Files

svemagie 34c99ec7a9 fix: rename 6 DE datasets README.md→{Name}.md + add 7 missing source catalogs

Renames (consistent naming convention):
- DE-Church-Exits, DE-Mental-Health, DE-Social-Isolation,
  DE-Wastewater-Surveillance, DE-Wellbeing, DE-World-Values

New source catalog entries (DS-00021 through DS-00027):
- Church Exits (EKD/DBK), Common Metrics (Destatis/Bundesbank/BA/ZEW),
  Democracy Metrics (V-Dem/RSF/ALLBUS), Mental Health (Gallup/Destatis/DAK),
  Social Isolation (Genesis/Einsamkeitsstudie), Wellbeing (Eurostat EHIS),
  World Values (WVS/EVS)

All 16 DE datasets + 1 EU dataset now have consistent naming and source catalogs.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>

2026-04-23 12:05:57 +02:00

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DE Church Exits — Kirchenaustritte

🎯 BEST ESTIMATE

Metric	Value	Confidence	Last Updated
Annual exits 2022 (all-time high)	~903,000	85%	2026-04-22
Annual exits 2023	~804,000	70%	2026-04-22
Cumulative exits 2010–2023	~6.7M	80%	2026-04-22

One-liner: Germany lost ~900k church members in 2022 — 48% Catholic, 52% Protestant.

Caveat: 2016–2019 EKD figures are rounded approximations; exact counts from published tables only available in official Zahlen-und-Fakten PDFs.

Quick Context

Germany's two major Christian denominations (EKD Protestant, DBK Catholic) have seen accelerating membership loss since 2010. The 2021–2022 spike coincides with the Munich abuse investigation (Münchner Gutachten) published January 2022. Church exits are a direct proxy for institutional trust collapse — a key dimension of PR-00001 (Meaning Crisis).

Methodology Summary

Approach: Hardcoded annual series from EKD Kirchenmitgliederstatistik and DBK Kirchliche Statistik (published annually). Exit counts are official registered Kirchenaustritte (formal resignation filings at civil registry offices).

Sources:

EKD Zahlen und Fakten: https://www.ekd.de/statistik-kirchenmitglieder.htm
DBK Kirchliche Statistik: https://www.dbk.de/presse/daten-und-fakten/kirchliche-statistik/
Statista aggregate: https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/1254/umfrage/kirchenaustritte-in-deutschland-nach-konfession/

Definition: Kirchenaustritt = formal legal resignation from church membership, filed at local Standesamt (civil registry office). Incurs end of Kirchensteuer obligation.

Substrate Connection

Problem: PR-00001 (Meaning Crisis)
Proxy cluster: Institutional Trust Loss
Argument: AR-00004 (Meaning Crisis Is Empirically Measurable)

Changelog

Date	Change	Reason
2026-04-22	Initial dataset created	PR-00001 evidence expansion

Data Source Notes

EKD and DBK do not provide public APIs or downloadable datasets. Data must be manually extracted from:

Annual "Kirchenmitglieder" press releases (EKD, November each year)
Annual "Kirchliche Statistik" report (DBK, July–September each year)

For automated monitoring, consider scraping:

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