The Aussies go godless

June 21, 2012 • 9:03 am

From The Age in Oz, courtesy of alert reader Marella, we find that the godless are now the second most numerous category of “belief” among Australians.  These data come from the 2011 census, showing that no-beliefers have passed Anglicans in numbers (Eric MacDonald will be pleased to hear that):

  • Catholics  5,439,268
  • No religion 4,796,787
  • Anglican 3,679,907
  • Uniting Church  1,065,795
  • Presbyterian and Reformed  599,515
  • Hindu  275,535

Almost 4.8 million people said they had no religion, up 29 per cent from 2006, but the number of people not answering the question dropped by 2 per cent. This suggested that more people were claiming a religious identity (including no religion), said Monash University sociology professor Gary Bouma.

The total Christian population is 13.2 million, or 61 per cent, down three percentage points. Catholics have dropped half a percentage point to 25.3 or 5.4 million, Anglicans are down 1.6 percentage points to 3.7 million, while the Uniting Church is down to 5 per cent, or 1.1 million people.

. . . ‘‘The rise in ‘no religion’ continues its historic trend, even in the face of an apparent small rise in claiming a religious identity. So polarisation is increasing,’’ Professor Bouma said.

In five of eight states and territories, no religion provides the largest group.  In Victoria and Queensland it is second, behind Catholics, and in NSW it is third, also behind Anglicans.

Good on ya, mates! But I’m still surprised at the hegemony of Catholicism in Australia. Never having been there (to my great regret), I didn’t know the Vatican held such sway.  For the next census, I hope to see the godless top the Catholics. It would take a switch of only 400,000 people.

63 thoughts on “The Aussies go godless”

  1. What is the “Uniting Church”? I don’t think we have that one here in the US.

        1. The Uniting Church is a combination of the previous 3 protestant denominations, Congregationalist, Methodist and Presbyterian. There are some dissenters who have stayed in a Presbyterian format, mostly as they don’t like the ordination of women.

          The Uniting Church tend to be liberal and highly accommodationist of science. If all religion was like them, there wouldn’t be a problem.

          I think our higher Catholicism is due to the immigrants from Europe and some from Sth America. We now have a Hindu population due to immigration from India, however, they are mostly cultural about their worship and beliefs.

    4. The Methodists and the Presbyterians got together to form the Uniting Church. It didn’t really work though because some of the Presbyterians refused to co-operate and stayed outside the fold, causing endless legal battles about who owned what, especially the very valuable private schools the Presbyterians owned.

  2. I have to wonder, though, how much “No religion” equates to atheist. Are people choosing that response not because they are nonreligious but simply because they don’t belong to a formal church? I’d also want to know whether the survey questions allowed “Atheist” as an option. I wouldn’t be so quick to crow without knowing those things.

    1. The growth of “No religion” is something to crow about even if it masks a variety of “spiritual but not religious” and similar folk. Any growth comes at the expense of religion. And I can see no reason that such changes aren’t good.

    2. I don’t think it’s that much of a problem that “no religion” could emcompass atheists, agnostics, apatheists, pantheists, panentheists, deists, or whatever. The main thing that is wrong with religion is not so much the part about belief in some kind of divine entity, but the idea that the entity has power and control and authority over what its followers do (and even worse, delegates that authority to *some of* its followers).

    3. We had quite a big campaign on Facebook and elsewhere asking people to be truthful in the census and not just put the religion they were brought up in if they no longer believed. How many of these people would be happy to label themselves atheist is impossible to say but I think it’s safe to say most of them aren’t deists. My guess would be that many of them would call themselves agnostics, that’s a popular word down here, less assertive than atheist but still irreligious.

    4. If you check the Australian Bureau of Statistics website you can see that the breakdown is

      7 NO RELIGION
      701 No Religion
      7010 No Religion, nfd
      7011 Agnosticism
      7012 Atheism
      7013 Humanism
      7014 Rationalism

      Michael

  3. “…So polarisation is increasing,’’ Professor Bouma said.

