Doughnuts All Round

Berlin is quite possibly the atheist capital of the world. Where else would sixty per cent of the population go to the trouble of filling in a form in order to disaffiliate themselves from religion?

So the failure of the Pro Reli campaign is not exactly any sort of surprise, although it is notable that it took Erich Honecker to turn Berlin into any American city, and that his loyal legatees have been to the fore in preventing that city’s return to Old Europe, instead preserving the insistence that their own Ethik, and that alone, be imposed on children there.

But with both German Catholicism and German Protestantism still banished from Berlin’s schools, making Germany’s capital wildly unlike the country at large (even more than ours is, and that is saying quite something), the secularist lobby has not won. Very far from it, in fact. When every church in Berlin has had a dome and four minarets stuck onto it, and when Christmas and Easter have been replaced as public holidays by celebrations of neither Darwin nor Marx, then they might, just might, realise what they have done.

Still, the rest of Germany remains sound enough, more or less. For now, at any rate. And possibly for a long time to come. After all, Merkel or no Merkel, the CDU still backed Pro Reli, mindful of its own name and heritage, and doubtless moved by the fact that global events have rather overtaken the decidedly anti-Christian and anti-democratic forces of capitalism and warmongering. The more Reli to inoculate people against those two, the better.

And what is more, Pro Reli was also backed by Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Foreign Minister in the current grand coalition, Acting Chairman of the SPD, and, which is the main point, that party’s candidate for Chancellor. Anyone from the SPD who backs something like Pro Reli really does believe in it. He really is in the same tradition as those Labour Council Chairmen in places like here to whom it would simply never occur to cancel the Christmas carol service, whatever might go on in a handful of London Boroughs.

A contest between two at least nominally Pro Reli candidates, but one of whom is like that while the other is Angela Merkel, is really no contest at all.