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Most overseas publications say 67% of Australians are Christian. Most Australian publications say it is 61%. Both figures are based on the 2011 Australian Population Census, but interpret the data differently.

Overseas scholars usually take the ‘missing data’, the people who have not responded to the question out of the equation. In other words, those people who do not answer the question are assumed to be ‘religious’ to the same extent as the rest of the population. Australian scholars report the missing data as one of the ‘responses’. On the other hand, a number of religious groups argue that the census under counts them. What do we know about those who do not respond to the question?

In 2011, more than 1.8 million Australians did not answer the question about religion on the census form. These people represent 8.6 per cent of the Australian population: a sizeable group. Indeed, there are sufficient numbers here to alter our understanding of the religious profile of Australia.

The question about religion is the one optional question on the census. Thus, people who do not wish to answer it may well choose not to do so. There are no penalties. Given that the optional nature of the question is stated on the form, it is surprising that so many people chose to answer the question.

The group which does not answer the religion question can be divided into two: (1) those who fail to answer most questions on the census and (2) those who chose not to answer the religion question but answered most other questions. The characteristics of these two groups are different and there are different reasons for their failure to answer. Hence, they should be considered separately.

1. People Who Failed to Answer Most Questions on the Census

While filling in the census is compulsory for all Australians, many people fail to answer all questions and each Census, some people do not complete a census form at all. The ABS, in its discussion of why people fail to complete a census form, notes:

There are a number of reasons why person non-response occurs in the Census. People may indicate a desire to mail back a Census form or to complete the form online but may forget to do so, or some may have left the dwelling before form collection, and some people may refuse to complete a Census form (ABS 2013).

The numbers of people not filling in a form are based on the local census collector’s count of people in the area and compared with the actual number of forms received and from a special survey conducted by the ABS called the ‘Census Post Enumeration Survey’ (PES). Overall, the number of people who failed to respond to the 2011 Census was 798,826 or 3.7 per cent of the population. The percentage of people failing to respond has fallen from past censuses due to different methods in collecting the data. Among the reasons why people are not counted are that they are travelling and difficult to contact, or there were insufficient census forms in the household, or they mistakenly thought that forms for young babies or elderly people should not be completed.

While special efforts are made, it has always been more difficult to obtain completed census forms from people living in remote and isolated places, including some Aboriginal people. The ABS calculated that there were close to 550,000 people living in the outback areas of Queensland, South Australia, Northern Territory and Western Australia at the time of the 2011 Census. Of these people, close to 10 per cent, or around 52,000 failed to complete a census form.

People who are living on ships or boats are not easily counted. Thus, it was estimated that there were more than 10,000 Australian residents on boats in the seas around Australia on the night of the 2011 Census, but close to 20 per cent of them failed to complete a census form.

It also is difficult to count people who live in high-rise and secure apartment buildings where the ability to access individual places of residence is limited (ABS 2007, p.7). This would be one factor in the relatively poor response in the inner-city areas. While the average ‘no response rate’ around Australia was 3.7 per cent, in the inner city areas of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Darwin, the no-response rate was close to 9 per cent, with more than 100,000 people not completing forms.

Some information is available about where people live who did not complete a census form. The proportion was highest in the Northern Territory with a 7.7 per cent ‘non-response rate’, and lowest in Tasmania: 2.3 per cent non-response rate, as shown in the table above.

In the Australian Bureau of Statistics census data that is made available to the public, those people who did not complete a form are included in the counts. Some characteristics such as age and gender are estimated or, to use the technical term, imputed from the characteristics of other people who live in similar residences in the same area, or estimated on the basis of the Census Post Enumeration Survey. For most other responses in the census form, these people are counted as ‘not stated’.

Hence, of the 1.8 million people who were counted as ‘not stating a religion’ in the census, approximately 800,000 did not complete a census form at all. These people did not explicitly decide not to answer the question about religion, but, for one reason or another, did not respond to the census at all.

It is reasonable to assume that many of these people would have identified with a particular religion or religious denomination if they had completed a form. It is likely that some would have identified with a particular religion or denomination if they had completed a form. Some of these people were Aboriginal, living in remote communities, living in the bush, or on walk-about. There are also communication challenges due to language and to the cultural activity of taking a census. Nevertheless, most Aboriginal people do identify with one religion or another, and just 24 per cent indicate that they have no religion, as in the Australian population as a whole.

It is probable that a few people refuse to respond to the census for ideological reasons. They believe that the State should not be interfering in this way in the lives of individuals. They are afraid of what the Government might do with the information gained about individuals from the census. Some of these people have religious reasons for this way of thinking. They believe that the Government is not of their religion and either has no right to request information from individuals or may misuse it to oppress people.

