The Christmas market attacks in Magdeburg — and the heated political atmosphere that followed — have stressed a range of issues ahead of Germany’s snap elections on February 23.  

Voters across Europe’s largest economy are concerned about domestic security, immigration, upholding the rule of law and strengthening democracy against perceived enemies within and without.  

An important aspect of this equation is how followers of Germany’s various religious communities might work to address these concerns together.  

With a total population of nearly 85 million, there are an estimated 23 million Catholics (27 percent), 21 million Protestants (25 percent) and nearly 5 million Muslims (5.7 percent). There are also smaller populations of evangelicals (2 percent) and Orthodox Christians (1.9 percent), as well as Jews, Buddhists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Hindus, Yezidis, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Pagans and Sikhs. Notably, 44 percent of Germans (or 37 million) claim no religious affiliation, but may practice some form of spirituality or hold some kind of enchanted worldview.  

How members of these various groups work together — or against one another — is of great importance for the future of plural, open societies like Germany.   

Finding the way: mapping Germany’s interreligious dialogue  

Inspired by such concerns in the wake of the 10th World Assembly of Religions in Lindau, Germany in 2019, representatives from Religions for Peace Germany, the Global Ethic Project, the Federal Congress of Councils of Religions, and the “Forum for Religions in Context” at the University of Potsdam worked together to map the size, composition and activities of interreligious groups in Germany. As a relative newcomer to Germany, I was invited to take part in the project and provide an international perspective on its findings.  

Our desire was to get a sense of such initiatives and procure more textured detail about their motivations, activities and locations. And so, we set out to compile a comprehensive list of initiatives, at the local level, as possible.  

As a reference work, it is designed to provide a starting point for appreciating interreligious councils’ and initiatives’, efforts in a religiously diverse context and begin to see the increasingly important role such councils play in processes of understanding pluralism and its many effects in Germany and beyond.  

Not only does the guide encourage people to get to know the interreligious actors and councils operating across Germany’s sixteen states but recognize their peace-making and policy-setting potential. Thus, as a treasury of good practice, it is intended to galvanize further networking and contribute to social cohesion in Germany, especially at times such as these. 

The published book that resulted from the study contains profiles of 70 interreligious organizations and initiatives across the country, supplemented by reflections on the history and future of interreligious dialogue in Germany and on the role of religion in civil society.  

This includes world-famous projects like the House of One — a church, mosque and synagogue in one building — in the heart of Berlin alongside profiles of smaller gatherings like the Interreligious Women’s Breakfast Neutraubling in the small Bavarian city of Neutraubling and the “garden of religions” in the southwestern city of Karlsruhe.  

Keeping it local 

Concomitant with the rise in religious diversity in Europe over the preceding decades, there has also been an increase in the number of dialogue platforms across the continent. National, regional, and local studies show how in Germany, interreligious dialogue has emerged as a notable response to immigration, pluralization, and security concerns to varying degrees of satisfaction and success.  

In various contexts, actors have worked together to initiate interreligious dialogue activities on varying scales, with particular emphasis on integration, education and governance-supported collaborations. 

Although 40% of the groups surveyed for this project reported some form of international contact (e.g., with European networks or international groups like Religions for Peace or United Religions Initiative), most of their work was focused on things like personal encounters and visits to communities and/or houses of worship, annual festivals and events or integration issues in their own cities and towns.  

For example, the Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Religionen in Dietzenbach in the state of Hesse (“ARD”) focuses on the annual Dietzenbach Peace Prayer with documentation of the prayer texts on its website.  

Elsewhere, the Bündnis Interreligiöses Deutschland in Dresden in the eastern state of Sachsen (“BIRD”) puts on interreligious peace concerts, festivals, and encounter events — including collaborative peace work and educational lectures — for the city’s half-a-million residents. 

Meanwhile, the Interreligiöser Gesprächskreis in Rostock on Germany’s north coast does similar work to that of ARD in Dietzenbach or BIRD in Dresden, with the added purpose of “extremism prevention.”   

Numerous other groups, meeting in churches, synagogues, mosques, city halls, gardens and private houses from Offenburg to Osnabrück, Paderborn to Potsdam and Hannover to Halle share similarly parochial concerns, locally focused programming and a sense of contributing to a city or community’s self-understanding through their respective interreligious initiatives.  

The results suggest that interfaith efforts are “steeped in the local context of their home communities” and are thus “foundational to interfaith infrastructure” in the country as a whole because of, and not in spite of, their overwhelmingly local concerns.  

These initiatives can take various forms: as councils, building projects, creative enterprises, informal gatherings or communal spaces. But at their core, each is dedicated to addressing local concerns and generating a sense of community at the person-to-person level.  

Although their concerns may be inflected by international currents, nationwide patterns of pluralism or informal and formal transnational networks, groups like the women’s breakfast in Neutraubling, the House of One in Berlin or the interreligious Garden in Karlsruhe rely on grassroots, everyday pluralism and interreligious encounters that contribute to their imminently contextual concerns.  

Place-making + peacemaking  

In view of the multiple challenges facing whichever political parties lead Germany’s government in 2025 and beyond, it is important to remember the value — and lived reality — of such initiatives. As Germany looks to address the problems threatening its democracy, it would do well to recall interreligious dialogue’s role in place-making and in strengthening the bonds of civil society at the local level.  

Engagement with religious actors and interreligious dialogue and collaboration are increasingly recognized as crucial policy tools to combat intolerance and strengthen peace building. And, as we found, established faith groups and actors (specifically, Protestant or Roman Catholic churches in Germany) are often perceived, or act in practice, as primary policy brokers and leaders of dialogue efforts in localities across the country.  

Though funding, recognition and the concentration of power may be funneled through leaders — often Christian — and can exacerbate uneven social relations, local initiatives and partnerships can prove pragmatically promising for establishing minoritized voices in the public square.   

Often, local contexts are key sites and critical laboratories for interreligious encounter and the outworking of globally inflected religious diversity. As Diana Eck wrote, “[t]his is where we gather up the complexity and diversity of a culture, not always in harmony, but sometimes in conflict.”  

Despite increasing rates of secularism, religious pluralization and non-religious affiliation, faith communities remain important sources of trusted information in a polarized political landscape. And interreligious groups — where local faith communities come together — have an invaluable role in protecting the integrity of democracies and plural societies like Germany. 

Interreligious dialogue has multiple critics, from those who question its effectiveness to those who warn against its inherent biases and elitism. Add, scholars like Muthuraj Swamy warn that stated conflicts often labeled “religious are mostly based on social, political, linguistic, or cultural factors, and that the practitioners of different religions do not actually come into conflict at the grassroots level.” These are all warranted and valid critiques. 

But, surveying how interreligious dialogue is done in Germany, I remain convinced that if we want to understand our place in the world and how values and the complexities of the human condition inform behavior in changing circumstances, we must not only pay attention to the role religious actors and institutions play but pursue interreligious dialogue as a critical practice and crucial part of policy-making processes. 

As Germany faces fresh elections and looks to set the tone for its society in the years to come, it would do well to draw on, and perhaps learn from, how interreligious initiatives across the country are already leading the way.