Veronika Rieger’s Instagram bio cuts straight to the point: “pastor in the making, Theologian*, queer feminist, nonbinary bitch.”
Rieger, who uses they/them pronouns, is a Berlin-based Christian influencer — one of many emerging progressive religious voices in Germany. Unlike their better-known conservative Christian counterparts, these influencers use social media to show how faith can align with LGBTQ+ acceptance, feminism, and progressive politics.
Rieger’s posts cover both the personal — their birthday, their experiences being polyamorous — to the political, like Germany’s recent election. “Christianity is inherently political,” one of their Instagram posts from February 2 of this year read. “Your neighbor is not just your neighbor if they were born in Germany, if they are white, able-bodied, and heterosexual. It is incompatible to invoke Christianity and vote right-wing.”
While right wing ideologies have gained traction in recent years in Germany — the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party won the second highest share of the vote in February’s election — religiosity has been decreasing.
Germany’s official churches, both the Protestant and Catholic, have lost millions of members in recent decades. Fifteen years ago, 61% of Germans were church members; that number is below 50%, according to a 2022 Deutsche Welle article.
Among believers, church attendance is going down, too. In 2025, just 6.6% of German Catholics and 2.3% of Protestants attend church regularly, according to a study cited by The Times and conducted by the Research Group on Ideologies in Germany.
Because these churches rely on membership taxes to fund public services, they’re keen to stay relevant with younger generations to keep membership high. That’s why Germany’s Protestant Church launched the Yeet Network, a social media initiative that amplifies diverse Christian voices, like Rieger’s. Named after the English internet slang word, Yeet aims to reach young people on social media.
Being a pastor was not always in the books for Rieger.
They were raised in the more conservative Bavaria region of Germany, and despite being baptized, didn’t connect with their religious identity until adulthood.
“I think I had a very strict picture of what it meant to believe in God,” they said. “It was like believing every story that the Bible says word by word, or going to church every Sunday.”
Through studying theology, they came to see their faith, identity and politics as deeply connected.
“A lot of people say you lose your faith in your studies,” they said. “But I found mine — because it gave me a way to approach faith with my mind.” They said this approach opposes conforming to societal expectations about what it means to be a faithful person.
Rieger uses Instagram to share about their faith in God, queer identities and activism. To Rieger, being a pastor is intertwined with every other part of their identity.
“I don’t think you can have this clear divide between a profession and your normal life,” Rieger said. “I’m always a pastor, no matter if I’m sleeping, if I’m going out with friends, if I’m working. I’m fully a pastor and fully myself.”
They also co-founded another group, called the Feminist Devotional Collective. They post Christian devotions from a feminist perspective on Instagram on a weekly basis. In German, the acronym fAK, for feministisches Andachtskollektiv, sounds like the word “fuck.” It’s a purposeful play on words that fits the group’s goals of connecting Christianity to the interests of youth.
FAK co-founder and fellow influencer Pastor Lena Müller uses her online platform to share her journey as a queer-friendly, anti-racist and anti-ableist pastor. She often posts photos of her colorful outfits.
“When German people imagine meeting a pastor, they think about an old white man with gray hair wearing black,” Müller said. “And I’m not an old white man wearing black. It’s very clear that I’m a modern woman.”
Not every post influencers make is explicitly religious, said Jan Philipp Hahn, a researcher at the Evangelische Zentralstelle für Weltanschauungsfragen, or EZW, who focuses on the intersection of religion and social media.
“It’s about confessing your identity to the public,” he said. “And that’s a dynamic that is crucial for social media in general — people speaking about their private lives in front of millions of people, potentially.”
Many progressive Christian influencers actually have relatively small followings; a few thousand followers, and a few hundred likes per post. But that intimacy helps foster a supportive, safe space in the comments, where people feel comfortable sharing personal struggles. The result is a kind of informal pastoral care that emerges between the influencer and their audience.
“Sometimes people share things about themselves that you would never imagine,” Hahn said. “When an influencer speaks about how God helped him to stop taking drugs, followers will come to the comments and share that they took drugs for several years and God helped them.”
