Evangelischer Kirchentag in Deutschland

Schatzi Lang is not attending Kirchentag, but I give him a full report every day.

I know you all have been waiting with bated breath (or baited breath, like my cat Schatzi's fishy breath) ... anyway, I know you've been eager for my latest report from the German Protestant Kirchentag (Church Convention) which is now in its third day. So I will not disappoint.

About 100,000 travelled to Hanover and another 200,000 are expected to attend a street festival organized for the occasion. Essentially, the church is taking over this major city for five days.

The biennial event is sponsored by the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD). The EKD is a federation of German Lutheran and "United" churches. There is a direct historical continuity between these churches and the Reformation of Martin Luther. [Note: "evangelical" in all languages except English means simply "Protestant" and has nothing to do with fundamentalism!]

Leading politicians—including Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and Christian Democratic leader Angela Merkel—have addressed the crowd. Schroeder and Merkel will face off in September in the federal elections.

In some ways, the status of the Protestant churches in Germany is the opposite of our situation: George Bush won't even consider meeting with representatives of "mainline" churches but lavishes attention on any big fundamentalist gathering. In Germany, politicians from parties from Right to Left are falling over each other to court the mainline Protestant churches and at an event like this the secular media are present in force. In contrast, any public event organized by Germany's fundamentalist churches would come and go in obscurity.

Much of the event focuses on social and economic justice—though through the lens of Bible, theology and worship, of course. The rising tide of frustration in Protestant churches over high unemployment, globalization and militarization is fully and openly expressed here. For instance, the Kirchentag's lay moderator denounced on Friday what he called "the romanticism of market-liberal" economics which, he said, "subordinates moral values to economic goals." This is a "fatal reversal of social relations." "The question must be reversed: "How can the economy be shaped so it serves the life of the individual and the community?"

Participants are also voicing sharp criticism for the U.S. government's treatment of prisoners in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay. No defenders of the war in Iraq here: it was and continues to be unpopular in Germany. But other debates on economics and ethics are more broadly representative of the existing political spectrum.