Why are children born out of wedlock (as percentage of total) still so low in Germany compared to other Northern European countries despite being one of the least religion countries?

9 comments

1. Cause people can still adhere to traditional values without religion.

   Also, it doesn’t say how long the parents were married before conceiving. Many of my friends were in long-term relationships when they got pregnant and got married before the birth. German law gives some advantages when the parents are married at birth of a child.

2. Tax incentives too

3. Germany gives married couples tax advantages, which can amount to a lot of extra money if only one of them works for a while or only works part time while caring for a child (this can be hundreds of Euros a month of “free money”).

   Also, getting married makes a lot of paperwork surrounding getting a child easier and is also very advantageous for the father because he has more rights while married.

4. Just because people don’t believe in God doesn’t mean they don’t want to get married.

   Marriage is really a legal status; a religious ceremony — which, by the way, is in its present form a relatively modern invention — is sort of an optional extra (my own wedding was entirely a civic affair, a simple legal ceremony followed by, I’m not kidding, a barbecue). Married couples can sometimes get extra tax breaks (my wife often jokes that I’m not her knight in shining armour, I’m her tax avoidance scheme), or have an easier time accessing certain benefits.

   Also, religious sentiment aside, it’s an opportunity for a public declaration in front of witnesses that the bride and groom (or, you know, bride and bride or groom and groom, whatever) have made an exclusive commitment to each other. It’s also an opportunity for the two families — i.e. the grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins of any children that might result from the union — to meet and get to know each other.

   If in other countries more children are born out of wedlock, it may be because there are no particular incentives to get married — it may not, for example, give you any extra benefits — but it may also be that rates of unwanted pregnancies especially in young people are higher, which would point to a problem with sex education or attitudes to birth control (Poland, for example, is very strongly Catholic, and the Catholic Church disapproves of birth control very strongly).

5. Marriage is not necessarily religious here. You can marry in two ways: one is religious in a church, without any legal connections, and one is “standesamtlich” – with all legal duties and benefits. So a lot of couples marry standesamtlich to benefit from tax helps and all. Religion plays usually a minor role in this, some couples want to use the religious ceremony, because it’s beautiful in their eyes getting married in a church.

6. Unrelated to your question, the color coding in the chruch attendance map is awful. One can see right away that it’s not neutral.

7. Tax incentives and avoiding the nightmare with Paperwork

8. These things have always had to do a lot more with practical circumstances and with people liking sex than a simple “are people religious?” question.

   My father has done work on old church records occasionally, and he’s seen ones where at certain time periods, ~1/3 of children were born out of wedlock, others were born extremely prematurely if you want to believe their parents had their first sex in the wedding night. Other couples had their first child very late after the marriage (so they might have had trouble conceiving, and they might have had premarital sex as well).

   At certain times, there were laws here that put financial requirements on people getting married, effectively preventing poorer ones such as agricultural labourers from getting married. Surprise, surprise: People still like sex, and religious doctrine doesn’t prevent them from having it. Hence all those unmarried or very early childbirths.

9. Because the laws on the books were mostly written by _Christian_ Democrats who designed them so as to incentivize the formation of the nuclear family in its traditional form. The current government has set out to change some of them.