Christians and the Australian Census
Is the census becoming a partisan political and ideological tool?
On Tuesday August 11 Australians will have a mandatory census to fill out. Generally speaking, these can be helpful for governments to determine policy directions, expenditure allocation, and so on. But they can be misleading, or used as a political tool by various groups.
Lies, damned lies, and statistics
A big problem lies with the religious section. Although it is optional, most Australians fill it in. The list itself is quite revealing, with “no religion” at the very top. That can give it an unfair advantage. Why not just offer an alphabetical listing? And as I have stated in previous articles on this, one can be quite spiritual yet belong to no formal religious group. So to assume that all these people are gung-ho atheists is quite misleading.
And the ‘no religion’ category is misleading for another reason. Some Christians insist that their faith is not a religion, but a personal relationship with God through Christ. Sure, if we define religion in a quite narrow sense of mankind trying to work his way up to God, then yes, biblical Christianity is not a religion. But in the broader sense of the term, it most certainly is a religion.
And to simply offer a shopping list of the top 10, the ABS is already putting a spin on things. And even church or denominational membership does not offer an accurate picture, with many folks attending churches but not being an official member.
Moreover, Jews are left off the list, although there are well more than 100,000 of them living in Australia. But Islam of course is on the list. Many have noted the problems here. For example, Lyle Shelton of Family First said this:
This year’s census will reveal one million Muslims in Australia for the first time. Yet the number of Christians will be suppressed because only some denominations are given a tick box. If someone wants to identify as Christian, they must tick “other” then write CHRISTIAN beside. This is a barrier to accurate data collection for the religion which made Australia great. Christians often rightly express their alarm and anxiety about Australia’s drift to secularism and even Islamisation…
An important new article in the Australian by Simon Benson spells all this out in more detail. He notes the ideological battles involved here:
Beyond the philosophical struggle between faith and the New Atheists is a deeper political project that seeks to reshape the nation culturally. The stated aim of progressivism is for a clearer separation between church and state. The unstated mechanism to achieve this is the effective defunding of religious institutions, from education and healthcare through to things as innocuous as pastoral services.
In recent years the census has been a useful tool for the rationalists in this conflict, where they seek statistical validation of the claim that Australia is officially living in a post-Christian world. To read the five-yearly census data across time is to observe a dramatic rise in secularism. Few would argue that this is not a real trend. The question that is harder to answer is the scale of it.
He says that the Australian Bureau of Statistics “concedes that the data collected by government overstates the number of Australians identifying as having no religion, simply because it re-ordered the options in the questionnaire.” He explains:
The ABS provides a footnote in its 2021 data to confirm this: “In 2016, the order of the response categories changed on the Census form, no religion was moved to the first response (from being last). This may result in higher responses reported for the ‘No religion’ category.”
The data proves the point. It showed that between the 2016 and the 2021 surveys, almost three million Australians had apparently lost their faith, with the “No religion” number leaping from 7,040,717 people to 9,886,957 people in the space of five years.
A polling study by the conservative-leaning Compass Polling of more than 5000 Australians has revealed for the first time just how much the national statisticians may have skewed the numbers against people of faith through this simple act of changing the question. It suggests that the ABS census numbers may be out by more than 20 per cent.
Wow, 20 per cent. That is a large percentage indeed. Benson continues:
Why the ABS changed its question format in the first place hasn’t ever been sufficiently explained, apart from a claim that in seeking to balance demands from secularists and religious organisations it opted for a vague consistency with how some other countries frame it.
The problem is changing the question, even if its placement on a checklist breaks the time series of the data collected. It can no longer be relied on for a meaningful trend analysis. The ABS admits this, which raises the question as to what the point of it is if it can’t provide comparable data sets.
He looks at one solution: randomising the ordering of the question. He then concludes:
What is unquestionably extraordinary is the admission by the ABS, according to the Guardian Australia news site, that it wasn’t possible to design a question on religion that allowed for a comparison with previous data censuses. “Some changes to the religious affiliation question need to be taken into account when looking at historical data,” it says. The question for next Tuesday is whether there is actually a problem with God or a problem of statistics. https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/speedometer-is-broken-question-shakes-census-faith/news-story/9984f173af8e387b734d865472c537af?giftid=ckYwk7xLTK
Other problems
Of course the religious question is not the only worrying part of the census. We also have questions that may not belong there. FamilyVoice put out a press release on this:
Families should boycott “creepy census questions on sexual identity” as such matters are no business of government, according to FamilyVoice Australia spokesman David d’Lima. “It beggars believe that the Australian Bureau of Statistics will soon be forcing families to grapple with issues of gender identity,” FamilyVoice Australia spokesman David d’Lima said.
