German church leaders take a stance against the rise of ethnonationalism – Annenberg Media

BERLIN — Pastor Martin Michaelis announced his candidacy last year for the far-right conservative party, Alternative for Deutschland (AfD), in the Saxony-Anhalt state elections. As news of his candidacy spread, the German Evangelical Church moved to demote the pastor from his parish office.
Michaelis’s removal sparked debate about the church’s engagement with political affairs. The churches in Germany have made their position on AfD clear.
“A person who is running for a position in the AfD, who has an official position, is not allowed to be at the same time in a board position of a church or congregation,” said Silke Radosh Hinder, deputy superintendent of the Lutheran Evangelical Church of Berlin in an interview with Annenberg Media. “Because what you’re preaching, what you stand for is contradicting each other.”
As Germany’s federal elections closed in February, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) won the popular vote, but the AfD made headlines coming in second place. The AfD has been under surveillance from German domestic intelligence on suspicion of its adherence to right-wing extremist values.
While AfD supporters perceive the church’s actions as a suppression of personal opinion, church leaders began these dismissals as a cautionary measure. Leaders in the German Protestant and Catholic Church worry that supporting the AfD values enables a repeat of an all-too-familiar Third Reich history steeped in exclusion and hate.
Auxiliary Bishop Matthias Heinrich serves the Catholic Archdiocese of Berlin. Before the federal elections, the bishops published a letter echoing the sentiments of the Protestant church about the AfD.
The 36-page document translated from German to English is titled, “Ethnic nationalism and Christianity are incompatible,” naming the AfD three times in its text.
“This declaration expresses the Catholic Church’s clear stance against right-wing extremist tendencies,” the letter reads. “In times when democracy is being tested, they encourage us, as a society, to stand together and steadfastly for our fundamental values.”
“We probably didn’t specifically think that we were making a historic statement against the AfD,” Heinrich said.
During the country’s 2021 federal elections, the BBC reported that a prominent far-right politician, Bjorn Hocke, was fined for reciting a Nazi slogan “Everything for Germany” at a spring rally. Two years later, prosecutors sought to try Hocke for repeating the same slogan at a winter rally.
When reckoning with Holocaust memory, Heinrich noted that the bishops received praise from missions outside of Germany.
Heinrich said in an interview with Annenberg Media, “The foreign communities told us, ‘It’s good that you wrote the document,’ because they believe that in 50 years, people could otherwise accuse the Catholic Church of having said nothing.”
Since the country’s 2021 federal elections, support for the AfD party has almost doubled as they ran on a platform based on German ethnic nationalism. Their top issue: immigration. This past election cycle, the AfD launched a campaign calling for mass deportation, coined “remigration,” citing a surge of migrants — particularly a surge of asylum seekers — as the leading cause of economic decline.
“We are not an immigration country like the US or Australia,” said Joachim Kuhs in an interview, head of the board for the organization Christians in the AfD.
Kuhs doesn’t like the use of the word “deportation”. He explained that the AfD campaign specifically refers to “illegal migration”.
“Everybody can come,” Kuhs said. “But not these migrants who are only looking for a better life and who are leaving their country where they should stay.”
He calls the response to Hocke’s use of the Nazi slogan a “witch hunt”, and rejects the idea that the values of the AfD falls out of line with Christian values.
“I don’t like these expressions that we are anti-Christian, or anti-Islamic and against the Jews,” Kuhs said. “It’s really stupid because it’s not true.”
Kuhs sympathizes with Pastor Michaelis and has had several talks with him about his experience with the church.
“He’s a man who likes a good joke,” Kuhs said. “He’s open-minded and therefore, I do not understand that such a man is forbidden to preach.”
Nicole Hochst is a speaker for Christian churches of the AfD in the German federal parliament. In a written statement, she acknowledged right-wing extremism as “incompatible” with Christian values, and denied that the AfD itself adheres to “anti-human” ideology.
In response to Pastor Michaelis’s demotion, Hochst wrote in an email, “the Protestant Church now assumes that he, too, shares anti-human and right-wing extremist views.”
She explained that Michaelis had been under scrutiny by the church prior to his AfD candidacy announcement.
“His prior activism against state COVID measures had already made him highly suspicious in the eyes of the church leadership,” she wrote in the same email.
The same year Michaelis was demoted, the Catholic Diocese of Trier removed Christoph Schaufert, an AfD state parliamentarian, from an administrative council. Julian-Bert Schafer, a 20-year-old vocal campaign staffer for the AfD, was removed from service as an altar server in the Parish of St. Francis of Assisi in Hamm.
“The cancel culture they now practice against the AfD is certainly a severe restriction of freedom of opinion within the church,” Hochst wrote.
Deputy Superintendent Hinder clarified that the church did not intend to stop congregants from attending services. She also recognizes the importance of maintaining a dialogue between opposing opinions, and she explained that the church hosts discussions where people from the AfD do get invited.
But, church leadership from both Protestant and Catholic denominations has been very careful to avoid support of the AfD’s positions.
“We think that it’s important that we, in general, talk,” Hinder said. “We don’t want to offer stages for election propaganda.”
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