A look at religious voters during the election 2009 Germany

When I first started researching for my blogpost I was sure to find something aout religious voters in Germany during the elections 2009, but now I need to say that I couldn't find anything about religious voters or religious groups voting for certain parties in Germany on any official website that I looked at.

To me this shows that in Germany religion is certainly not as important as in the USA, because it is not considered at all in the graphics that show the voters for the parties. I will give you a graphic later on.

Even though Germany has many parties like the CDu which is supposed to be based on Christian values, it does not seem to be as important to Germans as it used to be. People all the street will most likely not say that they voted for the party, beacuse they believe in the Christian values they represent.

Here now the results of the parties in Germany during the election 2009.

A look at religious voters in the 2008 elections

First it has to be mentioned that Obama and the democrats made their largest gains with during this elections among religious minorities. So I will look at some of these groups now.
(Source: Analysis of aggregated election weekend and post-election callback surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.)

The figure shows which groups voted for Obama and which groups voted for McCain. This figure shows how important religion was during the presidential election in 2008. The blue bars are describing Obama´s voters and the red bars are describing McCain`s voters. It is very striking that the black protestants voted nearly 100% for Obama and at the bottom it is the other way round. So it gets obvious that religion played a huge role in the American elections.
You can also see that there is a sharp distinction between democratic voters and republicans. Therefore you can see that racial and ethnis minortities voted most for the democrates and whites voted more for the republicans. Furthermore I think that these numbers show clearly the growing immigration in the United States. Today there are many more different ethnical groups than oin former times. So it it is understandable that these people need someone who knows what they need. Obama is a person who has drawn parallels between his life and their lives. So this is why this sharp distinction between the voters appears. Nowadays there are many more opinions and cultures so it is a natural behaviour that the minorities want to come together with a president who cares about them.
During the next few days there will be another post which takes a look at the changes of religion in politics.

General Information about Religion in Germany

This text deals with religion in Germany that is to say how people live with religion and furthermore if they live with religion.
It is obvious that religiousness is not as present as years ago. If one speaks to older people you can get easily to know that for those people religiousness is far more important than for most of the younger generations. And even if younger people believe in God most of them do not go to church regularly.
In the following there is a statistic which shows how many people would consider themselves as religious people (source: statista.org)


From my own experience I know many people who believe in God and got to church. But nobody can deny that for most people of the younger generations it is not important to visit church every week. In most cases it is limited to the first communion or the confirmation. These are days where most of the baptized children still go to church.
In Germany it is obvious that most of the families do not hold on religious traditions so that children could not learn from their parents anything about religious life. Although relious education is still anchored in the fundamental law many pupils decide that they do not want to take part in it. All in all one can say that the religiousness goes down in Germany.

General information about religion in the U.S

In the following post I'm going to give general information about religion in the United States and my personal experience on that matter.

There are two major religions in the U.S: protestant and catholic. During the 19th century liberal American Protestanism occured in the U.S..(about the same time as in Europe)
The movement started to interpret the Bible in a completely new way and questioned the validity of biblical miracles and traditional beliefs about authorship of biblical books. On the other hand the conservatives believed that there was no reason to question the literal truth of the Bible. They argue that it is not necessary to teach evolution at school, because it elevates human reason above revealed truth and is therefore antireligious. Because of that many parents send their children to religious schools or teach them be themselves at home.

In a majority protestant country the Irish Catholics, who had come to the USA during the Civil War, were subjected to prejudice. Even though they were allowed to attend public school and universities, they soon build institutions of their own to match their standards. But since the Catholic church does not require its members to attend one of their church-run institutions, most catholics today attend public institutions.

America has always been a fertile ground for new religions which is due to the lack of religious prejudice in most parts of the USA.

Today religion plays a huge role in politics. There is a powerful political movement which is called the Christian Right. Their aim is to overturn decisions allowing abortion and banning prayer in public schools.

For most Americans religion is a personal matter which is not talked about in everyday life. However Americans are, compared to other nations, spiritual people. Over 70% consider themselves as being religious.

As far as my own experience is concerned I can only say that I have observed the same things while being in America. Most people I have met were very religious and most of them wen to religious schools or were homeschooled. Most people at my high school were catholics which was due to the huge number of immigrants, because all the people I have met who were Americans were protestant and not catholics.

If you are interested in looking up further information about religion in the U.S. see:

http://usa.usembassy.de/etexts/factover/ch8.htm

On this webside you can also find more chapters concerning general information about the USA and its history and everyday life.

For our proseminar in American studies we ( two English students from Germany) are doing a blog project. In our blog project we are going to discuss religious narratives and the importance of religin in the presidential election in the U.S. 2008 and the federal elections 2009 in Germany. First we are going to to give general information about religion in the U.S. and Germany. After that we are going to look at how the media covered religion in both countries during the elections. Furthermore we consider the look at religious voters as important and point out the changes over the years.
Later on we give an example to proove our theses. In the end we compare how both countries dealt with a rumour about Barack Obama. We are also going to to give a conclusion to summarize our results.