Nearly a third of Germans say the country's Protestant and Catholic churches should merge, according to a new poll reported by the German evangelical magazine IDEA. Catholics were the most supportive of any Christian group surveyed.
The survey, carried out for IDEA by the polling institute INSA-Consulere, found that 31% of respondents agreed the two churches should unite. A slightly larger share, 34%, disagreed. Another 28% said they did not know, and 7% gave no answer.
Views divided along confessional lines. Catholics backed a merger by a clear margin, while Protestants in both the regional churches and the smaller free churches were more likely to oppose it. The poll was taken as Germany's two largest churches continue to report membership losses that have left them representing less than half the population.
Catholics in favor, Protestants opposed
Among Catholic respondents, 44% supported a union and 30% opposed it. Members of the regional churches — the mainline Protestant bodies that make up the Evangelical Church in Germany, known as the EKD — leaned the other way, with 35% in favor and 42% against.
Opposition was strongest among free church members, a category that includes independent evangelical congregations. Half of them rejected a merger, while 39% favored one.
Women were somewhat more open to the idea than men, at 33% compared with 29%. By age, the youngest and oldest respondents were the most supportive. Among 18- to 29-year-olds and among those over 70, 35% favored a merger. The lowest level of support, 24%, came from people aged 60 to 69, with the remaining age groups falling between 28% and 33%.
INSA polled 2,010 German citizens online from Oct. 23-26, IDEA reported. Respondents were asked to give their view of the statement that the Protestant and Catholic churches should unite.
According to IDEA, the results are representative of Germany's adult population and also by gender, age and region.
Two churches in long-term decline
Both churches have been losing members for decades. In April 2025, Christian Daily International reported that people with no religious affiliation had for the first time outnumbered Catholics and Protestants combined. Data for 2024 from the research group Fowid put the unaffiliated at 47% of the population, compared with 45% for the two churches together.
Each church lost roughly 580,000 members in 2024, according to that report. Fowid also found that only 5% of Germans attend a religious service at least once a month.
The decline continued last year. The EKD reported about 17.4 million members at the end of 2025, a drop of 3.2% from the previous year. The Catholic Church in Germany counted about 19.2 million, down from 19.8 million. Combined, the two churches represented about 44% of the population, Christian Daily International reported in September.
Growth in a smaller evangelical body
Some evangelical groups report movement in the opposite direction. The Federation of Free Evangelical Churches in Germany, known by its German initials FeG, said in August that baptisms on profession of faith in its congregations rose from 1,491 to 2,624 over four years, an increase of about 76%.
The federation's comparison begins in 2021, when public health restrictions limited church gatherings and baptisms in Germany. It counted 40,933 members in 504 congregations at the end of 2025.
Those numbers remain small in a country of about 84 million people. Evangelicals as a whole are estimated to make up around 2% of Germany's population.
The question put to respondents in the IDEA survey did not specify what form a union of the two churches would take or how it might be achieved.
