I came in. That pleased me very much, of course, because I chose it with care and painstakingly yesterday. So, these are, so to speak, aesthetic identity markers that one tries to set in order to stand out from the mass of speakers in this case. But our task is now, our task is now also to make Christian religion plausible as a lifestyle. And it is often said that Protestant Christianity is too intellectual. I would say, in principle and in some respects, it is true, because in our cognitive engagement, we actually fail to present to others, and perhaps to ourselves first and foremost, that this is actually about a lifestyle. And "7 Weeks Without" all these things, I think, interestingly, try to suggest to us again that it is actually about a lifestyle issue. I believe only if we succeed in this will Christian religion, and other religions too, become attractive again. I believe, by the way, one of the secrets of Islam is that it has this strong, so to speak, social component of lived religion. If you have once seen a Friday prayer and, so to speak, the entire Muslim community kneels down in a certain way in unison, that is an experience. I don't want to say that we should reintroduce kneeling in Protestantism. In view of global inequalities and these pluralization factors that I mentioned at the beginning, it is increasingly important, in my opinion, that we engage in communication within our own religious community and that we learn, somehow, to draw honey from global ecumenism. Perhaps you yourself have had the good fortune to travel in the Southern Hemisphere; then you probably know what I'm talking about. And one cannot say, let's do it like in Zambia or in, I don't know where, but to ask about the secrets of success, to engage with the fact that Christianity is alive in a society that is also modern there, perhaps in a different way, but still modern, seems to me a worthwhile task. And as far as I can see, we don't address this anywhere in religious education. I would be very happy to be corrected, and we also don't use the opportunity of, so to speak, multilingualism in schools. My daughter, for example, was in a bilingual class with English and went to England several times, but on none of these trips was she made aware of the Anglican Church, or, for that matter, any other church. Religion played no role at all in this foreign experience, and that is, in my opinion, a huge pity. Yes, you already know that in view of pluralization, we naturally need dialogue and critical engagement, although I fear that critical engagement presupposes dialogue and trust first. And I fear that most religious educators in general have no experience with dialogue, neither ecumenical dialogue nor interreligious dialogue. And therefore, our unit on Islam remains so strangely bloodless. Yes, and finally, in my opinion, in view of religious plausibility structures that could still be elaborated in detail, it is about bringing out the dynamics of Christianity and the truthfulness of religious interpretations of life. I say this with great reservation, because if I have understood youth sociology correctly, young people are no longer interested in the question of truth, but they ask about the applicability of something for their way of life, but not whether it is abstractly true and coherent. But perhaps, for our own sake, we must hold on to the truthfulness of Christian religion and its interpretive patterns. In short, in a plural context, it is about strengthening the recognizability of the Christian, which is the purpose of this lifestyle orientation, and showing the possibilities of its adoption in one's own way of life. And I fear that religious educators will have to demonstrate this more strongly through their own existence than they have until now. I fear, because empirically one rather recognizes the opposite trend, that religious educators in schools, at least, seem more inclined to remove their person and their personal lifestyles from the lessons. Just as little as these changes in the religious landscape affect religious education alone, but rather indicate a, I would say, truly transformative crisis of Christianity, just as little can this crisis be addressed solely with the means of education. This is perhaps the semi-good news that I have for you. Yes, we must analyze this with all its harshness, but not with the illusion that we can address these profound problems with the means of religious education. Therefore, in my opinion, it is very important that we understand this engagement with plurality as a task for the entire church and also carry it into these church bodies again and again. And perhaps I am mistaken, but I believe that the task of engaging with religious plurality is, on the contrary, preferably pushed aside by the church and the various other working methods of religious pedagogy. This is understandable from a human perspective, but factually wrong and will not help us. Yes, and I also believe that the church as a whole, this is the second point, would be well advised to inscribe this topic, the uncertainty caused by religious plurality, as a content-related task for the entire church. And with this, I mean a bit about not just understanding it as an external demographic change, but as a point of content-related engagement. Even the worship service would have to engage much more with inner Protestant heterogeneity than it does, not to mention that it could seize ecumenical opportunities, which it rarely does. The word service with the neighboring Catholic community will not lead to a religious awakening experience for most worship participants. Yes, and finally, third, Protestantism must increasingly profile itself as a reservoir of lifestyles, of possibilities for living, not just as an offer of interpretation. Here, of course, education is not the strongest, the strongest field of work, but our business, namely that of religious education, is reflection on the way of life. It must appear elsewhere, but for example, in confirmation work, paths are being taken with great success, in my opinion. In adult education, it would have to be pursued much more than it is. And in childcare work, I believe, more in this direction could and