Has Australia lost its religion, or merely its affection for institutions? – Sydney Morning Herald

But here the story gets complicated. As the statistician Ryan Burge argues in his book The Nones, not all Nones are created equal. In the popular imagination, it is easy to equate no religion with atheism. But when sociologists Tim Clydesdale and Kathleen Garces-Foley interviewed twentysomething Americans, they found only 14 per cent of Nones did not believe in God at all. Perhaps surprisingly, 35 per cent reported praying on a daily or weekly basis.

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The short story? The dominant trend was disaffiliation more than disbelief. For many, religion is coupled with belonging to an institution more than an indicator of belief. Little wonder, then, that Nones can be atheists, or agnostics, but they can also be unaffiliated believers, spiritual eclectics, or indifferent secularists. As Burge says, not all Nones are created equal.

It is a widely accepted truism that as cultures modernise, they inevitably lose faith. But in actual fact, modernity brings pluralism just as much as scepticism. As Tara Burton puts it in her 2019 book Strange Rites, Westerners havent abandoned their spiritual impulse theyve migrated it. Wellness culture, techno-utopianism, even the creative world of fan fiction all of these can function as sources of meaning, purpose, community and ritual. To quote Burton:We do not live in a godless world we live in a profoundly anti-institutional one.

The religious statistics of Australia likely point to a diverse future as much as an irreligious one. Our immigration programs welcome a plurality of different believers to our land. But even among long-settled Australians, the drop in Christian identification mostly indicates that fewer and fewer of us will affiliate with Christianity as a default. Instead, our search for fullness is a matter of choice, not tradition.

It will do us good to no longer assume too much. Instead of expecting that someone is a believer or a sceptic, perhaps we might try starting conversations with a question: What do you believe, and why?

Dr Mark Stephens is a senior research fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity and the author of The End of Thinking.

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Has Australia lost its religion, or merely its affection for institutions? - Sydney Morning Herald