The Outrage That Never Comes

Had an Islamic café anywhere in Germany been terrorized for months and forced to close, had someone entered a mosque to produce a sexually charged video or had vandals desecrated a Muslim place of worship, politicians beginning with the federal president would have issued outraged statements. Talk shows would have seized on the subject, NGOs would have demanded more money to fight Islamophobia – and received it.

Anti-Christian attacks – and the cases above represent only a small sample – rarely merit more than a brief item in the local press. If they are reported at all.

Despite the massive exodus from the churches in recent years, Germany remains a country shaped by Christianity. Far from everyone who leaves the Protestant or Catholic Church does so because he no longer believes. Very often, it is because he has lost confidence in church leaders. Free churches, meanwhile, have recently been drawing growing numbers, especially among the young.

Yet Christians and Christian institutions are increasingly treated as though they already constituted a minority.

One Faith Under Suspicion

Public broadcasters in particular regularly exhibit a hostility toward Christianity that goes far beyond criticism of churches or religion. At the same time, the state-affiliated broadcasters romanticize Islam whenever the opportunity arises.

Recently, two reports aired back to back on Logo, a ZDF program made specifically for children. The first dealt with the decline of Christianity. A voice-over explained that people in the past had professed Christianity only out of fear of hell, but that this backwardness had fortunately become a thing of the past. The Church, it continued, had turned that fear into money by selling indulgences and had also been guilty of child abuse.

The lesson for young viewers, then, was that Christianity amounted to a conspiracy to extract money and sexually exploit minors. The filmmakers said not a word about Christian beliefs themselves. Naturally, they also failed to mention that child marriage remains perfectly legal and commonplace in Islamic theocracies such as Afghanistan and Iran.

The second report showed colorful images of Ramadan and preparations for breaking the fast, accompanied by an upbeat commentary and not the slightest hint of religious criticism.

ZDF later withdrew both propaganda pieces after protests. But the fact that they were broadcast in the first place reveals how people at the station think.

While broadcasters idealize Islam – another public broadcaster recently praised Muslim “modest fashion” for women, designed to cover as much of the body as possible – any open expression of Christian faith comes under suspicion unless it confines itself to repeating left-wing positions on migration and climate.

During the World Cup, the hard-left political magazine Monitor, itself compulsorily funded through state-set broadcasting fees, devoted a pseudo-investigative report to German football star Felix Nmecha that veered between malice and absurdity.

Nmecha is a Christian and makes no secret of it. Before the match against Curaçao, he prayed together with players from the opposing team. Monitor ominously suggested that the footballer was part of a “network of radical Christians”.

In reality, he belongs to Ballers in God, a loose association of Christian athletes who play ball sports. In the filmmakers’ telling, it sounded like a highly dangerous conspiracy.

They also reacted with alarm to the discovery that a Christian counseling organization with which Nmecha also has ties “wants to proselytize people of other faiths”. Presumably, there is not a church in the world that tries to convert members of its own faith. Either those seeking to manufacture a scandal do not know that missionary work has always been part of Christianity, as it has of Islam. Or they are deliberately pretending not to know.

Christianity at Arm’s Length

The same distance from Christian tradition, coupled with a conspicuous affinity for Islam, can also be seen in state institutions themselves.

A striking number of politicians on the left now keep Christianity at arm’s length as though it were something disreputable. Hardly any of them still post Easter greetings on social media illustrated with a biblical image. Most opt for Easter bunnies and eggs instead.

By contrast, the case of a seventh-grader in Schleswig-Holstein attracted considerable attention. As part of the curriculum, his state school required the class to visit a mosque. After consulting his parents, the boy refused to go. A local court fined his mother and father €50 ($58).

Freedom of conscience carried no weight with the judges. The Federal Constitutional Court declined to hear the parents’ constitutional complaint on formal grounds.

Here, too, the question is unavoidable: how would the case have unfolded had a school made a church visit a compulsory part of lessons, especially for Muslim pupils? It would never have got that far.

The Church’s Politics of Appeasement

The peculiar dialectical irony of this development is that Protestant church leaders, along with many of their Catholic counterparts, seek the greatest possible harmony with the progressive zeitgeist while simultaneously cultivating an uncritical affinity with Islam.

Church leaders fly rainbow flags and organize events on the “colonial guilt” of the German Church. The Protestant Church provides substantial financial support to so-called “sea rescuers” in the Mediterranean who, in reality, make life easier for smugglers of illegal migrants by taking their customers aboard, often while they are still close to the North African coast.

At Protestant church conventions, even politicians from the extremist and, in large parts, antisemitic Left Party are treated as welcome guests. AfD representatives are kept outside.

The Church’s actual message, meanwhile, seems to its own representatives to have fallen out of step with the times.

Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, former chairman of the Council of the Protestant Church, epitomizes this development. When he visited the Temple Mount in Jerusalem in 2016, he hurriedly concealed his bishop’s cross beneath his clothing – even though his Muslim hosts had not asked him to do so. His Catholic counterpart, Cardinal Reinhard Marx, followed suit.

On another occasion, Bedford-Strohm enthused about the “spirituality” of Islam. In his own Church, he no longer seems to consider spirituality particularly important.

What Appeasement Buys

There is only one problem: embracing progressivism gains the established churches nothing. Quite the opposite.

Leftists, who increasingly see radical Islam as an ally, may accept the overtures of church dignitaries. They nevertheless regard Christianity as a Western remnant that would be better off disappearing. And they make that attitude quite explicit.

At the same time, lay members are deserting the churches precisely because of their senior clerics’ woke pronouncements and detachment from reality, particularly on migration.

There is a saying that crime does not pay. The same applies to ingratiation and self-abandonment.

Muslims in particular react with contempt when native Europeans behave as though Christianity had suddenly become a deeply embarrassing affair.