What are we reading? 17/02/2024

[Tam]

AB76 wrote: "RussellinVT wrote: "Thanks for all those Germany posts.

Tam – Like you I thought Bavaria was a Nazi bastion. Not so, according to Hawes. In that state as a whole the Nazis didn’t even reach 15% in..."

There is an incentive in Germany to maintain links to the church though, even if you are not religious, as you have to pay an annual church tax, if you intend to either get married, or christened in a church, (or buried I assume?) which we don't have here.

Though I believe that a vicar is entitled, personally, here in England, to decide who qualifies for a church ceremony, or not (I had a friend here in the village who was turned down for a church marriage, by the vicar, because she was already a divorcee!...) but we don't have to pay a tax to do so, like the Germans do. That might well skew the statistics somewhat, as whether you make it onto an official census, or not, as to having an official particular religious identity, and could perhaps explain the differences in German 'census' information to some degree?...

[AB76]

Tam wrote: "AB76 wrote: "RussellinVT wrote: "Thanks for all those Germany posts.

Tam – Like you I thought Bavaria was a Nazi bastion. Not so, according to Hawes. In that state as a whole the Nazis didn’t even..."

yes, good point, the church taxes could be mean the census collation is very different and clearly if you were a Lutheran tax payer, you would be Protestant on census returns in the 1930s.

Holland from its early days as the Dutch Republic had a very flexible system where many non observant or even non-religious calvinists would still contribute to church taxes and have their own pew, certainly in terms of Protestant policy, the UK is a very different world to Protestant Europe. While in the modern day atheism and secularism dominates Protestant Europe, i have always been intrigued by the minute dissedent numbers outside the Anglo-Protestant world

In the UK and even more in the USA, the dissedent/non-conformist % of Protestants was a majority, or a large minority(in 1851, about 45% of UK protestants were dissenters). But in Switzerland, Holland, Scandinavia and Germany, where the Protestants were a majority up to the 1920s(they still are in Scandinavia), the dissenting Protestant numbers were tiny, Holland had the most, with maybe 15-20% at most(Mennonites/Lutherans and dissenting Calvinists), while in populous Germany, dissenters were at most 6-7% before the Protestant churches united in the 1820s and figures lost accuracy.

[Robert]

An odd moment in the library this evening. One of the librarians came up to me, and said that it had been so long since she'd seen me there that she thought I was dead. I explained that I'd passed from hospital to rehabilitation center to rest homes, but had returned since I re-learned to drive.
Though it's nice to be missed...