The number of people leaving the church has been rising for decades. In the past twenty years, they have roughly tripled. They rose sharply in three major waves in 2010, 2014 and 2019.
The year 2010 marked the beginning of the abuse scandal in the Catholic Church in Germany. In January of the same year, Jesuit priest Klaus Mertes made sexual abuse at the Canisius College in Berlin public and triggered a domino effect. Four years later, it was primarily a new collection procedure for church tax on capital gains that caused the number of people leaving the church to soar. Originally, church tax was only paid together with the capital gains tax if the taxpayer applied for it, but from January 1, 2015, this was done automatically. This caused great resentment because it often gave the impression that it was an additional tax. Added to this was the scandal surrounding Limburg bishop Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst.
The year 2019 marks the third spike in the statistics of church resignations since 2002. In September 2018, the abuse study of the German Bishops' Conference was published, which comprehensively documented the mass abuse of minors and its systematic cover-up for the first time.
According to many studies, there is no single reason for leaving the Catholic Church; in most cases, several reasons come together. The EKD's church membership survey published in November 2023, in which the German Bishops' Conference also participated for the first time, came to the conclusion that for Catholics, the reasons associated with a failure of the church play a greater role than for Protestants.