AUSTRALIAN COUNCIL FOR THE DEFENCE OF
GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS
PRESS RELEASE 944
12 July 2022
THE CENSUS AND RELIGION:
STATE AID HAS PROVED BAD FOR RELIGION.
The DOGS have always argued that public funding of religious schools is not only bad for the democratic State. It is also very bad for religion. The recent census result prove their point.
The behaviour of religious schools in their quest for ever increasing billions of dollars of taxpayer funds have turned many people away, not necessarily from spirituality, but certainly from organised religion. The greed, over indulgence and hypocrisy of elite religious schools have turned citizens - including their own students - away, not from the basic spiritual tenets of Christianity, but certainly from its institutionalised churches. There was a reason our ancestors, after hundreds of years of bloody religious wars, placed separation of religion and the state in Section 116 of the Constitution.
On June 28 Matthew Knott and Angus Thomson, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, attracted more than 943 comments for their article,
Abandoning God: Christianity plummets as ‘non-religious’ surges in census
- Forty-four per cent of Australians identify as Christian, down from 61 per cent a decade ago.
- The share of people ticking the “no religion” box grew from 22 per cent in 2011 to 39 per cent in 2021.
- The number of people in Australia who identify as Hindu surged by 55 per cent over the past five years.
Australia has become strikingly more godless over the past decade, with the latest census data showing the proportion of self-identified Christians dropping below 50 per cent for the first time and a soaring number of people describing themselves as “non-religious”.
The first tranche of data from the 2021 census, released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics on Tuesday, shows that just 44 per cent of Australians now identify as Christian, down from 52 per cent five years earlier and 61 per cent in 2011.
When the first census was conducted in 1911, 96 per cent of Australians listed a form of Christianity as their religion.
The proportion of Australians identifying as Catholic declined from 23 to 20 per cent over the past five years while self-identified Anglicans dropped from 13 to 10 per cent.
By contrast, the share of Australians identifying as “non-religious” has surged.
Thirty-nine per cent of Australians now identify as non-religious, up from 30 per cent in 2016 and almost double the 22 per cent of Australians who ticked the “no religion” box a decade ago.
In the mid-1960s, less than 1 per cent of people in Australia identified as having no religion.
Based on current trends, non-believers could overtake Christians as the biggest religious bloc in Australia by the time the next census is conducted in 2026.
The move away from Christianity accelerated rapidly over the past decade after previously being in a steady long-term decline…….
The following was not untypical of the more than 943 COMMENTS
JF
No surprise there. With the appalling behaviour of some church people and the attempt to cover it up by churches, trust was destroyed. Then these same morally compromised people try to tell others how to lead their lives. Sorry you blew it.
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