Tonight is Census night. Across the country, households will sit down, some at kitchen tables and some on their phones between other tasks, and answer a question that has appeared on every Australian Census since 1911. What is your religion?
For a growing share of the population, the answer will be ‘no religion’ at all.
It is worth pausing on that question tonight, not because the outcome is a surprise, but because the trend behind it says something real about the country the church is called to serve.
The numbers so far
In 2021, 38.9 per cent of Australians selected “no religion” on their Census form. That was up from 30.1 per cent in 2016, and 22.3 per cent in 2011. It is now the second largest single category on the form, behind Christianity, which fell from 52.1 per cent of the population in 2016 to 43.9 per cent in 2021.
That last figure matters on its own. It marked the first Census in Australian history where fewer than half of the population identified as Christian.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics has also traced the shift over a longer arc. In 1966, 88 per cent of Australians identified as Christian. By 1991 that had dropped to 74 per cent. The movement away from Christian identification has been underway for six decades. What has changed more recently is the size of the “no religion” category specifically, which nearly doubled between 2006 and 2016, then jumped again by 2021.
Tonight’s Census will show whether that climb has continued, slowed, or plateaued. Results will not be public for some time. The ABS has flagged a staged release, with most topics, including religion, expected around June 2027.
A question that almost changed
The wording Australians will see tonight, “What is your religion?”, nearly did not survive to this Census. In 2024, the ABS proposed replacing it with a more direct question, “Does the person have a religion?”, paired with a straightforward yes or no tick box.
Church leaders pushed back hard. Archbishop Timothy Costelloe, president of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, argued in The Australian that the change would strip the question of meaning beyond belief alone. “Reformulating the question as ‘does the person have a religion’ effectively destroys the measure of culture and identity, as it changes the question to whether a person holds religious beliefs or not,” he wrote. He warned the shift would come at a cost, saying it “will result in the loss of a sense of religious heritage, as the new format attempts to divorce religion from culture and tradition, presuming that this is no longer significant.”
The ABS ultimately reinstated the original question for tonight’s Census. But the dispute is a reminder that even the framing of “What is your religion?” carries an assumption, that religion is as much inherited identity as personal conviction, an assumption not everyone answering the form tonight will share.
What the data does not say
Numbers like these can read as a verdict on faith’s place in Australian life. But a closer look at other research suggests the picture is less settled than the Census category alone implies.
NCLS Research’s 2021 Australian Community Survey, conducted separately from the Census, found that a majority of Australians, 55 per cent, still say they believe in God. Around six in ten reported that they pray or meditate in some form. NCLS researchers have described many younger Australians as not affiliating with a religion as part of their social identity, without necessarily being closed to spiritual life.
In other words, “no religion” on a Census form is a statement about institutional affiliation. It is not necessarily a statement about belief.
A demographic story too
Migration has shaped this trend in more than one direction. Census data shows that among people who arrived in Australia in the years leading up to the 2021 Census, a substantial share, close to 30 per cent, identified with no religion. At almost the same rate, migrants in that period identified as Christian. Migration has also brought growth to a wide range of other faith traditions, adding real diversity to what is often described in media coverage as a single downward trend line for religion overall.
Age is a factor too. Younger Australians have consistently been more likely than older age groups to report no religious affiliation, a pattern the ABS has noted since at least the 2016 Census.
Filling in the form tonight
None of this changes the practical reality facing churches across the country, whatever their denomination. Fewer people are identifying as religious on official forms than a generation ago, and that trend has been consistent for decades. But as tonight’s households fill in their Census forms, the mission field has not disappeared so much as changed shape, from people who have rejected belief to people who no longer see a form’s tick box as the place to describe it.