Given the fact that most of the people who failed to complete a census form did not do so to avoid completing the religion question, they should be truly treated as ‘missing’ and removed from calculations about religion. To put it in other terms, we can reasonably assume that, if these people had completed a census form, that more than 61 per cent of them would have identified with a Christian denomination, another 7 per cent with another religion, and 22 per cent with ‘no religion’. This would result in an additional 488,000 people added to the count of those identifying with a Christian denomination, bringing the total to 13,638,671, or 63.4 per cent of the total Australian population.

2. People Who Decide Not to Answer the Religion Question

Another 1 million people completed a census form, but did not answer the question about religion. Data tables from the Australian Bureau of Statistics do not distinguish these people from those who did not complete a census form. However, they are a different group of people and many of them would have had specific reasons for not answering the religion question.

We cannot exactly identify these people, but we can obtain some information about them. The ABS allows us to identify those people for whom their age has been imputed. Around 90 per cent of these people were people who did not complete a census form. Thus, by distinguishing those who were recorded as ‘not stating’ a religion into those for whom age is imputed and those for whom it is not, we can come close to distinguishing those who did not complete a census form and those who completed a form but did not answer the question about religion.

The group which did not answer the religion question but otherwise completed the census form made up about 4.8 per cent of the population in the 2011 Census. However, some age groups are more highly represented:

• 6.7% of those under 4 years of age
• 5.1% of those between 5 and 9 years of age
• 5.4% of those between 75 and 79 years of age
• 6.6% of those between 80 and 84 years of age
• 8.4% of those between 85 and 89 years of age
• 10.5% of those between 90 and 94 years of age
• 12.4% of those between 95 and 99 years of age,
• 14.1% of those aged 100 or older.

In other words, the proportions are higher among those under 10 years and over 75 years of age. It is likely that in most of these cases, someone other than the person themselves was filling in the census form and decided that it was inappropriate to identify the person with a particular religion. For example, some parents say that they want children to make up their own minds about religion, and thus, on the census form do not answer the question about religion for their young children.

The form may be filled in by a carer for some of the older people. It is likely that some of these older people would not be able to speak for themselves or be active in a religious group in any way, even if they had been in the past. Hence, the question of their religious identity is left blank. Together, these young children and these older people constitute around 250,000 of the one million people we are investigating. While it is likely that many of those parents who did not respond to the question for their children were not religious, and thus it would be inappropriate to impute a religion for their children, it is likely that many of the older people would have identified with a religion if they had been able to do so and would have done so earlier in their lives. We roughly estimate, then, from the numbers of older people, that it would be reasonable to impute a religious identity to approximately 126,000 of these people. Most would be Christian, as there are currently few members of other religious groups who are aged 80 years and older except for some Jews (Hughes et al. 2012).

Another possible reason for not answering the religion question is that people feel that religion is something personal and should not be something ‘registered’ in any way with the government. Some immigrants may feel this way because of personal experience of governments misusing information about religion, such as by oppressing particular religious groups. When we look at the place of birth of those who do not answer a question, we find some groups of people stand out including the following:

5.5% from Chinese Asia (including Mongolia);
6.5% from Central Asia (including Afghanistan and Iran);
5.5% from Western Europe
6.1% from New Zealand, and
5.3% from the United States.

It has been suggested that there may be some Christians from the Muslim countries in North Africa and the Middle East who would be afraid to put down their religion on the census form. However, the 2011 Census indicates that only 10,000 out of 300,000 people from these parts of the world who have not answered the religion question.

On the other hand, 2,000 out of 33,000 people from Central Asia along with 23,000 out of 425,000 from China did not complete the question. Some of these people may privately identify with a religion, but not wish the government to know, perhaps as a result of their experience of communist governments.

Some of those born in the United States may feel that it is not an appropriate piece of information to give to the government because of their commitment to a separation of ‘church and State’. For that reason a question on religion has not been included on censuses in the USA. It is quite possible, then, that privately, a number of these people from China, Central Asia and the United States identify with a religion. If one adds these people together, there may be 30,000 of them.

There are other religious people who may leave the question blank because they feel that their religion is not a matter of government concern. Some members of groups such as the Exclusive Brethren believe that information about one’s religion should not be registered with the government. The numbers of such people are unknown. We do know that 21,731 people identified themselves as Brethren, most of whom would be ‘Open Brethren’. It is possible that there are another 10,000 to 20,000 Exclusive Brethren who did not answer the question.

On the other hand, another 114,000 did complete the census form, but completed neither the information about birthplace nor about religion. It is likely that these people deliberately chose not to share both pieces of information, perhaps because it would identify them as illegal immigrants. Or perhaps they were concerned that such information could be shared with their homeland government which regarded their religious identification as illegal or unacceptable. 

Putting these figures together, we estimate that perhaps another 200,000 people may identify personally with a religion but either out of fear or ideology prefer not answer the question. It is also likely that some of these are Christian. It is also possible that some of these people, having entered what they perceive to be a Christian country from a Muslim country, are Muslim. There may also be Muslims and Buddhists from China who do not wish to identify their religion for the same reason as Christians from China. Some Iranian Baha’i may prefer not to identify their religion to the government.

