Abstract
Because of the secularization thesis and the assumptions about the de-institutionalization of religion which had been thought to be valid for a long time, German sociology of religion tended to focus primarily either on the great trends of religious developments in a macro-perspective or on individual religiosity in a micro-perspective. By contrast, the meso-level of social forms of religion including the congregations remained unconsidered for a long time. This is not only contrary to their numerical strength – with nearly 14,200 Protestant, 10,300 Catholic and a hardly comprehensible number of congregations of the many different Christian denominations as well as about 130 Jewish, more than 2200 Muslim and 100 Alevi, several hundred Buddhist and Hindu, about 30 Sikh and a few hundred Bahá’í congregations throughout Germany – but also to the high expectations that are addressed to them, especially in the course of increasing religious pluralization. Drawing on a locally representative study of congregations, this paper maps the religious landscape in Hamburg in view of main characteristics such as organization, activities, beliefs and networks. In view of the city’s self-description as the “capital of interreligious dialogue” special attention is given to interreligious practice and to networks of congregations and thus to their bridge-building potential.
This chapter has been published under the title “Congregations in Germany: Mapping of Organizations, Beliefs, Activities, and Relations: The Case Study of Hamburg,” in: Christophe Monnot & Jörg Stolz (Eds.) (2018): Congregations in Europe. Springer International Publishing. pp. 117–137.
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Notes
- 1.
Or as Chaves (2004, 1–2) formulates more precisely: “By ‘congregation’ I mean a social institution in which individuals who are not all religious specialists gather in physical proximity to one another, frequently and at regularly scheduled intervals, for activities and events with explicitly religious content and purpose, and in which there is continuity over time and in the individuals who gather, the location of the gathering, and the nature of the activities and events at each gathering”.
- 2.
For a detailed overview of the current state of research on Christian, Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu and Jewish religious communities and comparative approaches in Germany as well as international perspectives, see Körs (2018a).
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Körs, A. (2020). Congregations, Diversity, and Interreligious Relations. In: Körs, A., Weisse, W., Willaime, JP. (eds) Religious Diversity and Interreligious Dialogue. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31856-7_11
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