What facts are you talking about that you think I need to “address” and have ignored? I don’t defend Merkel’s immigration policies at all, and never have. I also think in many ways she is somewhat to the left (and quite far to the left on immigration), as are many European usually thought of (in Europe, that is) as being on the right.

My argument with you in this thread is quite limited: whether Wiki is sometimes a good source of material, and whether their information on Merkel’s family’s reasons for going to East Germany (and her upbringing there) are correct. That bears on my main point, which is that there is no reason to suspect that Merkel is not a Christian.

In my comment to you at 5:30 PM I introduced a link to a Bloomberg article that contained a lot more information and explanation about Merkel’s early life, some of which you should have recognized as being relevant to your expressed concerns. So they certainly were not “ignored” (I really don’t know what you were getting at by that accusation).

If you read that Bloomberg link that I gave you in my 5:30 PM comment (and I have no idea whether you did, since you don’t mention it or a single fact in it), you would have read these passages which help to explain why her family went to East Germany [emphasis mine]:

Her father Horst Kasner, son of a Berlin police officer, had finished studying theology and was needed by the church. Bucking the exodus of East Germans fleeing to West Germany’s reviving economy, he and his wife put their infant first-born into a basket and headed the other way. The first stop was a parish house in Quitzow, a farming village outside a former Prussian garrison town only 20 kilometers (12 miles) east of the intra-German border. Merkel said her father always intended to return to his native eastern Germany after studying in the western cities of Heidelberg and Hamburg. Merkel’s mother, Herlind, an English teacher who had grown up and met her husband in Hamburg, went along “out of love.”

Suspect to the regime because the family wasn’t part of the “workers’ class,” the pastor’s wife was barred from teaching, so she became a stay-at-home mother. In 1957, the family moved to Templin, a market town of fewer than 20,000 inhabitants some 80 kilometers (50 miles) northeast of Berlin, where church authorities asked Horst Kasner to set up a theological seminary…

Politics were never far below the surface in the seminary her father led at Waldhof, where young trainee pastors came and went, exchanging ideas. Church faith ran counter to the state’s communist ideology, and the Stasi secret police infiltrated congregations and church groups as they did every other aspect of life in the GDR. Yet there was also a recognition of the welfare work the church performed in places such as Waldhof. By remaining deliberately open in the certainty that everything was being monitored, the church became the one sphere of East German life where alternative viewpoints could be expressed, a counterweight to the regime rather than a rival power base.…

Also during those years, Angela Merkel made a crucial decision to turn down the Stasi. While finishing her studies at the end of the 1970s, she applied for an assistant professor’s post at an engineering school. Stasi officers demanded she sign up to inform on her co-workers to get the job. She says she refused, feeding the recruiters a line suggested by her parents: she wouldn’t make a good spy because she couldn’t keep her mouth shut. Turning down the feared secret police ended Merkel’s bid for the professorship; the regime wouldn’t let a person it considered ideologically suspect teach students…

While Merkel wasn’t a dissident, she rebelled against her father’s political views. Initially critical of the East German regime, Horst Kasner increasingly reached an accommodation with East Germany’s rulers — for the sake of the church and, perhaps, his family. Merkel says her father, who died in 2011, was captivated by the ideas of “socialism with a human face” — the slogan associated with the Prague Spring reforms that ended with a Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 — and “liberation theology,” the Roman Catholic movement for social justice in Latin America.

Those political directions were anathema to Merkel, who says she had concluded that East Germany was stifling and dysfunctional. Her father had a “milder” view of the communist state…

In other words—Merkel’s father went east in order to maintain a church presence in the Communist state, so religion DID “play a key role” in his move. Politically, he was originally somewhat to the left and became more so as time went on. You know, religion and leftism are hardly mutually exclusive. Merkel herself, however, was significantly to the right of him. She was also raised with a strong faith which she still professes to have. Why would you question her father’s religious motivation, or her own faith for that matter? Many Christians (including the present Pope) are leftists and/or supporters of open-door immigration from Muslim countries. The two stances are not at all incompatible, although you were indicating they are—which was the cause of my original disagreement with you.

Oh, and also—Wiki is usually not a bad source at all, and it’s a convenient one. What’s more, if you go there, it often cites its own sources, which are often readily available online. And since Google is your friend—as I’ve often said—all you have to do is Google to get reams of information about Merkle’s family and early years.

For example, this. If you’re really interested in learning something about Merkel and her family, their motives and what happened to them, read it.