Another reason why people may wish to leave this question blank is simply that they have never thought about religion or have no opinion about it. In 2002, the Security and Wellbeing Survey, conducted by Edith Cowan University, Deakin University and NCLS Research asked a range of questions about religion. It found that 16 per cent of the population thought there was ‘something beyond’ this life but were unsure what that might be. Nearly 80 per cent of that group identified with a religious group, but few of them were active in it (Kaldor. Hughes and Black 2010, p.51).

Another group of 27 per cent of the population were ‘uncertain about the beyond’. Many of them believed that there may be some sort of spirit or life-force, while others simply said they did not know what to think. Seventy-three per cent of them identified with a religious group, but only 3 per cent were actively involved.

Given the choice, it is likely that some people in these two groups would choose not to answer questions about religion. While many of these were not willing to affirm they had ‘no religion’, in practice, they were also not confident of religious beliefs or organisations. Some of these people would have chosen not to respond to the question on the census form. In analysis, we concluded:

While people who were ‘uncertain about the beyond’ had not necessarily rejected religious or spiritual beliefs altogether, such beliefs were not generally at the forefront of their attention. Perhaps because of the busyness of life, pressures of work, family, or making a living, or because they did not feel that these beliefs were very important, most were not usually involved in religious or spiritual practices (Kaldor, Hughes and Black 2010, pp.53-54).

This raises the question about what those people who identify with a particular religious group mean by it. Certainly there are many people among those who specifically identified with a Christian denomination who are not active in any way in a religious group, do not hold religious beliefs, and are not involved in personal religious practices.

Many people indicate identity with a particular religious group because of family heritage, or because they were raised in a particular group, or their children attend a school of a particular group. Hence, when one asks the question about religious identity in the form of ‘Do you have a religion? If so, what is it?’ The results are quite different from those obtained by the census. The question was asked this way in the Australian Survey of Social Attitudes (2009). Asked in this form, just 56 per cent of the Australian adult population said they did have a religion. Fifty-two per cent identified with a Christian denomination and 4 per cent identified with another religion.

Conclusion

Of the 1.8 million who did not answer the question about religion in the 2011 Census, we estimate that there may be 544,000 who might have identified with a particular religious group if they had completed the census form. There may be another 200,000 who do identify with a religion but took the option not to answer the question on the census form because they felt that it was not a matter that the government should know, or out of fear of how the information might be used. It is quite likely that some of those from overseas who did this were not Christian but Muslim. There are also a few other younger and older people who did not complete the census form themselves and might have identified with a religion if they had the opportunity or had the ability to understand the question. Hence, out of this group of 1.8 million, we might add another 870,000 to the list of those who identified with a religion. Of these, our estimate is that around 750,000 would identify as Christian and 120,000 would identify with another religion.

If we add these additional people to the numbers identifying as Christian in the 2011 Census, it makes a total of 14 million Christians in Australia: 65.2 per cent of the Australian population. It would also mean that there were approximately 1.67 million people associated with other religions in Australia, making 7.7 per cent of the population. Overall, then, 73 per cent of the total Australian population would identify with a religion leaving just 27 per cent as having no religion.

It must be stated again that this is an estimate of the proportion of Australians who did, or who probably would if they had to, choose a religious response to the question ‘What is your religion?’ This is not the proportion of Australians who are in any way active in a religion or hold to religious beliefs. Indeed, it is not the proportion who would identify with a religion when asked if they personally have a religion prior to being asked what is that religion, as has occurred in some surveys.

Overseas scholars who have identified the proportion of Christian in Australia as 67 per cent are almost certainly over-estimating the proportion. On the other hand, the figure commonly used by Australian scholars as 61 per cent is an under-estimation. 

Philip Hughes
Christian Research Association

References:

• Australian Bureau of Statistics (2013) ‘Non-response rates’- http://www.abs.gov.au/websitedbs/censushome.nsf/home/nonresponserates?opendocument&navpos=440 (Accessed January 2014)
• Hughes, P., M. Fraser and S. Reid (2012) Australia’s Religious Communities: Facts and Figures, Melbourne: Christian Research Association.
• Kaldor, Peter, Philip Hughes and Alan Black (2010) Spirit Matters: How Making Sense of Life Affects Wellbeing. Melbourne: Mosaic Press, 2010.
• Pew Research Centre, The Global Religious Landscape: A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World’s Major Religious Groups as of 2010, Washington: Pew Research Centre. (Pew-Templeton Global Religious Futures Project)

The Christian Research Association was formed in 1985 to provide up-to-date and reliable information about religious faith and church life in Australia. For more information on CRA go to: http://www.cra.org.au