The Unnoticed Resurgence of Faith

The Australian Census Commission recently decided to drop the list of boxes for identifying your religion, to be replaced with the question, “Are you religious? Tick this box for ‘No’.” There is no box for “Yes”, just a blank space should people feel like writing something.

Timothy Costelloe, Archbishop of Perth and President of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, responded that more precise information was “critical” for national planning, in his case particularly for members of the Eastern Catholic communities—Maronite, Melkite, Ukrainian, Chaldean, Syro-Malobar and Syrian. “The Census has been, and must continue to be, a comprehensive and accurate tool for supporting services and activities provided by religious groups and government.”

The goal of the change would appear to be to undermine any realistic measurement of faith. The decision appears to continue a concerted effort by the “progressive left” to declare faith obsolete and irrelevant to government decision-making. Consider this 2021 “explanatory” sentence by the Census Commission about the purpose of gathering information:

Census religion data shows a characteristic of Australia that has changed significantly over the past two decades. Knowing about the religious affiliation across the population supports local planning for facilities, goods and services for Australians who identify as religious and helps them to live according to their beliefs.

Apparently the Census wonks have changed their minds. This comes while several federal ministers in Muslim-dominated seats are doing backward cartwheels to pretend anti-Semitism is not a live issue in Australia. They may not believe in faith, but apparently faith believes in them.

Which raises the question: How much of this progressive left’s fantasy viewpoint is embedded in the modelling that those elites present to government policy-makers? Do the policy wonks have any concept of the majority perspectives on not just faith, but on such things as immigration, inflation, housing, nuclear power and wokeism?

The clear assumption by many politicians, public servants, and journalists, is that Australia is inevitably going down the path of “no faith”.

Like most shibboleths of the progressive elites, this assumption appears so incontrovertible to them that no evidence to the contrary is even worth considering. But the logic of such a belief is dubious. Put simply, the religious have children—lots of children, particularly the more recent immigrant groups. It’s the non-religious who don’t have many, or even any, children.

Demographics, and all future planning, is about who has children. The fact that the Census Commission imagines it is unimportant is mind-bogglingly incompetent. I pointed this out at the recent Funeral Industry Expo “Leadership Forum” on the Gold Coast, where the guest “demographer” trotted out the “inevitable decline of faith”, based on the common interpretation of the 2021 Census data. I was just one of several funeral directors serving immigration hotspots in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne who laughed out loud.

The reasons for thinking this “inevitable decline” argument is dubious are varied—starting with the limited viewpoint of those who make it. The “experts” of the chattering classes seem to specialise in simplistic statements based on assumptions they haven’t bothered to analyse. Such as “renewables are cheaper” despite all international evidence proving the opposite; or, “the rise of China is inevitable”, when anyone can see that demographically China is going to get old before it gets rich.

Similarly, the chattering classes often just look at the demographic decline of Christianity in the West. They fail to note the explosive expansion of Christianity in Africa and large parts of Asia—including China—which makes Christianity in fact the fastest-growing religion in the world.

Speaking as a person responsible for arranging hundreds of funerals every year (and therefore responsible for collecting and submitting the information to the Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages in Victoria), my own funeral company in Melbourne has a statistical sample of several thousand “voluntary” responses over the last decade. That “voluntary” part always makes this the most interesting question for my funeral arrangers to phrase. We actually practise the way to ask.

Me: “Did she specify any religion on the census?”

Family: “I don’t think so. She was raised a Catholic/Anglican/Methodist/etc, but hasn’t attended church for many years.”

Me: “What about the funeral service itself, will we need to include Bible readings or the Lord’s Prayer for the comfort of some older relatives or other attendees? Would that have annoyed her?”

Family: “Oh, she’d want proper Catholic prayers, particularly at the graveside. We just don’t need a full Mass. Can we just do prayers at the end of the service at the chapel? Can you get us a priest who would be willing to come and do that? It’d be important to her that the grave be blessed properly …”

Or sometimes more directly:

Family: “He was Orthodox, and we’ll do the service at Holy Protection Cathedral where he and all the children were married, and where all the grandchildren were baptised. But being a refugee from communist states, he never volunteered anything on any government forms. We couldn’t even get him to sign your pre-arrangement documents. We had to fill them out behind his back. Just leave it blank.”

Should it surprise anyone to know that Christians from Egypt or Sudan, or Sikhs or Jains from India, or anyone from a communist state (like China), might prevaricate over answering this voluntary question?

