Still continuing

The decline in religion is something that interests me greatly, as anyone who reads this blog can attest. I originally wrote about in in 2019, with an essay on the decline of religion in the Anglophone world, wherein I tracked the proportion of the population who, according to the census, had no religious affiliation. In 1966, only 0.8% of the population reportedly had no religious affiliation whereas, at the time the last census for which data was available (i.e. that of 2016), indicated that 30.1% of the population had no religious affiliation¹.

A subsequent hunt around for other available data, found that there were sources other than the census which included religiosity in their surveys. They included the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey. This is an annual survey which began in 2001. At the time the most recent data available, although published in 2020, was from 2018. It indicated the decline in religion was continuing, with about 40% of those in the 17,000 households surveyed, claiming they had no religion².

At the same time, I stumbled across that HILDA survey, I found the results of a Roy Morgan survey, which was based on responses from about 17,000 people. These results were obtained in 2020, so the results were more recent than the HILDA survey. The Roy Morgan survey indicated that those with no religious affiliation comprised 45.5% of the population².

In June 2022, I had a crack at the topic again when the results of the 2021 census were released. This census gave the proportion of the population with no religious affiliation as being 38.9%. At the time, I wondered why there was a disparity between the census and the previous HILDA and Roy Morgan surveys where the non-religious proportion was higher. At the time of the release of the census figures, the Rationalist Society of Australia suggested that the figures of those with a religious affiliation were inflated³.

In 2021, the National Secular Lobby (NSL) released the results of two polls run during July of that year which attempted to analyse the census’ measurement of religiosity in Australia. They suggested that the census question was a leading one and it gave an inflated religious affiliation result. So, in their polls, they asked two questions, one reproducing the census question, and the other with a non-leading version. The result they obtained from the leading question was (at 41%) roughly in line with the census result of 38.9%. The non-leading alternative question gave a No Religion proportion of 52%, considerably more than the census result³.

A new HILDA report came out in 2024, based on data obtained in 2022. This indicated that the downward trend in religious affiliation was continuing. Among respondents, 39.4% of women over 15 years of age had no religious affiliation, while for men it was 46.3%. Given that there are 100 women for every 99 men in the population, the proportion of the population with no religious affiliation is 42.6%. This is an increase of 2.6% from the previous HILDA report⁴. At the time of writing no other surveys are available.

The main reasons for the decline over the years seem to be concerned with improvements in education, child and other sexual abuse within assorted churches, and the general discrimination by religions against women⁵.

What will happen from here? I suspect religious affiliation will continue to decline as the appalling current methods of the religious to halt this decline become more widely known. These include taking over political parties (e.g. the Australian Liberal Party⁶) and what can be called ‘the Trump effect’ where many of the religious have thrown their lot in with oligarchs, fascists and the weirdos behind the Trump Project 2025. These religious nutters have jettisoned any semblance of following the supposed teachings of Jesus. Their attitude to the teachings of Jesus is to state they are too “weak” and too “liberal” (sensu Americana) and that “they don’t work any more”⁷.

This perception of the venality of the religious is exacerbated by their figurehead Trump and his cronies attempting to dismantle US democracy. This clearly demonstrates that David Frum was right when he said: “When conservatives become convinced they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism, they will reject democracy”. The religious are on this bandwagon with Trump and they will suffer for it.

Sources

1. https://blotreport.com/2019/07/29/decline-of-religion-in-the-anglophone-world/
2. https://blotreport.com/2021/11/15/still-trending-upwards/
3. https://blotreport.com/2022/06/28/and-so-it-continues/
4. https://melbourneinstitute.unimelb.edu.au/hilda/publications/hilda-statistical-reports
5. https://about.csu.edu.au/community/accc/about/latest-news-assets/2023/is-australia-losing-religion-the-state-of-the-church#:~:text=There%20are%20various%20and%20interrelated,and%20issues%20of%20sexual%20ethics.
6. https://blotreport.com/2019/01/15/demise-of-the-liberals-under-way-in-wa/
7. https://www.newsweek.com/evangelicals-rejecting-jesus-teachings-liberal-talking-points-pastor-1818706