Olaf Scholz may be right when he says he is among the few in Germany who has read the whole Bible from Genesis to Revelation.

The Chancellor (Germany’s head of government) might also give an accurate image of society when he says (contrary to his predecessor Angela Merkel) that faith is a private matter he prefers not to discuss in public.

A new survey conducted in Germany by the firm Insa-Consulere for the Idea news agency concludes that 68% of the population “never reads the Bible” (78% in eastern Germany, 66% in western Germany). Another 15% responded that they may have read the Bible at some point in the last months.

According to the survey, conducted in May 2024, those who have a daily routine of reading the Bible represent 5% of Germans, while another 4% say they read Scriptures once a week or so.

These figures are better than those of an in-depth research of the Leipzig University published in 2023, which concluded that while over half of Germans own a Bible, only 1.6% read it every day. That report also underlined a “surprising low use among Protestants and Catholics” in the land that saw the birth of the Protestant Reformation.

Young people most interested in the Bible

The age group in the Insa-Consulere survey who responded most positively to the question of whether they read the Bible every day was that of those aged 18 to 29: 11% read it daily and 8% on a weekly basis. Just over half (56%) said they never read it.

This trend of a higher interest in the Christian faith among younger generations has appeared in other recent statistics in Germany. Furthermore, research among the Gen Z generation (those born after 1997) points to an increase in prayer and church attendance in countries like France, Great Britain, Netherlands and Hungary. In Finland, the number of young men that go to church has more than doubled in less than a decade.

Catholics and Protestant vs free evangelicals

Nevertheless, the Insa-Consulere survey on Germany shows that 61% of self-identified Roman Catholics confess they never read the Bible (very close to the general average).

Those who identify as Mainline Protestants who say they never open Scripture are 57%.

The answers only are significantly different among respondents who self-identify as free evangelical Christians. Among them, only 15% say they “never read the Bible” while over one third say they read the Bible every day. Another 20% says they do so once per week.

The survey, in which over 2,000 adults were asked, also found that voters of the traditional centre-right and centre-left parties read the Bible a bit more than voters of parties more on the extremes of the political spectrum.