Page updated 31 March 2026.
Every five years, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) conducts a national survey – called the Census – to collect data in order to build an accurate picture of who we are as Australians.
Census data is used by governments and many other organisations to inform a wide range of important decisions and policies.
One of the questions asks respondents to nominate their religion. Religion statistics from the Census are used to inform policies and funding that affect the daily lives of all Australians — including schools, hospitals, aged care facilities, universities, places of worship, chaplaincy programs, laws governing religious and non-religious freedoms, allocation of time on public radio and other media, and so on.
The Census result for religion does not accurately reflect Australia’s religious views.
This is due to the ABS using a biased question – ‘What is the person’s religion?’ As a result, a large number of Australians mark the religion of their childhood or the religion of the school they went to when in fact they no longer really practise or hold those beliefs.
The acquiescence bias inflates the data in favour of religion – by as much as 11 per cent, according to several robust surveys (including this one).
Despite the ABS having proposed to change the question to remove the bias in its preparations for the 2026 Census (wanting to use ‘Does the person have a religion?’, the ABS decided to re-use the biased question after facing a public campaign by religious groups.
Even with the biased question wording, the percentage of Australians identifying as non-religious has been rapidly increasing – from 12.9% in 1991 to 38.9% in 2021.
Based on the trends, ‘No religion’ is on track to overtake Christianity at the 2026 Census.
For the 2026 Census, we have teamed up with a number of pro-secular organisations for the Census – Not Religious? Mark ‘No Religion’ campaign.
The joint campaign is also supported by Humanists Australia, National Secular Lobby, Humanists Victoria, the Secular Association of NSW, Skeptics Australia, and Recovering From Religion.
The campaign encourages each person to reflect on their personal beliefs and, if they no longer see themselves as religious, to mark ‘No Religion’.
Separately, the Rationalist Society of Australia has, over recent years, been advocating directly for change to the Census question. In 2025/26, thought freedom of information requests, we revealed what took place in leading to the ABS deciding to continue using the biased Census question.
See the reporting on our advocacy work here.
Read our three-part ‘The Census Files’ feature series on our Rationale website.
On the joint campaign’s website, you can sign up to get updates delivered to your email when they happen. The coalition behind the campaign will send out updates when further developments, such as when the Census results for 2021 are released.
You can view and share updates, videos and other content from the campaign’s Facebook page, Twitter account, Instagram page and YouTube channel.
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A senator asked the Australian Bureau of Statistics whether it thought a community campaign encouraging people to mark ‘No religion’ if they were not religious
The Rationalist Society of Australia has asked the Prime Minister to confirm what his response was to the Catholic bishops’ request in 2024 for him
The Rationalist Society of Australia is urging delegates at the Labor Party’s national conference this week to make changes to the policy platform to support
The Australian Bureau of Statistics has blamed a “system error” in the software that it uses to redact documents for having blocked damning information about
Australia’s Catholic bishops used highly dubious claims when they pressured the nation’s statistics agency to “reconsider” its plans to fix the religion Census question, documents