We have certainly seen a steady increase in people just saying “no religion” (or even “Hell no, he’d get out of the coffin and complain”). But we have actually seen far more increase in, “She wasn’t a particular religious denomination any more, but she defined herself as spiritual, and we want to acknowledge that. During the service please invite those who want to, to pray.”

In the 2021 Census, 38.9 per cent of Australia’s population reported having no religion, an increase from 30.1 per cent in 2016 and 22.3 per cent in 2011. Christianity is the most common religion in Australia, with 43.9 per cent identifying as Christian, down from 52.1 per cent in 2016 and 61.1 per cent in 2011.

Given that the same Census tells us that half our population is first or second generation arrivals, and that over recent decades our immigration groups have changed from 90 per cent European (from mostly Christian areas), to an ever increasing proportion of people from nationalities dominated by Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Shinto, Shia—in fact everything from Animism to Zoroastrianism—that change in the percentage of Christians in the population is pretty logical. Even before you consider the effects of “voluntary” reporting.

It is true that there is a significant decline in “people of faith” amongst the policy wonk classes, most of them descended from immigrants from Western Europe, or perhaps from post-war immigrants from Eastern Europe. People whose families arrived when integration into Australian society was still publicly discussed as a positive goal, rather than in current fashion as an oppressive evil.

Most of the chattering class believe society as a whole is becoming less religious, and many also believe that is a good thing. The decline part of that viewpoint is undoubtedly true—if your viewpoint is limited to the denominations of the European diaspora, the Anglican, Catholic, Protestant, perhaps even Orthodox or Jewish backgrounds. But that viewpoint is very limited—insular might be the right word.

Not long ago, a funeral director in Bairnsdale was less than impressed when asked by a state government official if his team could help out daily in Warrnambool. If you just laughed here, you probably studied geography at primary school in the 1970s or earlier; if you’re younger and had to calculate driving distances, then Siri is your friend; if you just wondered why it would matter, then you would apparently fit right into a current Victorian government planning team.

My organisation’s experience of running funerals across Melbourne includes your average inner and middle suburbs funeral service in an Anglican or Catholic or Orthodox church with a congregation of perhaps fifty to sixty, with an average age of sixty-five, and with very few children present. Presumably these are the only religious services a senior public servant—or academic, or journalist—is ever likely to see.

But while we spend some weekdays doing such services, that’s not the whole story. We also spend other weekdays, and most weekends, doing services in the migrant suburbs. We do Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Chinese or Vietnamese or African Christian, Charismatic, Mormon, Muslim, and so on. These services have a typical congregation of 250 or 300, with an average age of thirty-five, with children everywhere. If you go to these services, then you are aware there is something going on “out there”.

It is certainly true that the older European-centred denominations in the remnant WASP suburbs are declining. That might be the real lesson to take from the woke suburbs that have started going to Teal candidates.

Take the federal seat of Kooyong. My wife and I ran a music studio for young children in Glenferrie Road, Hawthorn—dead centre of Kooyong—from the late 1990s to the early 2010s. Amongst our many parent-and-baby groups we had such Australian firsts as: the first group with all gay parents; the first group with all in-vitro children; and the first group where all the little girls were adopted from the same orphanage in China. I probably don’t need to tell you the economic or education levels of the people involved here. Let’s just say my Ford Falcon was by far the least glamorous vehicle in the carpark.

It was also noteworthy that if a mother in her early twenties did turn up, she was usually—despite our best efforts—quite intimidated by the high-power professional thirty-something medical specialists, law partners and financial controllers in her mothers’ group.

Kooyong used to be a “blue ribbon Liberal” seat in the 1950s, or even 1980s, when it was a prime location for old-style bank managers, GP’s, and small-business owners. Now it’s a location for a different group, with different priorities. The ex-minister who called modern Kooyong the “sandal wearing mung bean crowd” was slightly exaggerating, but there are few suburbs that have adapted to the work-from-home option with more ease.

Our music studio was in the church hall complex at All Saints Kooyong, a traditional Anglican parish with an elderly and declining congregation, lucky to get thirty or forty to the Sunday morning services. The vestry—average age seventy-something—refused to even consider a Sunday School to attract younger families—too hard, despite 200-plus children walking into the church hall every week for music classes! A perfect confirmation of the elite viewpoint on declining faith.

When the parish was on its last legs, a new priest from a less traditional ethnic group was appointed. All Saints Kooyong still has a Sunday morning congregation of about thirty or forty old-school Anglicans. Plus a Saturday night congregation of dozens of Pakistani Christians of various denominations. Plus a Sunday afternoon congregation of about 120 or so Indonesian Christians, mostly young families, with a rock band for the main services. The church went from the “small and declining” category to the “fastest growing” category of Anglican churches, almost overnight.