He has seen comments asking for advice about marital sex life and job loss. Other commenters offer prayers and assurances that God will help. “It’s a kind of peer pastoral help,” he said.
For some, this online engagement is their only relationship with the church believers. A 2022 study by a research group affiliated with the Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland, Germany’s mainline Protestant church found that 19.3% of followers engaging with progressive Christian influencers were members of a church, but had no contact with a congregation.
For others, influencers are their way into Christianity. According to the same study, 11.9% of followers of these Christian influencers did not consider themselves religious or spiritual at all.
For Müller, some followers are interested in the feminism, disability rights or queer rights aspects of her content.
“I somehow managed to get out of this churchy bubble, and a lot of feminists follow me, even though they’re not religious,” she said. At least one person personally requested Müller perform her baptism.
For Germany’s official Protestant church, the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD), the takeaway is clear: social media is central to reaching younger, more diverse audiences. That’s where the Yeet network comes in. Run by the EKD’s media organization, Yeet’s Christian influencers span across Germany, and across the LGBTQ diaspora.
The influencers in their network–including Rieger–produce videos, podcasts and social media posts about diversity in the church and intersectionality between religion, politics and activism. They aren’t paid by the church for their content creation, but they receive support like video production, editing and marketing — and can make extra income through merchandise sales.
They also receive a strong community and legal support.
“Being a Christian, especially a progressive Christian, online, it’s not super easy,” said Rieger, referencing a time when the Yeet network helped her look into legal action after she received violent messages.
Müller also has experienced hateful messages and comments.
“They say I’m not a real Christian, that I’m building my own religion,” Müller said. “That you can’t be a feminist and a Christian. That women aren’t allowed to preach. That being LGBTQIA is sinful.” Sometimes, when she blocks one account, the commenter will create a new one to comment again.
Once, in a sermon, Müller mentioned that non-binary people exist. Afterwards, two people came up to her. “[They] said I’m responsible for making all the kids gay, and that’s why Germany has no babies anymore. So I’m responsible for Germany dying out.”
Müller responds to the hate by making it clear she doesn’t subscribe to a literal interpretation of the Bible — and points out that many of her critics don’t either.
Referencing often-ignored rules in the Hebrew Bible, she says, “‘I hope you never cut your beard or your hair. I hope your clothes aren’t of mixed materials. I hope you’ve never had seafood — never had shellfish.’”
To Christian influencers on both sides, politics is inextricably linked to religion.
“This is a big discussion right now, also in my kind of digital bubble: Should a pastor be openly political?” Rieger said.
For them, the answer is an easy yes. In a democratic society, they feel it’s their duty to be political. “For me, it goes hand in hand,” she said. “I’m Christian because I’m a left-leaning person. I’m a left-leaning person because I’m Christian.”
As a pastor, they often ask themselves: What would Jesus do?
“Jesus was the one who turned to the women, turned to the poor people, turned to the sick people,” she said. “This, for me, translates directly into politics. I have to take care of poor people through politics.”
Tying politics and religion rings true for the right-wing Christian influencers, too. Leonard Jäger, a blonde, blue-eyed, traditionally handsome man in his 20s, is one of the leading right-wing influencers in Germany. He posts under the name “Ketzer der Neuzeit” (“Heretic of the Modern Age”.)
In a recent post, he wears a crewneck sweater that reads: “God created them male and female. Gen 5:2.”
A recent convert to Christianity, he combines his support of right-wing politics (like AfD) with his Christian faith. In February 2025, he interviewed politician Alice Weidel and asked her about her faith. He spent the U.S. election day, Nov. 5, 2024, with President Donald Trump and other far-right, AfD-affiliated Germans at Mar-a-Lago.
That kind of alignment between conservative politics and Christian identity is exactly what Rieger and Müller are pushing back against. They want to ensure progressive voices remain visible amidst this conservative Christian majority.
“I want to show that you can be a modern, queer-friendly woman and be a Christian,” Müller said, “So that young people, when they have faith questions and they look on the internet, they won’t find only those fundamentalist answers.”