By Afzal Chowdhary
When I sit down to fill in my first Australian Census in 2026, one question I will be watching closely is a familiar one. Back home in India, “What is your religion?” was never really a question – although it is asked in the census.
But religion looks different in Australia. The first option for religious affiliation on the census is “no religion”, before Catholic, Anglican, Islam, Hinduism, other options, and a free-text field.
It is a small design choice with a surprisingly long and, at times, politically loaded history.
The slow start – and a rapid shift
Australia has asked about religion in every census since 1911.
In that first census there was no “no religion” box at all. If you did not have a religion, you had to write it in yourself, in the margin.
Only about 0.4 percent of Australians, roughly 10,000 people in a young, overwhelmingly Christian society, recorded “no religion”, alongside another 14,000 who were recorded as “indefinite” — including agnostics and freethinkers – and 86,000 who refused to answer the question.
We do not know a great deal about who those 10,000 people were, apart from the fact they dared to write outside the lines on a government form.
They were likely members of Australia’s secular organisations, like the Sunday Free Discussion Society or the Victorian Association of Progressive Spiritualists, both established in Melbourne in the 1870s, and reflected across the country. Or maybe they identified as “rationalists” who argued against religion and for science.
By the 1960s, Europeans and North Americans were seeing unexpected changes in religious identity, Australia was not far behind. Australians became more diverse in their theology, and their ways of worshipping and the social norms that were associated with religiosity also shifted.
But people still said they were religious. For decades the number of people recording “no religion” on the census barely moved – it was still under 1 percent by the mid-1960s.
This changed in 1971, when the Australian Bureau of Statistics added a simple instruction to the form: if you had no religion, write “none”. This gave people explicit permission to say what was already true for many.
The effect was immediate. “No religion” jumped from under 1 percent to 6.7 percent of the population in a single census.
The White Australia Policy had been abolished, increasing the diversity of migrants – and with it, the diversity of religions. At the same time, the social and class status linked to Christianity in Australia was becoming less prevalent, and more Australians started to disassociate themselves away from the religion they had been raised in.
Losing our religion
From there, the number climbed steadily. More people migrated to Australia, more Australians turned away from the religions they were raised in, and more Australians were comfortable with saying they didn’t consider themselves religious.
In 1991, “no religion” was introduced as one of the checkbox options. It sat at the bottom of the list, and 12.9 percent of Australians selected it that year. The number of Australians describing themselves as having no religion was 16.6 percent by 1996, around 18.7 percent by 2006 and 22.3 percent by 2011.
By then, it was the second-largest individual category in the country, behind only Catholicism.
In 2016, “no religion” became the first option on the list, and it became the largest single category, representing just under 30 percent of the country.
By 2021 it climbed to 38.9 percent – overtaking every individual Christian domination, but lower than Christianity’s 43.9 percent overall. It was the first census where less than half of Australians described themselves as Christian.
It is easy to think of immigration as simply adding religious diversity to Australia. But the true picture is more nuanced.
Around one-quarter of people selecting “no religion” in 2021 were born overseas.
Australia’s growing secular population is not simply the result of Australian-born people moving away from religion. It is also because some immigrants arrive already identifying with no religion, and feel more comfortable expressing that identity after settling in Australia.
But some might feel fearful about recording their religion in the face of Islamophobia, Antisemitism or other forms of religious discrimination. Religious groups have been campaigning for their members to record their faith honestly – even if some people might otherwise not be tempted to. Of course, non-religious groups have been campaigning, too.
Members of the Indian community gather to see Modi in Melbourne.
I had half-joking conversation with immigrant friends and peers: suggesting that ticking “no religion” might be the quieter option, to not draw any more attention to an already-scrutinised identity.
Nobody can measure such an instinct showing up in the data; the ABS cannot see motive, and Australia’s census privacy protections are strict. Even if it happens only to a small extent, it would mean something different: not people feeling free to say they have no religion, but some choosing it to avoid being noticed.
That is the story I will be thinking about when I finally tick my own box.
Afzal Azeem Chowdhary is a Lecturer, Department of Computer Science, Swinburne University of Technology. This article was first published by The Conversation