Walk through any older suburb and see which church signs now say “9.30am: traditional service; 11 am: Cantonese/Spanish/Indonesian …”

When the Anglican church of St Philip’s and the Catholic church of St Joseph’s, both in Collingwood, burned down about thirty years ago, both dioceses thought they would never need to re-build. (The Anglicans used the insurance payout from St Philip’s to build in a new “high need” suburb.) Both dioceses have had their hand forced since. Both churches now have shiny new premises, packed with families from the nearby housing commission flats—the Catholics largely with Asian or South American immigrants, the Anglicans with African and Pacific Islander immigrants. These are congregations largely of young adults, with many many children … But such groups are hardly on the radar of the academics and public servants of neighbouring North Fitzroy, who now rarely even ride past to go to work. Certainly not on teeming Sunday mornings, when they are busy competing for tables at their favourite cafes.

Are the latte set so inward looking as to have missed these demographic ripples entirely? Do they imagine that these people can simply be edited out of planning for their idealised society?

Consider the political parties. The ALP’s declining voting base in the inner suburbs is definitely older than the Greens’ growing one. But the Greens appear to rely on twenty- or thirty-something university-educated scions of the old European diaspora, people who comfortably accept woke political positions because of their own life position of, well, comfort. Have the anti-religious elements of the ALP and the Greens got any plans to meet the wave of primary and secondary school-age immigrants from the housing commission towers that pack St Joseph’s each weekend?

Children of immigrants from housing commission flats may have been “left wing” voters back in the days when the ALP at least pretended it advocated for the “working class”, and pursued the migrant vote: but now they may be more likely to become “conservative” (whatever that means these days) if their refugee parents feel persecuted by the activists preaching about woke causes. After all it’s not the affluent academics and civil servants and journalists of Northcote who suffer from increased living costs from woke causes. It’s the children of immigrants in Collingwood housing commission towers who have fled corrupt, dictatorial, centralised states, with incompetent economic management. Speaking of Victoria …

Other religions are growing but continue to make up a small proportion of the population. Hinduism has grown by 55.3 per cent to 684,002 people, or 2.7 per cent of the population. Islam has grown to 813,392 people, which is 3.2 per cent of the Australian population.

These small percentages can add up pretty fast when there are scores of non-Christian religious denominations to share around. Note that these “proportions” of the population are only those whose background makes them willing to volunteer information that, in the countries they left, might have been best left hidden.

Still, the religiously active are likely to remain a relatively small voting group in the inner suburbs where the Greens and Teals now rake in the votes. Indeed it is the goal, and often the need, of housing commission families with several children to be able to escape their two-bedroom housing commission flats for a nice three-or-more-bedroom brick veneer in Sunshine or Thomastown or Dandenong, the moment they can.

The real challenge to those who believe in “inevitable loss of faith” is actually in the outer suburbs—again, mostly in places the latte set rarely venture. Menzies’s “forgotten people” may have lived in Kew, or even Howard’s “aspirational battlers” in Ringwood, but the slow and steady increase in the Coalition vote in immigrant-dominated outer suburbs like Clarinda or Truganina is also an ethnic movement, and therefore also a growth of the significance of religious groupings.

Anybody who has driven into Melbourne from the north, or from the west, in the last few years would have been hard put to ignore the vast new mosques sprouting along the major roads. Anyone who has driven in from the south-east surely can’t have failed to notice the huge convention-centre-style churches along the roads—with the Sikh temple next to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and the Chinese Christian church, with the Eastern (Middle Eastern) Orthodox and the Pentecostal churches on the other side. Each with 200 or 300 parking spaces! Surely some of the chattering class must notice such large complexes as they commute to their holiday homes in Blairgowrie and Daylesford?

Immigrant communities are far more faith-based than ethnic-based. We know that from our early settlement, when Irish Catholics had more political interests in common with English or Scottish—or Polish or Italian—Catholics, than with Irish, English or Scottish Protestants. Ethnic groups cling to their religious communities for comfort and support. This is apparently a human constant, and holds if you are an Indian Catholic in Protestant Fiji, an Indian Hindu in Muslim Malaysia, or an Indian Muslim in woke Birmingham.

It is confounding to read endless government documents that talk about immigrants from one country as if they can be classified as one interest group. Fijian or Lebanese or Yugoslavian immigrants are not cohesive groups. There is not just a divide between “First Nations” Fijian Protestants and “immigrant community” Chinese-Fijian Catholics and Indian-Fijian Hindus, but a history of conflict almost as violent as the “Troubles” of Ireland.

