faith traffic is not one way in Australia – while many lose their faith others find new life according to a close analysis of census data by the McCrindle research company. Their report, “An Undercurrent of faith” reveals that, in the words of Grant Dusting, McCrindle’s strategy director, “Despite a trend of overall decline in Christian affiliation in Australia, there has been a steady stream of people moving towards Christian faith over the last two decades, and this has occurred in a time when Christianity has experienced sustained negative publicity and social commentary.” Dusting was one of a panel presenting the figures at a recent webinar.
McCrindle was able to use a dataset from the Australian Bureau of Statistics that tracks the numbers moving into and out of faith between each five yearly census.
The story that most Australians know from the census about religion is the continual decline in the proportion of Christians in Australia from 61% in 2011 down to to 44% in 2021.
“But once we look underneath these headline figures, we find that there are still more than 784,000 Australians who change from no religion to Christian in the most recent census, and that’s the equivalent of one in 10 non-religious Australians moving from no religion in 2016 to Christian in 2021,” according to Shannon Wherrett, senior researcher at McCrindle. “And that number has actually been relatively steady over time. Here you can see between 2006 and 2011, there were 880,000 people who move from no religion to Christianity, and this is at 784,000 in the most recent census.”
As Wherrett put it, the people coming to faith may not be the people you expected. “One of the largest groups of Australians moving towards Christianity is older Australians. Between 2016 and 2021, almost 200,000 [older] Australians move from no religion to Christianity…”
“While the overall proportion of Australians age 55 plus has increased by three percentage points over the last 10 years probably as a result of the ageing population, the proportion of Christian converts in this age group has increased by 11 percentage points.”
Mark McCrindle explained that one factor behind young people as the group most likely to be leaving Christianity in the census dat was that parents will have spoken for them in earlier census. “If you look at the young people, the 15 to 24 year olds, 36% of those who at the start of that reference year said ‘Christianity’ were ticking ‘no religion’ by the end of that five year period. That’s a massive shift away from Christianity to no religion as is evident. You can see that it’s historically the case. It’s roughly at twice the rate as the general population, and that is because we are talking here about the decisive decade, those from 15 to 24 years of age that are moving from dependents as teenagers in the household to independence as young adults.
But Mark McCrindle saw hope in the religious practice of young people, who if they identify as christian are more likely to go to church. “Of all of those in Australia who tick Christianity in that census form, that 44%, most of them don’t go to church. You can see with the baby boomers just one in four of them who tick Christianity will go to church. You see, this is historically representative of ‘cultural Christianity.’ … The younger people, those in their thirties, those in their twenties: more than two thirds of them who tick the box turn up to church regularly.”
“More than 85,000 young people in this age group between 2016 and 2021 moved from no religion to Christianity.
“If we just take the 2016 to 2021 data, you had 8% of all of the young people who chose no religion five years earlier have most recently chosen Christianity. You see that decade-by-decade there are many thousands, tens of thousands of young people ticking that Christianity box, and as you just saw, that most likely means they’re actively involved in that faith.”