    I’m not sure that necessarily follows just from the numbers. At least, polarization to me has a connotation of antagonism. I suspect that most who ditch religion simply shrug and walk away from it, and don’t make an issue out of it unless confronted by a godbot. If instead, polarization is taken to mean that the numbers at opposite sides of the spectrum are increasing, then the statement is redundant.

  4. So does the Australian population suffer from a mental health epidemic of anomie and despair because more and more Aussies have abandoned belief in the gods?

    I have to laugh at all the stereotypes about atheists promoted by theologians and even by some secular philosophers who didn’t have populations of real atheists to observe and form generalizations about. These people have constructed a kind of fantasy atheist who apparently wakes up one morning and perversely decides to have a meaningless life from then on by disavowing belief in god. In the real world it just doesn’t work that way at all.

    These theologians and clergymen have also inadvertently created a kind of false advertising campaign for atheism by preaching that atheists indulge in “the works of the flesh,” specifically fornication. How many young men in christian homes hear this propaganda about atheists’ swinging sex lives from the pulpit, and decide to become atheists for that reason? Imagine their disappointment when these new atheists go to atheist conferences looking to cash in on the promise of godless sex, and discover that the atheist chicks won’t put out for them. Indeed these women have lately complained about sexual harassment from male atheists at these conferences. It just goes to show that religious people promote nonsensical beliefs about atheists even if they unintentionally make atheism sound desirable.

    4. What? No bevies of nymphomaniac cuties looking for free love? Damn, that’s a whole lifetime of disbelief wasted. Think I’ll have to try this muslim thingy, I heard something about 72 virgins…

  5. I’m still surprised at the hegemony of Catholicism in Australia. … I hope to see the godless top the Catholics.

    Thank the Irish. And smile at the irony of a real-life gay man personifying the myth that priests are virile straight men who battle their desire for beautiful women:

      1. Yep, them too. The Eastern Orthodox contingent is down to the Greeks. Melbourne is the second largest Greek city in the world after Athens!

  7. There are more Buddhists in Australia than Hindus and the growth of Bu’s is also more rapid, 418,749 Buddhists according to the 2006 census and had increased 70% since 1996. By contrast, only 276,000 Hindus in Australia by same census.

    Why the omission of Buddhists from this survey.

    Disclosure: I am a non-theist who practices Buddhism, though like Sam Harris I prefer to do so without labeling myself a Buddhist.
    See Harris’ essay “Killing the Buddha” at his website here
    http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/killing-the-buddha
    and/or see Stephen Batchelor’s book “Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist”
    or see the Secular Buddhist Association here http://secularbuddhism.org/tag/skeptical-buddhism/

  8. Almost 4.8 million people said they had no religion

    It’s a lie. Sun, beach, surf – that’s their religion. And they can be highly devoted.

    1. And beer and footy, don’t forget beer and footy! Sport is the real religion of Australia, any kind of sport (when the Japanese came to Melbourne to give a Sumo demonstration the whole week was sold out).

        1. Australian rules football is almost exactly like a game we played as kids.

          We called it “throw up”. You threw up the football, and the guy who caught it would run for one of the the driveways on either side of the yard. Everyone else’s job was to tackle the guy with the ball or run him into the lone tree in the yard.

          Once you tackled him (or the tree did), he threw up the ball.

          Fun times.

  9. “No Religion” not necessarily implies “godless”. To bad census usually don’t make a clear distinction. Still, I think it’s good news. Soon should be available the results of our own census here in Chile. Go Gondwana Go.

  10. Naturally in Australia the hack news was trumpeting the “more than 40% rise in Islam” despite the muslims being a pretty small minority.

  11. There was a bit of a campaign before the census, similar to the one in Britain but not as well organised, to urge atheists and agnostics and just lapsed folk who don’t follow any religion to put “no religion”. I had previously been in the habit of putting Jedi, or Frisbeetarian in the past but I was convinced that it was about time the numbers got counted right. It’s still probably an underestimation as people with no religion who were raised Catholic or Anglican or whatever will still habitually put their childhood/cultural religion.