Nor can you assume, as many reports seem to, that ethnic Chinese immigrants are culturally cohesive when they come from different parts of the world. If Fijian-Chinese are mainly Catholics, and Malaysian-Chinese often Anglican, then Chinese immigrants from actual China are just as likely to be Presbyterian as they are to be Buddhist. Race is the least important feature of the backgrounds, cultural experiences, or immigration experiences of these quite distinct social groups. Go to the church funeral of any young immigrant who has died, and you will see several hundred of the relevant religious community turning out, and dozens, if not scores, helping to prepare lunch boxes and water bottles for distribution, in a remarkable show of community solidarity defined by “faith”.

So the Australian academics and civil servants who are supposedly analysing the census to assist future planning, either don’t recognise the size and strength of our religious communities, or simply assume they will fade away quickly, as of little importance to modern society. It probably doesn’t seem important to a British-background academic, or a third-generation Italian or Greek, who has grown up in a comfortable, indeed privileged lifestyle, with only a few stories of their grandparents’ hard graft to give them context. More recent refugees from Burma, Yugoslavia and Lebanon may not enjoy the same comfort levels.

The truth is that the desire to cling to your community is lessened if you are secure, have real opportunities, and face few challenges. It is more likely to become entrenched, or even embittered, if your community feels it is struggling for acceptance.

That is what happened for Catholics in the nineteenth century, and a lot of older Catholics still have chips on their shoulders as a consequence. One of my funeral crews found and extinguished a fire bomb at a Melbourne Macedonian Orthodox church during the Balkan ethnic tensions of the 1990s. Even the well established Jewish communities have recently rediscovered that scratching the surface of the “progressive Left” often reveals vicious anti-Semitism.

If the Left’s continuing campaign to divide people by race and culture continues—and there is no indication that the failure of the recent referendum to install our own version of apartheid in the Constitution has dampened their desire to push ahead with “treaties”—then that will only reinforce the tendency of people to stick to their communities. After all, there is money in making a case for your particularly sub-set, whatever that may be—and the more you can justify feeling “excluded” or “persecuted”, the more money you can ask for.

What is difficult to fathom is how the political parties most intent on dividing people for votes, don’t seem to understand that they are actually stimulating the religious divisions and conflicts they fondly imagine we are all leaving behind. How can a candidate promise to be a better representative for such and such an immigrant community, while denying that the main feature that makes that group a community is their religious identity? If a candidate imagines he or she can speak for the Indian diaspora, without recognising that the Hindu, Muslim, Sikh and Jain communities in that diaspora have just as serious divisions as the Catholics and Protestants from the UK or Germany, or Orthodox and Muslims from former Yugoslavia, then they really don’t understand basic human behaviour—or belief. Human social groups are fundamentally religious in concept.

The chattering class can avoid being “of faith” (although its irrational embrace of its own woke orthodoxies resembles religious fanaticism), mainly because it is a class, not an ethnic or religious group. Safe, secure, multi-generational opportunity, leading to increasing living standards on the back of often taxpayer-funded cushy jobs, allows you to luxuriate in a community of idealism—a community just as distinct and almost as easily identifiable as that of the Sikh immigrants who transport them around in Ubers. But it is obviously a community of the privileged.

If you divide immigrants by community, it is not usually—with the possible exception of some economic refugees from Hong Kong or South Africa—a community of the “privileged”. Usually it is a group of poor, definitely not “secure” ethnic groups, in many cases refugees fleeing persecution or even genocide. They identify and support each other primarily through their religious communities.

So is there a problem with the woke classes assuming the Census results are actually going where they want them to go, when they’re probably not?

Their dismissal of other viewpoints, and their pursuit of “them and us” politics, will inevitably strengthen the communities that feel persecuted by them. Woke policies promote division by race, ethnic groups, social groups and religious groups. These policies will push such groups to become more cohesive, rather than less. If integration is a dirty word to the woke, then the unavoidable solution is division. Take a guess if the result is going to increase religious tribal affiliation or undermine it.

And we return to the original point, demographics. Whatever the chattering classes think about the inevitability of a decline in people “of faith”, the religious have many more children than the non-religious. Want to think that through a bit?

Nigel Davies paid his way through university working in the funeral industry before taking up a teaching career. Back in the funeral industry, and President of the National Funeral Directors Association, he saw in his numerous government consultant roles during COVID the unreality of much federal and state planning.