“Whoever completes the household survey on 11th August will have to consider how best to respond to this creepy development,” he said. The 2026 census for the first time will invite people as young as sixteen to indicate their sexual orientation from a range of options, along with sex recorded at birth.
“Mums and Dads who are completing the forms on census night will either ignore such foolish questions or struggle to raise them with teenage children,” David d’Lima said. “Raising such questions will hurt feelings and accelerate the growing problem of gender confusion.”
“We urge families to exercise their right to boycott those creepy questions and mark the reply sections as ‘None of your business’,” he said. “The census is meant to serve the nation by collecting essential data for public planning and services, not by inciting gender confusion and upsetting families.”
FamilyVoice is quite right to raise these concerns. But all this is not happening by accident. Just as secularists, atheists and misotheists want to see data skewed to favour their agendas, so too the sexual revolutionaries are happy to use the census to further implement their own nefarious plans for the nation.
The religious and culture wars are all over the place – even at the ABS.
Afterwords
A quick word to those Christians who claim that taking a census violates biblical commands. Yes, God’s covenant people in the Old Testament were sometimes warned about taking a census, but that mainly dealt with counting military aged males. Yahweh wanted the people to trust him, not the size of their own army, when contending with enemies. See more on this here: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2023/05/05/difficult-bible-passages-1-chronicles-211-4/
And for those Christians wanting some help in filling in this rather dodgy census, or want to see how it can be improved, see this helpful article by Kurt Mahlburg: https://dailydeclaration.org.au/2026/08/05/christian-census-abs/
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The government appears to be obsessed about what we all do in the bedroom. If the bedroom is spare or if it’s used, they want to know what we are doing in there….
Creepy indeed.
Sure is Anita.
For sexual orientation, Men, don’t tick [Straight], tick [Other] and write in [Male].
Wonen are OK, you can tick [Woman].
Why? I filled in feedback as follows:
It is GROSSLY inappropriate that the Australia Census, where our laws and culture are Judeo-Christian based, does not list Jewish and Christian under Religion.
Instead, the questions on religion omit Judaism entirely, and fragment Christianity by listing only some Christian denominations, while listing Islam but ignoring the fact that Islam also has a diversity of sects.
That blatant bias effectively skews the results: demoting Christianity and promoting Islam and other non-Judeo-Christian religions.
Unbiased categories should include Christian, Islam, Hindu, Buddhist, etc., with no subdivisions – unless all categories have the option of sect identity, which may be important considering that some sects within a category may aggressively differ.
Gender:
The Census questions avoid Genetic facts: humans are almost invariably Male or Female, but very rarely genetically-Intersex where true Intersex has negligible connection to “Trans” identity.
The vast majority, if not all, trans identifying people are either genetically male of genetically female.
The category of “Straight” at the top of the sexual orientation list with no option for “Man” is deplorable. Women, at the top of their list, have the option Woman, which perhaps panders to “Trans” “Women”, meaning of course a genetic male who identifies as a woman.
Thanks for that Peter.
There’s a feedback form at the end of the census, so we can let them know our thoughts on these matters.
Good idea Annette.
And of course, it omits “atheist” as a belief system and so lumps the numbers here in with the agnostic and the simply apathetic in an obvious attempt to give more weight to what is, in reality, an atheistic religious belief or world view system and thereby attempts to justify imposing atheistic immorality onto decent people who don’t hold to their immoral and irrational views.
Correct Michael.
Of course, “more” muslims, means more of their needs will be met and “less” Christians will naturally see less of their needs attended to. One good thing might come out of this – we get our female toilets back (to appease the muslim women of course). A worrying and false narrative is being introduced into Australian society.
Quite so Christine.
Thanks for keeping us up to date on these issues, Bill.
I am unhappy with the personalising of the details. I preferred the census to be anonymous.
Thanks Lauren.
So they can’t get feedback on the census questions BEFORE they send it?
Funny how I automatically wrote Other > Christian because I am happy to join with other Christians on the list when they believe the Bible too. Pentecostal is rather missing I noticed, but I wouldn’t have picked that since Pentecostal churches were only around in the 1980’s. Not sure what you call a church that believes Pentecostalism but acts like a mainstream denomination with skinny jeans and smoke machines. How Pentecostal become prosperity doctrine I have no idea. Oh wait – there’s a devil…
Thanks Tim.