  12. This is also a triumph for pushy, in-your-face aggressive New Atheist tactics over wishy-washy Kumbaya accommodationism.

    Thanks and congratulations to Jerry, Richard, PZ, Ophelia, Greta and all the others for putting in so much hard work over the years. We all appreciate it more than words can tell.

      1. Cricket is the national religion of Australia, but in the southern states there is a break-away cult that follows that horrible self-important game called “Aussie Rules”.

        Seriously though, even though our PM is an avowed atheist (and not a very good advertisement for one, to be honest), her cabinet is heavily populated with very Catholic lawyers/ex-union hacks. The opposition leader nearly went into the clergy and his party room is similarly filled with the religious. Dire.

  14. Just to gloat for a little while: the figures show a rise of over a million for No Religion in five years. That’s about

    200,000 people per year
    4,000 people per week
    600 people per day

    In other words, one Australian loses their religion every three minutes.

    Yes, I know about immigration and population growth and so on, but still, let’s just take a moment to enjoy it.

    2. “600 people per day

      In other words, one Australian loses their religion every three minutes.”

      But since they can only lose their religion while they’re awake (surely), that’s about one every 96 seconds.

  15. Cricket is the national religion of Australia, but in the southern states there is a break-away cult that follows that horrible self-important game called “Aussie Rules”.

    Seriously though, even though our PM is an avowed atheist (and not a very good advertisement for one, to be honest), her cabinet is heavily populated with very Catholic lawyers/ex-union hacks. The opposition leader nearly went into the clergy and his party room is similarly filled with the religious. Dire.

  16. As usual the Aussies are followers. In New Zealand it is 34.7 per cent in the 2006 Census up from 29.6 percent in 2001. No recent data as the 2011 census was posteponed when their office got munted in the Christchurch earthquake. And unlike the Aussies no one really gives a toss about the Catholic church here.

    1. How lovely for you, no George Pell to poison your breakfast! Must be heaven. 😉

    2. Perhaps all thos Kiwis migrating here account for most of the rise. 600 per day sounds about right. Haha

    3. Not only because the office in Christchurch got munted, but because the earthquake stuffed up the demographics – too many people living away from their usual homes and jobs for comparisons to be valid.

      I bet we’d have more with no religion if it had been held, though, nyah, nyah, nyah.

  17. Australian Catholicism, for the most part, is not much in line with the Vatican. Even among leading Catholics, apart from a few Vatican suckholes, there’s a very liberal bent.

    1. Does the name Pell not fill you with dread?
      The conservative backlash since vatican 2 is alive and flourishing here.
      The fact that “normal Australian catholics” think they are so detached from the vatican is scary.
      “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance”.

      1. Pell does, yes, but Pell isn’t even respected among other Catholic leaders. Just as I don’t think Peter Jensen holds much sway among Anglicans.

    1. Yeah! so much for our atheist Prime Minister!
      She believes whatever the pollsters tell her to believe.

      1. Pollsters, yes, and the right-wing back-room hacks that control the Labor party.

        Jules might be an atheist, but she’s a pandering, accommodating faitheist, which makes her effectively just as bad as a Bible-thumper like Tony Abbott or Bob “Gays don’t exist in my electorate” Katter.

    2. I too had moments of hope, and I still don’t understand how it doesn’t break our constitution.

  20. Looks like Catholics make up about 40% of Christians there. That’s not really holding sway, more being the largest minority interest group.

  21. And how many calling themselves Catholic actually give a fig about Catholicism. This is positive news

  22. It’s definitely changing here, it’s not that long ago you would never hear of people that didn’t believe in God. Just didn’t occur. Now it’s not nearly as much an issue.

    Let’s just hope (I won’t say “and pray”) those numbers continue to rise. How long until we can catch Iceland??

  24. While the general Australian population is losing it’s religion, the Federal politicians are happy to make up the shortfall.

    The Catholic arm of Labour party seems to have said very firmly to the PM, no to same sex marriage. While the evangelicals arm of the party have decided the School Chaplains(Missionaries) must still be funded.

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