Germany’s biggest Protestant gathering, the Kirchentag, has ended in Dresden with a call for the country’s nuclear power plants to be phased out by 2017 and to be replaced by renewable sources of energy.
“The switch in energy production is coming. We have only just started,” the Kirchentag’s president, Katrin Göring-Eckardt, told 120,000 people gathered for an open air closing service on 5 June 2011 on the banks of the River Elbe.
The five-day Kirchentag (church convention) is once-every-two-years convention drawing tens of thousands of participants, including prominent decision-makers. The often controversial debates and discussions at the Kirchentag are widely seen as a barometer of public life in Germany.
In a week when the German government agreed to phase out its nuclear power plants by 2022, Göring-Eckardt said there now needed to be a policy shift to ensure that 100 per cent of energy is generated from renewable sources. The Kirchentag had called in a resolution for a “complete and unconditional” end to nuclear energy by 2017.
The Kirchentag was founded in 1949 as a lay Protestant movement to rebuild a sense of civic and religious responsibility after the experience of Nazism and the Second World War.
Prominent participants in Dresden included President Christian Wulff and Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Göring-Eckardt said that decision-makers need to replace ‘top down’ politics with civic discussion on controversial issues. “Ask us what we think, take part in fair discussion, listen to objections before you take big decisions,” said Göring-Eckardt, a Green party politician who is a vice-president of the Bundestag, the lower house of the German parliament.
“We need another measure for growth, a new definition of success, and a new form of civic coexistence,” she stated.
Another issue for the Kirchentag was that of military policy, following a controversy in 2010 when the then senior leader of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD), the Rev. Dr Margot Kässmann, questioned Germany’s armed involvement in Afghanistan.