Is labelling yourself in any of the religious categories in the census only for the truly devout? How Christian do you have to be to label yourself as “Christian” in the census?
The only optional question in the census simply asks “What is the person’s religion?” This annoys the devoutly atheistic people at the Humanist Society, who say it assumes people do have a religion.
So the Humanists have felt the need to campaign to attack that alleged assumption. Part of their Census 2026: Not religious? Mark ‘No religion’ campaign is a quiz, with the answers seeking to show that saying you have a religion is only for those who are most devout – presumably Christians in church each week, Muslims who pray five times a day and Jews who won’t press the lift button on the sabbath.
But that’s not quite what the census thinks it is asking, says Mark McCrindle, a social researcher whose veins would bleed survey forms. “Even on the census website from the Bureau of Statistics, it says that your religious affiliation may not match your current belief or practice,” McCrindle told Dominic Steele on The Pastor’s Heart podcast. “So it’s looking at history, heritage, connection, family, upbringing, or maybe someone just has a loose connection with the Christian faith or any faith; that’s what they’re trying to record. It follows the previous question of cultural affiliation, and in the same way, that’s a broad measure.”
Bishop Michael Stead from the Sydney Anglicans experimented with the Humanists’ quiz, testing it by assuming different levels of devoutness. “I think this is a very skewed survey,” he told the Pastor’s Heart. “I did it a couple of times using real people that I know, but kind of imagining how they might answer it. The first one was people who attend church, but they’re semi-regular. They’re kind of a bit loose with the official lines of the Anglican church, but undoubtedly Anglican. I filled it in, and I was encouraged to tick the spiritual but not religious box. And then I did it again with somebody who’s, I’d say, kind of drifted away from that, grown up as an Anglican, still comes to church occasionally and feels a bit guilty about the fact that they don’t come more regularly. And in that case, it came up and said, tick the no religion box, that you are kind of culturally Christian, but not actually a practising Christian.”
This writer’s experience of writing about religion is that there is a vast hinterland of people who are Christians but avoid church, or come rarely. There are people who came to church, maybe as children, but have not “clicked” with a church, but hold to what they learned. Maybe some of the SRE students I have taught for the last two decades fit that category – which would indicate that our God is indeed merciful.
A word about denominations and the census
While we might have the doctrines of Chrisianity clear in our own heads, there’s fuzziness when it comes to actual people. Churches may not be comfortable with that; many want clear boundaries of who is in and who is out.
But the census will simply measure people’s answers to the question “What is the person’s religion?” And perhaps the best answer for believers is simply “Christian.”
The denominational census answers are efficient at capturing nominals, rather than who goes to church. The best example of this is Pentecostals not making the top ten religions, which are listed as options on the census form. But after Catholics, Pentecostals are the second group for church attendance.
So the census is not a great place to measure the relative strength of a denomination. We should wait and see if the habit of using census figures to make claims about the strength of a denomination rather than memory persists.