Tea at Trianon: Germany’s Protestant Church and the Seeds of a Religious Backlash

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, April 3, 2026

Germany’s Protestant Church and the Seeds of a Religious Backlash

From The European Conservative:

Germany is not like America. There is no mass evangelical movement blending Christianity with culture war activism, no figure comparable to Charlie Kirk. But this doesn’t mean the country is immune to change. Beneath the surface, a new, quieter religious backlash is stirring—and Germany’s notoriously progressivist Protestant Church may, paradoxically, be helping to fuel it.
The official church is in crisis. The scale of that crisis was thrown into sharp relief once again during this year’s Lenten season, when statistics published in March confirmed the continuing downward trend in membership. In 2025, a further 1.1 million people left the two major churches, with Protestants leading the exodus: their numbers fell by around 580,000 to approximately 17.4 million. Where in 1992, some 36% of Germans were Protestant, that figure has now fallen to 21%.

No one was surprised. The reasons are surely complex in a largely secular society. What is striking, however, is not the decline itself but the leadership’s response to it—a posture of resignation bordering on indifference. When the already-falling figures were presented in 2024, Kirsten Fehrs, chair of the German Protestant Church Council and the institution’s most senior representative, could offer nothing more than, “We will become a smaller and poorer church.”

Rather than campaign to win members, the leadership appears to have made peace with its growing irrelevance. In recent years, anything associated with the church’s former core mission—spreading the faith and engaging non-believers—has been quietly abandoned, even treated with embarrassment. The very word ‘mission’ has become contested. In a recent opinion piece, the editor of the church newspaper evangelisch.de argued that the term rests on a false distinction between “us” and “them,” and that mission should mean only “walking alongside others”—explicitly not “about recruiting members or church growth.” The instruction in John 20:21—”As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you”—is evidently no longer something the leadership feels obliged to follow. (Read more.)