The German Protestant Church's failure to deal with sexual abuse is so great that even the most faithful Protestants cannot begrudge being spared one consequence for now: a drastic increase in the number of people leaving the church. This is because membership figures will not be available until next spring.
In 2023, the full extent of sexual violence in the Protestant Church was not yet officially known. It was only revealed with the publication, on Jan. 25, of the ForuM study on sexual abuse. The impact on current 19 million Protestant Church members will only become clear next year, when 2024 figures are available.
The study is catastrophic for the church. It found that sexual abuse in German Protestant Church, with at least 1,259 alleged perpetrators and 2,225 victims, is of the same magnitude as in the German Catholic Church.
The study also found that both the church's power structures and the Protestant self-image of supposedly harmonious coexistence enabled many acts, and prevented them from being uncovered and dealt with appropriately.
Structural failings
The church failed to cooperate in the study commissioned by the Protestant Church (known in German as Evangelical Church, or EKD) itself: contrary to the original agreement with the researchers, almost all regional churches only dug up a few personnel files searching for allegations of sexual misconduct.
They largely limited themselves to recording disciplinary files for cases that had already been dealt with. The extent of the omissions is also shown by the fact that the Diakonie charitable organization, whose homes and facilities for children and young people pose a particularly high risk of abuse, only shared cases from before 1979 for the purpose of the study.
"The responsibility for the missing or incomplete data in the study lies with the EKD," according to the text. Regarding the treatment of the victims, the experts write that the EKD "acted without empathy, ignored the victims' demand for justice or disappointed the desire for participatory processes of clarification and reappraisal."
The statement also takes a look at Protestantism's understanding of the church and theology. For example, "the self-perception of large parts of the Protestant church as progressive and liberal" and at the same time "a 'milieu of fraternity' dominated by the 'need for harmony'" have led to the myth of the Protestant church as a safe place. "In such an institutional context, there is a lack of transparency, diffusion of responsibility and a lack of binding rules for dealing with transgressions." The church must therefore "subject its attitude to theological reflection."
Declining trust
But one can assume that the Protestant Church has a lot to brace itself for. Church loyalty is not particularly high in Protestantism anyway, and faith is even lower. And if the very thing that motivated many people to stay in the church — trust in an institution with some sort of integrity, adherence to rules, honorable leadership — now collapses, then many more Protestant Church members may do the same as the Catholics, who started the mass exodus earlier.
The question really is what will keep popular churches alive if Christian religiosity declines in the course of general secularization. Not much more than basic institutional qualities remain. And what if these can no longer be recognized in this issue of preventing and dealing with crime, which is so central to churches?
So if the Protestant Church wants to repair something in the coming months, the entire institutional structure and harmony-centered self-image, the tearful treatment of abuse victims and theological principles must be tested and largely dismantled.
But this has not happened so far.
No longer the 'better' Church
The Protestant Church has been sharply criticized by the Independent Commission for the Reappraisal of Sexual Child Abuse.
"The Protestant Church can no longer maintain its self-image of the 'better,' more enlightened and more liberal church," according to a statement published on Tuesday by the seven-member panel of experts, who were appointed by Berlin based on a Bundestag resolution.
The entire institution is at stake, the experts wrote, "We are convinced that the credibility and future of the Protestant Church in Germany depends crucially on it recognizing its own mistakes and shortcomings, taking responsibility for them and implementing the necessary consequences without delay."
Where is then an uprising of the congregations, a rebellion of synods, where are initiatives that demand fundamental changes along the lines of the Catholic Church?
But perhaps many members have been saying to themselves for a long time that they — hardly believers anymore — no longer find the church really important.