Kirchentag 2025 in Hanover: Why politics has always been part of the Kirchentag

Long gone are the days when the Federal Republic of Germany was a thoroughly Christian country. Immediately after the Second World War, however, well over 90 percent of the population belonged to one of the two major churches. At that time, the German Evangelical Church Congress was launched as a major Protestant event with the explicit aim of engaging pointedly in current social debates.

Being political is, in a sense, part of the DNA of the Kirchentag. This year will be no different, as the 39th edition of the meeting takes place in Hanover from April 30 to May 4.

Get involved – even though Protestant Christians, with fewer than 20 million church members, have long been operating from a minority position. Even though attendance at church conventions is declining. Even though Bundestag President Julia Klöckner (CDU), a Catholic, wants the churches to provide more meaning and fewer non-governmental-style statements on current issues.

To understand the politics of the Kirchentag, it's worth taking a look back: This large Protestant gathering was founded in 1949 as a Christian lay movement and attracts tens of thousands of people to Bible studies, church services, and concerts every two years. What at first glance appears to be a colorful celebration of faith was, in fact, a conscious reaction by Christians to the dark era of National Socialism.

In their eyes, the official church had offered far too little resistance to the dictatorship. As a Protestant lay movement, they wanted to use the Church Congress to form a counterpart to the established church—and henceforth act as an interface between church doctrine and attitudes and the secular world.

With the Kirchentag, lay people have always wanted to participate in social discourse - as here in 1983 in Hanover.

Source: IMAGO/Klaus Rose

The movement's first president and founder was the lawyer Reinold von Thadden. As a member of the Confessing Church, he had already campaigned for democracy in Germany during the Nazi era, and his opposition movement had already hosted Christian meetings that can be considered precursors to today's Church Days. The movement's roots stretch back to the German Empire.

However, especially before his experiences in the Hitler years, from the church struggle to being a prisoner of war, von Thadden placed his hopes in the young Federal Republic even more strongly on the grassroots, the church people.

"Von Thadden embedded the expectations he associated with the Kirchentag in broader church-historical perspectives," says church historian Thomas Kaufmann. At the Essen Kirchentag in 1950, for example, he deliberately addressed the role of lay people in the Reformation Church, and a year later in Berlin, he placed the "congregation" at the center. Von Thadden was convinced that the activation of lay people "runs like a thread through the history of the Protestant Church," says Kaufmann.

The lawyer Reinold von Thadden (third from left) founded the German Evangelical Church Congress in 1949. This picture shows him the previous year together with the then Minister-President of Lower Saxony, Hinrich-Wilhelm Kopf (from left), the regional bishop Hans Lilje, and the poet Rudolf Alexander Schröder in front of the town hall in Hanover.

Source: picture alliance / dpa

The Kirchentag remained highly political in the decades that followed—for example, in the late 1960s with its debates about the Vietnam War, or in the 1980s with its nuclear arms buildup. The peace-minded Christian crowd transformed the Protestant mass gatherings into high masses of pacifism. Furthermore, the desire for global ecumenism soon became a fixed feature of the events, which ultimately found concrete expression in the increasingly strong focus of the Kirchentag as a communal experience.

However, the lay meetings were by no means a purely West German phenomenon, as they often appear. Until the construction of the Wall, the Church Congresses were clearly dominated by the "pan-German question"—also a sensitive political issue, as the term itself suggests. In 1954, around 650,000 people from East and West gathered at the Church Congress in Leipzig—the largest Protestant gathering ever in Germany to date.

Even after the construction of the Wall in 1961, a lively tradition of church meetings continued in the East. Although they were smaller and somewhat less political than on the other side of the Iron Curtain, they were by no means insignificant. Quite the opposite. In 1983, for example, around 100,000 people gathered in Dresden for a closing service. The environmental movement in the GDR churches gained particular visibility at the meeting.

The church thus succeeded in establishing itself as a kind of counterculture to the official line of the SED state. The Kirchentag thus consciously opposed the dictatorship—a reference to its founding principle could hardly be clearer. The role of the Kirchentag movement as a whole in the peaceful revolution of 1989 and German reunification should therefore not be underestimated.

“Church has always been political”

In recent years, topics such as sustainability and climate protection, as well as theological positions on these issues, have increasingly taken up space in forums and on podiums. And these new topics can once again be viewed as primarily political.

A correspondingly broad understanding of speaking out politically from a Christian perspective is clearly not well received by Bundestag President Klöckner, as she made clear in the "Bild am Sonntag" newspaper at Easter. The politician warned that the church would become interchangeable if it became too arbitrary and no longer focused on the fundamental questions of life and death.