Every Sunday morning in the 1970s, my parents dragged my brother and me to Mass. Which church depended entirely on how early they could get us out of bed and moving. If we were quick, it was Albion Park. If we were slow, and we were usually slow, it was the later Mass at Oak Flats.
It didn’t matter which. The church was always full. Most weeks there were people standing at the back, men in their good shirts, hats in hand, who had either arrived late or wanted to be first out the door to the pub. Children were shushed. Babies were jiggled. The collection plate went round, and everybody put something in it.
I was an altar boy. That wasn’t a choice so much as a family obligation. When your mother’s maiden name is Timbs, you don’t so much join the Catholic Church as get born into it, like a football club. I wore the cassock, rang the bells and tried not to set fire to anything with the candles. I mostly succeeded.
That was 50 years ago. Fast-forward to today, and those full churches feel like scenes from another country. In many ways, they are.
In the 1971 Census, 86 per cent of Australians said they were Christian. Catholics made up 27 per cent of the country and Anglicans 31 per cent. Just 6.7 per cent said they had no religion.
By the 2021 Census, fewer than half of us, 43.9 per cent, called ourselves Christian. It was the first time that had happened in our history. Anglicans had collapsed to under 10 per cent. Catholics had held on better, at 20 per cent, but were still well down. And the fastest-growing answer of all was “no religion”, ticked by 38.9 per cent of Australians. That’s almost six times the figure from my altar boy days.
Church attendance has fallen even further. In 1950, around 44 per cent of Australians went to church at least once a month. By 2016, it was about 16 per cent. Many of those full pews at Albion Park would be half empty now. Some parishes have merged, and some churches have been sold and turned into homes, cafés and wedding venues.
The 2026 Census was held in August, and its religion results come out next June. Many demographers expect “no religion” to overtake Christianity for the first time. If they’re right, it’ll be one of the biggest cultural shifts in our nation’s history, and it will have happened in a single lifetime. Mine.
But here’s the thing: Australia hasn’t simply lost its religion. It has gained several others.
In 1971, every religion other than Christianity added up to less than 1 per cent of the population. Today it’s about 10 per cent. There are now more than 800,000 Muslims in Australia, 3.2 per cent of the population. Hindus number almost 700,000, and Buddhists and Sikhs add hundreds of thousands more. The Australian Bureau of Statistics now lists 139 separate religious groups in its official classification, up from 107 in 1996.
Drive through the suburbs of Sydney or Melbourne today and you’ll pass mosques, Hindu temples, Sikh gurdwaras and Buddhist monasteries, as well as Catholic churches. Plenty of those churches are kept going by new arrivals from the Philippines, India, Vietnam and Africa. Some Sunday Masses in western Sydney would fill Albion Park twice over.
So it isn’t quite true to say Australia has become godless. It’s more accurate to say we’ve become a country where faith is a choice, not an inheritance.
It’s hard to explain to younger Australians just how much power the Catholic Church once had in this country.
For much of the 20th century, Catholics were largely Irish, working-class and loyal to the Labor Party. The Church and the Labor movement went hand in hand. Priests had opinions about elections and weren’t shy about sharing them. When Labor split in 1955 over the fight against communism, the influence of Catholic activists helped break the party apart. A breakaway Catholic-backed party, the Democratic Labor Party, then helped keep Labor out of federal government for the best part of two decades.
The Church fought for, and eventually won, government funding for its schools. That battle shaped politics through the 1960s and into the Whitlam era. Today, Catholic schools still educate around one in five Australian students.
But its political sway has faded dramatically. In 2017, the Catholic Church campaigned hard against same-sex marriage. The country voted yes by more than 60 per cent. Voluntary assisted dying is now legal in every state, despite strong opposition from church leaders.
And the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse shattered the trust of many Catholics, including many who had once been altar boys like me. For a lot of people of my generation, the decision to stop going to church wasn’t about losing faith in God. It was about losing faith in the institution.
That’s the question I keep coming back to. And I’m not sure the Census can answer it.
Ticking “no religion” on a form isn’t the same as not believing in anything. Researchers call it “believing without belonging”. Plenty of Australians who never set foot in a church still pray when someone they love is sick, still want a priest at a funeral, and still feel something in a quiet cathedral, even on holiday. Plenty of others call themselves “spiritual but not religious” and find their meaning in nature, family or community.
There’s a Brooks & Dunn song called Believe that captures this beautifully. It’s about an old man who, after a lifetime of loss, refuses to accept that a life simply ends with nothing beyond it. The lyric I love from that song goes like this … “I can’t believe it all ends in a slow ride in a hearse”. I think a lot of Australians feel the same way, even if they’d never say so out loud, and even if they haven’t been to Mass since their own wedding.
It matters because churches did more than hold services. They ran schools, hospitals, aged care homes and charities. They gave lonely people somewhere to be on a Sunday morning. They gave towns like Albion Park and Oak Flats a meeting place, a calendar and a sense of community. As congregations shrink, we have to ask who fills those gaps.
It also matters for my generation. Over-60s are now the most religious age group in Australia. For many of us, faith, or at least the habit of it, is part of who we are. Watching it fade can feel like watching a piece of our childhood disappear.
My mother would be horrified to know how few people go to Mass these days. My father would probably be secretly relieved not to have to get two sleepy boys out of bed.
As for me, I don’t make it to church every Sunday any more. But every now and again, when I walk past an old church with its doors open, I still find myself stepping inside. I stand at the back, the way those men used to, and I remember the bells, the candles and the crowded pews of a Sunday morning 50 years ago.
I’m not sure what that means. But I don’t think it means I’ve stopped believing.
Do you still go to church, or have you, like so many Australians, stopped going? Tell us in the comments.
Comments 0
Join the conversation. Comments are reviewed before they appear.
Be the first to comment.
Join the conversation
Tell us who you are to post a comment. We'll remember you next time.