The Australian Census is a critically important Australian project which provides essential and accurate data about the lives of Australians.

Yet in one area – religion – it is unreliable. Unreliable purely and simply because intense lobbying by religious groups has sabotaged plans to ask a Census question which would provide more accurate data on Australians and religion than previous Censuses.

Let’s be clear: the religion question being used in this year’s Census will be the question demanded by religious lobbyists, not the one the country needed.

A number of organisations – the Rationalist Society of Australia, Humanists Australia, National Secular Lobby, Humanists Victoria, the Secular Association of NSW, Australian Skeptics (Victoria Branch), the Secular Association of NSW and Recovering from Religion Australia – are supporting the campaign to change this misleading situation.

The group said: “Following overwhelming public support for change during a two-year consultation process, the Australian Bureau of Statistics had proposed making changes to address the leading nature of the question and deliver more accurate data.

“It wanted to change ‘What is the person’s religion?’ to ‘Does the person have a religion?’”

If you think about the two questions there is actually quite a significant difference – a difference caused by a common (and misleading) phenomenon known as agreement set response. In simple terms that means that the question presupposes a particular answer.

“But then religious lobbyists put their foot down and called for the Albanese government to intervene in the process”, the group said.

“In highly unusual circumstances, the ABS was not able to fully test its proposed new question in September 2024 and, as such, opted to revert to the old question.”

So basically, religious groups managed to persuade our Government to approve a question which inflates the number of Australians who follow a religion.

The originally proposed question required a simple yes or no response and then would have allowed someone who was religious to nominate their particular allegiance.

Despite the methodological problem many Australians were able to write in that they had no religion. Indeed, in the 2021 national census, 43.9% of Australians identified with Christianity and 38.9% declared ‘no religion’.

The World Data site, which analysed the 2021 Census data found that: “The statistics from the 2021 Census reveal a nation undergoing profound spiritual restructuring. The decline of Christianity by more than 1 million people represents not merely statistical change but a fundamental shift in how Australians relate to organized religion.

 

“This decrease occurred across nearly all age groups, with young adults aged 18-25 years experiencing the most dramatic departure from Christian identification.

“The trend suggests that younger Australians are increasingly rejecting the religious affiliations of their parents and grandparents, choosing instead to identify with no religion or exploring alternative spiritual paths outside traditional Christian frameworks.

“Simultaneously, the rise of no religion to 38.9% of the population marks a cultural milestone. Nearly 10 million Australians now explicitly state they have no religious affiliation, representing an increase of more than 2.8 million people since 2016. This growth indicates not just passive disengagement from religious institutions but active identification with secular values and non-religious worldviews.”

World Data says: “the phenomenon reflects broader societal changes including increased access to education, urbanization, and exposure to diverse philosophical perspectives that challenge traditional religious narratives.”

It is necessary to stress that some religious organisations – such as the Quakers and others – have a beneficial effect on society. The Salvation Army is perhaps Australia’s best example of a religious organisation which undertakes work few others would. Indeed, this author’s rationalism doesn’t preclude donations to the Salvos.

There are other examples too, but they need to be set against the exploitation in, for example, Irish and Australian homes for unmarried mothers.  As the revelations of cruelty and exploitation unfolded the Irish Cardinal, who dominated Irish politics for decades, finally left, with his mistress for South America to escape the backlash against him and the Irish church.

The current Pope – as befits a tough guy from Chicago – is a more powerful voice against Trump and others of similar ilk than the Australian government, for instance, is.

But it is the bloody history of religions we also need to recognise.

r/atheism, the web’s largest atheist organisation for data on religion and atheism provides some historical context of the role of religion in the world’s history and which demonstrates that over the centuries tens of thousands of people have been killed in the name of religion.

The group has prepared a list of religiously motivated wars and genocides and their death tolls. They included: The Crusades: 6,000,000; Thirty Years War: 11,500,000; French Wars of Religion: 4,000,000; Second Sudanese Civil War: 2,000,000; Lebanese Civil War: 250,000; Muslim Conquests of India: 80,000,000; Congolese Genocide (King Leopold II): 13,000,000; Armenian Genocide: 1,500,000;Rwandan Genocide: 800,000; Eighty Years’ War: 1,000,000; Nigerian Civil War: 1,000,000; Great Peasants’ Revolt: 250,000; First Sudanese Civil War: 1,000,000; Jewish Diaspora (Not Including the Holocaust): 1,000,000; ;The Holocaust (Jewish and Homosexual Deaths): 6,500,000; Islamic Terrorism Since 2000: 150,000; Iraq War: 500,000; US Western Expansion (Justified by “Manifest Destiny”):20,000,000; Atlantic Slave Trade (Justified by Christianity): 14,000,000; Aztec Human Sacrifice: 80,000;AIDS deaths in Africa largely due to opposition to condoms: 30,000,000; Spanish Inquisition: 5,000.

That makes a total of 195,035,000 deaths in the name of religion. Hardly a history to be celebrated.

Of course, while Australian religious groups cannot be held responsible for this list, it is a profoundly significant indication that the world’s religions have not all been about peace and love.

But, nevertheless, the current Australian situation is an indication of the role religious organisations play in lobbying to undermine the statistical integrity of our Census and inflate the number of religious Australians.

Declaration of interest: The author is a Rationalist Society of Australia member