Is a far-right party gaining ground among German evangelicals?

Elections in Germany are typically pretty quiet, according to Assemblies of God pastor Timothy Carentz.

Germans are wary of extremism, concerned about propriety, and committed to a principle of political privacy or “electoral secrecy,” which is enshrined in the German constitution. They don’t often put signs up in their yards or get into heated arguments about candidates at the pub.

But this year, following the collapse of Chancellor Olaf Scholz's three-party coalition in November, things have been more heated.

“We’ve noticed people getting more and more vocal,” said Carentz, an American who runs Rhema Café, a coffee shop and ministry center in Kaiserslautern, in southwestern Germany. 

There are debates about the economy, which is floundering, and rise of rightwing nationalists in Germany and around the world. People are arguing about immigration and asylum policies, the war in Ukraine, high energy prices, and which politicians (if any) can be trusted to do something to help.

The conversations seem more divisive than usual.

“It’s the first time I’ve seen Germans so active, engaged and opinionated about it all,” Carentz said. “This year, people are putting up banners outside their apartment windows, leaving stickers around town, wanting to hand out brochures and pamphlets.”

Amidst it all, evangelical leaders told Christianity Today, they are focusing on God’s love for all people and the value of every human life—unborn and migrant, in Ukraine, the Middle East, and at home in Germany. And they are praying for Germany’s democracy.

After Angela: German Evangelicals Consider the Political Future

In 1987, then West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and his party the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) ran a re-election campaign with the slogan, Weiter so, Deutschland. (“More of the same, Germany”), promising stability and security in the years to come. 

They ended up winning, but Germany—and the world—was drastically transformed with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. 

Fast forward to 2021 and Germany and Kohl’s one-time protégé Angela Merkel is about to step down as chancellor after 16 years at the helm. A fixture of life and a living embodiment of weiter so, Merkel’s departure presents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for change in German politics. 

“These elections are historic,” said Anna Klein, a 27 year old teacher and evangelical in the central German state of Thuringia, “we are coming off our first female chancellor and we have the opportunity to build on her legacy, to see if we elect a woman again and move in an even more transformational direction.” 

Until April, the consensus was that despite the profound quandary of a political party bereft of Merkel’s calm, disciplined leadership, her CDU and its sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU) in Bavaria, would remain the dominant force in German politics. Even more weiter so, it seemed. 

But then, with the support of younger evangelicals like Klein, the Green Party seems to be pulling ahead in polls. It may garner enough votes to form a coalition government with the conservative bloc, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Christian Social Union (CSU).

Though the idea of a progressive party (the Greens) and a conservative bloc (CDU/CSU) working hand-in-hand to govern might sound strange, the environmental and protest party has shifted toward the mainstream in recent years, becoming part of Germany’s new, forward-looking political middle ground. 

There, at the heart of this collective of political compromise, one finds a wide swathe of evangelical voters whose values and varied priorities seem to pair well with a coupling between the Greens and CDU/CSU. 

Sins of the fathers: How German evangelicals are confronting antisemitism, past and present

“The Grandchildren, The Dialogue” (Die Enkel, Der Dialog) event was meant to be a chance for the people of Eisenach, a town of 42,000 in the central German state of Thuringia, to reflect on their collective Nazi past. 

Part of a series of events focused on “interreligious and intercultural dialogue,” the event brought together public personalities in Eisenach’s St. George Church to discuss how their families addressed Germany’s antisemitic past and how they could confront it today.

Bodo Ramelow, Minister-President of the Thuringia State Parliament, said his family simply did not talk about it. “I only found out my family’s involvement with National Socialism later, in pieces,” he said.

Worried about this historical neglect, Ramelow said, “we thought antisemitism was gone, but it never really left. We just stopped talking about it and now, it’s back out in the open.” 

Despite the nation’s “Culture of Remembrance” (Erinnerungskultur), antisemitism is still a problem in Germany. The Department of Research and Information on Antisemitism Berlin’s (RIAS Berlin) most recent report recorded a total of 410 anti-Semitic incidents in the first half of 2020.

The most recent prominent attack occurred in 2019 in the eastern city of Halle when a gunman killed two people outside a synagogue during the observance of Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. 

While some blame far-right politics or Germany’s Muslim community, data shows multiple sectors of society bear responsibility for the rise in antisemitic incidents, including Christians. 

Data such as this has recently forced Christians to reconsider how their communities respond to anti-Semitism, or whether they address it at all.

Although sources say that churches have long sidestepped the issue, many are learning to confront the history of Christian complicity in the greatest sins of the nation’s past and build better Jewish-Christian relationships in the present.