• Losing Heavencommunity's social geography. The religious sphere is an important aspect and axis of the city, but this is even more true in many villages, and in both cases religion has become permanently embedded in their architecture.This initial impression is rapidly dispelled the moment our outsider gets a sense of how these buildings are used. While few former churches have been redesignated as residential or business premises, it soon emerges that religious buildings -as places of worship and assembly -now play a rather modest role. Church services tend to attract older people, more women than men, few families and very few young people. As they gather against a backdrop of empty pews and high ceilings, these small groups merely underline how empty their churches are. Outside hours of worship, churches are either closed or serve as tourist attractions. Visitors come to view and admire the achievements of European civilization: pictorial work, windows, sculptures, altars and pulpits -features of art historical value or that sightseers perceive as colourful, out of the ordinary and 'exotic'.If our outsider proceeds to look for other, non-Christian places of worship and prayer she will find only a few scattered examples. Synagogues, Hindu and Buddhist temples and other places of worship are thin on the ground. A single mosque, located some distance from the town centre and with no lack of Muslim attendees, provides a counterpoint to the generally deserted Christian churches. Amid the bustle of the town centre shopping precincts, for the most part it is only Muslim women in their headscarves and a few rather forlorn-looking Jehovah's Witnesses, proffering the Watchtower to those hurrying past, who can be identified as believers.If our outsider now asks not just the few churchgoers but also the passers-by she encounters about their attitude towards religion she will soon make a new discovery: if she is in the former GDR, just one in three are members of one of the major Churches. In what used to be East Germany, 67 per cent of the population do not belong to a religious community, and there is a firmly established culture of religious non-affiliation extending across three generations. Things are different in the larger, western part of Germany, where four out of five people are members of a religious community, with 18 per cent unaffiliated. Whether this is merely a matter of paper membership is not immediately apparent to our outside observer. But, she is told, the number of churchgoers is small in both confessions and in sharp decline. Only one in twenty nominal members, as a Protestant pastor complains, finds his way to a Sunday service. 1 If our outsider speaks to his or her Catholic counterpart, he would inform her that in 2010