The New Neo

The number of Christian believers in Germany has been falling rapidly, and this presents a problem: what to do with all those empty churches? Maybe it’s time to re-purpose them as mosques – it’s certainly happened before; just ask the Byzantines. But meanwhile, here are some other solutions:

The number of church members in Germany is falling rapidly. In 2024 alone, the two major churches lost over a million Christians due to people leaving the church or dying. Currently, more than 45% of Germans still belong to either to the Protestant Church in Germanyor the Catholic Church. Thirty years ago, that figure stood at almost 69%. This is why churches are now being deconsecrated or desacralized.

… In response to a DW inquiry, the German Bishops’ Conference informed of the closing and decommissioning of 611 Catholic churches between 2000 and 2024. The Protestant Church estimates that some 300 to 350 churches were permanently shut in the same period; more precise figures are not available.

And what happens to former houses of worship? In some cities, especially in Berlin, growing Orthodox Christian congregations have taken over church buildings. But that remains the exception. …

Some are repurposed. In Jülich, a town between Cologne and Aachen, bicycles are now sold in the former Catholic St. Rochus Church. Thomas Oellers moved his business, Toms Bike Center, into the church building. …

In Wettringen, just north of Münster, an abbey has been transformed into a “soccer church” where footballs are knocked about. In Kleve, the former Protestant Church of the Resurrection serves as a boxing arena. Former churches now house pubs, libraries and book stores. Entire cloisters have even been turned into hotel complexes. In Düsseldorf, a hotel has retained its traditional name Mutterhaus (Mother House) in a nod to its original use as a convent for nuns.

In times of housing shortages, there are more and more cases of architects converting church buildings into residential buildings. In Berlin, Rostock, Trier, Cologne and Wuppertal, for example.

Which makes me think of the Philip Larkin poem “Churchgoing.” It was written in 1954, which is a long time ago, indicating that this trend has been going on for a considerable time. You can find the entire poem here, and I call your attention to the fact that in the poem the speaker has been bicycling, and stops in an empty church to take a look: “Hatless, I take off/My cycle-clips in awkward reverence …”

Here’s a longer excerpt:

Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show,
Their parchment, plate and pyx in locked cases,
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.
Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?

And then of course there’s a poem written about a hundred years earlier than that (probably in 1851) by Matthew Arnold, and entitled “Dover Beach. I wrote at some length about the poem in this post. The stanza that is particularly apt:

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

I believe that Arnold was speaking of Christianity and of Europe, and he sensed what was coming there or what had already begun. He seemed to have seen the trend:

In an 1869 letter to his mother, he wrote:

“My poems represent, on the whole, the main movement of mind of the last quarter of a century, and thus they will probably have their day as people become conscious to themselves of what that movement of mind is, and interested in the literary productions which reflect it. It might be fairly urged that I have less poetical sentiment than Tennyson and less intellectual vigour and abundance than Browning; yet because I have perhaps more of a fusion of the two than either of them, and have more regularly applied that fusion to the main line of modern development, I am likely enough to have my turn as they have had theirs.”

Stefan Collini regards this as “an exceptionally frank, but not unjust, self-assessment. … Arnold’s poetry continues to have scholarly attention lavished upon it, in part because it seems to furnish such striking evidence for several central aspects of the intellectual history of the nineteenth century, especially the corrosion of ‘Faith’ by ‘Doubt’. No poet, presumably, would wish to be summoned by later ages merely as an historical witness, but the sheer intellectual grasp of Arnold’s verse renders it peculiarly liable to this treatment.”

Indeed.