Germany

Germany is roughly evenly split between Catholic and Protestant Christian heritage, though both have declined sharply in recent decades to around 24 to 26 percent each, with religiously unaffiliated Germans now forming the largest single group at over a third of the population, alongside a Muslim minority near 5 to 6 percent, chiefly of Turkish descent from postwar labor migration, per estimates including Pew Research's Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020.

Germany was the birthplace of the Protestant Reformation, launched when Martin Luther posted his Ninety-Five Theses in Wittenberg in 1517, challenging Catholic Church practices including the sale of indulgences and igniting a religious schism that fractured the Holy Roman Empire along confessional lines for over a century, formalized in the 1555 Peace of Augsburg's principle that a ruler's religion determined that of his territory.

The Thirty Years' War of 1618 to 1648, fought substantially along Catholic-Protestant lines though entangled with wider European power politics, devastated Central Europe before the 1648 Peace of Westphalia established a lasting framework for religious coexistence. Germany's Jewish community, a major center of European Jewish culture and Reform Judaism's birthplace in the nineteenth century, was almost entirely destroyed by the Holocaust, and today's much smaller Jewish population is partly rebuilt through postwar immigration, notably from the former Soviet Union.

Germany maintains a distinctive church-state arrangement inherited from the Weimar Constitution of 1919 and preserved in the 1949 Basic Law, under which registered members of recognized religious bodies, chiefly the Catholic and Protestant churches, pay a mandatory church tax collected by the state alongside income tax and transferred to the churches, a system that has driven a sustained wave of formal church exits since exiting membership is the only way to stop paying it, with hundreds of thousands of Germans doing so annually in recent years. This funding model has helped both major churches remain wealthy and institutionally significant, running major hospital, welfare and school networks, even as active religious practice and belief decline.

Germany's reckoning with the Holocaust has shaped its approach to religious minorities and hate speech considerably, including strict laws against Holocaust denial and incitement, alongside constitutionally protected religious freedom, though debate over Muslim integration, headscarf bans for public sector employees in some states, and, since 2015, the arrival of large numbers of Syrian and other Muslim refugees have remained politically contentious, feeding the rise of parties critical of both immigration and Islam's growing public visibility.