And if you find some fact in Wiki that is untrue, all you have to do is refute it by explaining what’s wrong, what the truth is, and give a source for your claims.

Otherwise, criticizing something just because it comes from Wiki is absurd.

And by the way, I am no apologist or defender of Merkel’s policies on immigration. I have been deeply critical of them from the start. That has nothing to do with whether she is religious or not, or what her interpretation of Christianity might be.

Sometimes I wonder whether you read the links I provide. Of course Christianity is not a suicide pact. That was the point of my post that I linked in my previous comment to you on this thread.

However, as was also discussed in that post I linked, many Christians use it to justify an open-door immigration policy. It is not (in my opinion, as I write about in the post) required by Christianity at all, but many Christians seem to think it is. Therefore, whatever YOU may think about Christianity not being a suicide pact (an idea where I obviously agree with you), THEY don’t see Christianity that same way.

Thanks again for some ground truth. Too many think they know alot from thousands of miles away.

Oh the sins of the parents? The Bible says some things about that Frog.

As to Merkel in Wiki, who wrote that? Why do we deem Wiki as less than 100% reliable?

And, as the Wiki piece says, “Religion played a key role in the Kasner family’s migration from West Germany to East Germany.” Migration into East Germany? In 1954, nine years after that became Sovietized? Because of religion? Yeah, sure.
I had distant relatives in what became East Germany. Their properties were seized by the State in the late 1940s, and they most assuredly could not leave, decades before the Berlin wall. My parents sent them “care” packages regularly.
Merkel’s family moved there voluntarily, as religionists into an atheistic State, and that does not raise your eyebrows, Neo? Does not give you concern there is more to the Angela story than she and her obsequious defenders let on?

First of all—as I discussed in this post, “Christian duty” to offer a safe harbor (at least in the eyes of many people, and many church leaders) is definitely part of what dictated Europe’s immigration policy.

As for Merkel herself, if you actually study her history rather than speculating on it, you will see that religion was highly important in her family and upbringing and that there is evidence that it may have somewhat subdued the influence of the leftist environment around her. See this:

Religion played a key role in the Kasner family’s migration from West Germany to East Germany. Her father was born a Catholic, but the Kasner family eventually converted to Lutheranism, and he studied Lutheran theology in Heidelberg and afterwards in Hamburg. In 1954, Angela’s father received a pastorate at the church in Quitzow (a quarter of Perleberg in Brandenburg), which was then in East Germany, and so the family moved to Templin. Merkel thus grew up in the countryside 80 km (50 mi) north of East Berlin.

Like most young people in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), Merkel was a member of the Free German Youth (FDJ), the official youth movement sponsored by the ruling Socialist Unity Party. Membership was nominally voluntary, but those who did not join found it difficult to gain admission to higher education.[citation needed] She did not participate in the secular coming of age ceremony Jugendweihe, however, which was common in East Germany. Instead, she was confirmed. Later, at the Academy of Sciences, she became a member of the FDJ district board and secretary for “Agitprop” (Agitation and Propaganda). Merkel claimed that she was secretary for culture. When Merkel’s one-time FDJ district chairman contradicted her, she insisted that: “According to my memory, I was secretary for culture. But what do I know? I believe I won’t know anything when I’m 80.” Merkel’s progress in the compulsory Marxism—Leninism course was graded only gené¼gend (sufficient, passing grade) in 1983 and 1986…

In 1989, Merkel got involved in the growing democracy movement after the fall of the Berlin Wall, joining the new party Democratic Awakening. Following the first (and only) multi-party election of the East German state, she became the deputy spokesperson of the new pre-unification caretaker government under Lothar de Maizié¨re. In April 1990, the Democratic Awakening merged with the East German CDU, which in turn merged with its western counterpart after reunification.

Now, it may be that Merkel has left her religious upbringing behind. It may be that she was always more sympathetic to leftism than that upbringing indicates. It may be a lot of things, but we don’t know. However, her upbringing certainly indicates a strong religious underpinning to her life.

Here’s an article that tries to trace the influence of religion in her policies towards immigration.

Her “acceptance”, nay, encouragement, of the entry of the horde of >800,000 Muslim so-called refugees is clearly the triumph of Statism suborning the good of the German people. That was obvious from the start.

That she is the leader of the CDU is a sick travesty. CDU being the Christian Democratic Union (party). There is to my eyes nothing Christian about her. But in that she is not alone in Germany, the former land of Luther and the Lutheran Church, the church of pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whom the Nazis executed in the closing days of the war. Christianity has atrophied into nothingness in Germany.