section_path: Demographics/Religion
section_name: Religion
paragraph_text: Religion
  
  According to the 2022 census, Christianity is the largest religion at 49.7% of the population; 23.1% identified as Protestant and 25.1% as Catholic.
  
  A study in 2023 estimated that 46.2% of the population are not members of any religious organisation or denomination and that a majority of the population no longer belongs to a Christian denomination (48.5% Christians). Irreligion in Germany is strongest in major metropolitan areas and throughout the former East Germany, which used to be predominantly Protestant before the imposition of state atheism under communism.
  
  Islam is the second-largest religion in the country. In the 2011 census, 1.9% of respondents (1.52 million people) gave their religion as Islam, but this figure is deemed unreliable because a disproportionate number of adherents of this faith (and other religions, such as Judaism) are likely to have made use of their right not to answer the question. In 2019, there were an estimated 5.3–5.6 million Muslims with a migrant background (6.4–6.7% of the population), in addition to an unknown number of Muslims without a migrant background. Most of the Muslims are Sunnis and Alevis from Turkey, but there are a small number of Shi'ites, Ahmadiyyas and other denominations. Other religions each comprise less than one percent of Germany's population.
  
  In 2011, formal members of the Jewish community represented no more than 0.2% of the total German population, and 60% of them resided in Berlin. An estimated 80 to 90 percent of these Jews in Germany are Russian-speaking immigrants from the former Soviet Union, who came to Germany from the 1980s onwards.