’Membership of the churches will halve by 2060’

Detlef Pollack, a sociologist of religion, describes in this guest commentary the effects of demographic change on the churches Nowadays, when talk in public turns to the church, it is above all the cases of sexual abuse that are discussed; these, along with the attempts by those higher up in the church to hush things up, and the resulting wave of people leaving the church, all cast doubt on the church's ability to survive. It is not only the scandal arising from cases of abuse that is responsible for the large numbers of people leaving the church - other factors play a role, such as indifference to religion, alienation from the church's teachings, and people's insistence on their own religious self-determination. But quite apart from these issues, public opinion overestimates the significance of this wave of people leaving the church as regards the instability of its membership levels. Demographic change will be just as important, if not more so. In order to keep membership at its current level, it is not only the losses arising from departures from the church, but also the losses resulting from deaths, that will need to be made up through baptisms and people joining the church. The churches have not been able to do this since the 1960s. In 2020, the Catholic and the Protestant churches each lost just over 200,000 members who left.