Spiegel reports on the state of religion in the German city of Wittenberg, 500 years after Martin Luther launched the Protestant Reformation there:
But 500 years after Luther, Protestants seem to be longing for the things he himself called into question — ceremony, ritual and all the religious trappings. Higher-ups in the EKD [the Evangelical Church in Germany] are no longer content to watch debates about religion revolve around Islam and the pope, and they’re not content to watch mosques erected in the Protestant heartland while there are still no places for Protestant pilgrimage. Their goal is to remake Wittenberg into a true Protestant Rome.
[…] But will the campaign work? Is it possible to bring belief back to a city where tradition has been lost, to a place in the former East Germany, where the Communist government drove religion underground? Will the church manage to proselytize to the former East German citizens within its home borders the way its missionaries once did in foreign lands?
Read the full article here.