should happen. But above all, the non-educational fields of work of the church are also called for here. Yes, I believe that is essentially clear. This brings me to my desiderata. This is now very cursory and carelessly brief, especially since I will now select again with an eye on the clock. I have three areas. I begin with school and religious education, not because it is the most important, but because the desiderata just flowed from my pen there. The first desideratum naturally concerns the organizational form, and here I mean that we should say goodbye to regionalization for a long time. Hamburg requires different instruction than Lower Saxony. And that we should generally, as the memorandum also reaffirmed, move towards confessional cooperation with phases of interreligious opening. Perspectively, this may then lead to the Hamburg model, perspectively, one must see how things continue to change, but it is useless to anticipate it from my point of view. Rather, the offer of religious education must fit the context in which it is anchored, and that looks different in Baden-Württemberg than in Saxony. Second, concerning the internal structure of religious education, we should, in my opinion, increasingly try to establish a common thread, a thematic common thread, and without wanting to get too close to individual people, even to myself, competence orientation is only an instrument to possibly underline this thread, but it is not the solution itself. And when I look at the curricula, the core curricula of our federal states, I have the feeling that the relationship has reversed: orientation is primarily competence-oriented, and then also interested in internal accents. Yes, religious education should not be overburdened. I'll make that very brief. Training of religious educators: This seems to me to be an important point. If one wants to interpret Protestant Christianity more strongly as a lifestyle, as an option for living, then one must also give religious teachers the opportunity to get to know such spiritualities, and in my opinion, this is dramatically lacking. We did a small survey in Göttingen on the background and motives of religious teaching students, and it shows that they largely lack an experiential background, and at least through studying at our faculty, it is not made accessible to them. Perhaps they attend an excursion, perhaps they are invited by our mentor who accompanies the teaching students, but all of this is voluntary and reaches, I would say, no more than 10% of the students. Extracurricular learning locations: Here I would say we simply need to examine synergies in public presence and see where we can cooperate ecumenically in a broad sense. In adult education, this seems close at hand. In childcare work, it is actually in almost every area, except perhaps for confirmation work or vocational training. And not only because necessity dictates it, but also because it is necessary for the visibility of our offerings. And the religion-distanced contemporary will anyway not understand what the difference is between Catholic, Protestant, and Syrian Orthodox. Yes, here too, of course, we need a content profile, and here too we must build bridges, and here too we must train the professionals. I will take the training of educators as an example here. Academicization seems unstoppable and of course has great strengths, but it must not be overlooked, as it is in teacher training in many parts, that practical skills must also be taught, for example, singing, crafting, such simple things. And if this is overlooked with academicization, then I think we can close down our childcare work. Yes, with that, the last desideratum block: Community, Church. Here, of course, we must work on the public image and, I would say, force a diversification of offerings. Let's take Göttingen again, a beautiful city with almost 50% church members, Lutheran, Roman Catholic, and Reformed, and Orthodox combined. And there you will find, on Sunday mornings at 10 o'clock, what feels like 25 services. On Saturday evenings, if things go well, let's say on the first Saturday of the month, a worship service at 6 p.m. And that, I would say, is it, broadly speaking. Yes, here too, the content profile, and frankly, on the subject of contextualization, more courage. I could paraphrase it this way: I take the English "fresh expressions of faith" as an example. I believe we must free ourselves from the visions of serving the people's church, because wherever I look and experience pastors, they work themselves tired on fulfilling the duties of the people's church and have zero energy for, so to speak, special initiatives. One cannot blame them, and I don't blame them either. They are simply left in the lurch by their church leadership. But with this exhaustion syndrome, there will be no upswing. Therefore, I believe we must actually break with the vision of serving the people's church and gain more strength for fresh initiatives. Yes, and here I would say the professionals, meaning the pastors, would need a bit more pedagogical training, because they would have to learn overall that they are not there to stabilize the institutional church, but to draw each and every individual into a process of religious education in the best sense of the word, i.e., not in the sense of school religious education. And I fear that this happens far, far too rarely. Individual Christian children, whether distant or already with one foot out, do not experience this as an enrichment of their lives, as a positive learning process to be in the church. Exceptions confirm the rule. I still have the shining eyes of a man before my eyes who, after his wife's death, took up volunteer work in my wife's congregation. He passed away last week and once told me with shining eyes that his life had begun again in the congregation because he realized he was positively challenged. They asked him what he could do and demanded something from him that he couldn't do yet, but in a supportive, positive environment. So, this is what I mean by a process of religious education par excellence. That would be my concluding example. I would like to go there with the entire church. And now I thank you for your attention.