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The Grundgesetz, Germany's constitution, guarantees freedom of faith and religion. It also states that no one may be discriminated against due to their faith or religious opinions. However, unlike some other countries, it is entirely in keeping with the German constitution for larger religions to receive some preferential treatment, for example being able to teach religion to adherents' children in public schools and having membership fees collected by the German Finanzamt (equivalent to the U.S. Internal Revenue Service). There have been numerous discussions of allowing other religious groups like Jehovah's Witnesses and Muslims into this system as well. The Muslim's efforts were hampered by the public adversity and also by the Muslims' own disorganized state with many small rivaling organizations and no central leadership, which do not fit well into a legal frame that was originally created with well-organized, large Christian churches in mind.
Christianity is the major religion, with Protestants (particularly in the north and east) comprising 33% of the population and Catholics (particularly in the south and west) also 33%. In total more than 55 million people, officially belong to a Christian denomination, although most of them take no part in church life except at such events as weddings and funerals. Most German Protestants are members of the Evangelical Church in Germany. Independent and congregational churches exist in all larger towns and many smaller ones, but most such churches are small. Roman Catholicism was Germany's top religion in the 15th century, but the religious movement commonly known as the Reformation changed this drastically. In 1517 Martin Luther challenged this religion as he saw it as a commercialisation of his faith. Through this, he altered the course of European and world history and established Protestantism, the largest denomination in Germany today.Before World War II, about two-thirds of the German population was Protestant and one-third was Roman Catholic. In the north and northeast of Germany especially, Protestants dominated. In the separated West Germany between 1945 and 1990, Catholics had a small majority.
In the former East Germany, there is much less religious feeling — probably the result of forty years of Communism — than in the West. The average church attendance is one of the lowest in the World, with only 5% attending at least once per week, compared to 14% in the West according to a recent study. The number of people who attend church for christenings, weddings and funerals is also lower than in the West.
About 30% of the population are officially religiously unaffiliated. In the East this number is also considerably higher.
Approximately 3.7 million Muslims (mostly of Turkish descent) live in Germany. Lately there have been heated discussions about the question if Muslim women working in public service, such as schoolteachers, should be allowed to wear headscarves to work or not. (See also Islam in Germany).
Besides this there are a few hundred thousand Orthodox Christians, 400,000 New Apostolic Christians , numerous other small groups, and 160,000 Jews, of which around 100,000 belong to a synagogue.
Today Germany, especially its capital Berlin, has the fastest growing Jewish community worldwide. Some ten thousands of Jews from the former Eastern Bloc, mostly from ex-Soviet Union countries, settled in Germany since the fall of the Berlin wall. This is mainly due to a German government policy which basically grants an immigration ticket to anyone from the CIS and the Baltic states with Jewish heritage, and the fact that today's Germans are seen as significantly more accepting of Jews than many people in the ex-Soviet realm. Some of the about 60,000 long-time resident German Jews have expressed some mixed feelings about this immigration that they perceive as making them a minority not only in their own country but also in their own community; but largely the integration seems to work out. Prior to Nazism, about 600,000 Jews lived in Germany, most of them long-time resident families.
In the mid-1990s there was a moral panic about Scientology in Germany, which was perceived to be planning to infiltrate the top tiers of society, as an exaggerated picture of the number and influence of its adepts was being reported by the press but also by Scientology groups themselves. The discussion became a transatlantic affair when Scientology managed to rally US politicians and Hollywood artists behind them. The affair peaked in 1997 when 34 Hollywood artists including Dustin Hoffman, Goldie Hawn, and Oliver Stone, published an open letter in the International Herald Tribune on the 9th of January 1997, and in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on the 18th of January. In this letter they accused Germany of being after Scientology members like the Nazis being after Jews. This certainly didn't help the case. As of 2004, the scare has pretty much turned into a non-topic, with the German inland intelligence service ( Verfassungsschutz) assuming less than 10,000 followers in the country.
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