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 reveal.
Documents obtained by the Rationalist Society of Australia under freedom of information (FOI) laws reveal that the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference (ACBC) wrote to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) on 19 March 2024 saying it “strongly opposes” the proposed changes to the question design.
The ACBC sent the six-page letter on the same day that it wrote a two-page letter to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese calling on him to intervene in the ABS’ process and “reverse” the proposed changes.
In the letter to the ABS, the ACBC made a number of dubious claims, including that reformulating the question – from “What is the person’s religion?” to “Does the person have a religion?” – would “destroy” the question as a measure of culture and identity.
However, the Census is about providing a snapshot of current demographics to help inform policy-making and funding decisions. By leading people to respond based on upbringing or culture rather than their current relationship with religion, the question leads to inaccurate responses that understate the number of non-religious people.
Read the full letters to Prime Minister Albanese and the ABS
The bishops also argued that the optional nature of the religion question would make “negligible” any concerns about the bias in the existing question design.
However, the results of several other robust surveys suggest that the leading nature of Census religion question produces a significant undercount of non-religious people – by as much as 11 percentage points. Also, given that they have opted not to nominate a religion, it appears more likely that most of those who opt not to answer the question (7.3 per cent of the population at the 2021 Census) do not have a religion.
The bishops also claimed that the proposed changes had “likely been proposed by opponents of including a religion question in the Census.”
However, the Rationalist Society of Australia is not aware of any community group calling for the removal of the religion topic as part of the Census. Rather, a number of pro-secular and non-religious groups – through the ‘Census – Not Religious?’ campaign, which gained prominence at the 2021 Census – have been advocating for the ABS to fix the religion question to address the inherent bias that leads to inflated data in favour of religion.
In its letter to the ABS, the bishops argued that the changes to the question would “introduce a new bias in favour of ‘No religion’.” They said:
This is due to two factors: first, by offering the more convenient option of selecting ‘no’ as the initial response, and second, by limiting the availability of the tick-box option and providing only write-in options for everyone else.
This unjustly increases complexity and ambiguity for all individuals who wish to record their religious identity.
The bishops were under the impression that there would be no ‘Yes’ box with the proposed new question design after the ABS made an error in sending them an email in early March 2024 featuring an image of the new question with the design missing the ‘Yes’ box but including a ‘No’ box.
At the same time, the ABS had sent a similar email showing the proposed question design missing ‘Yes’ box to the Rationalist Society of Australia, along with other community stakeholders.
The bishops focused on this issue in their letter to the Prime Minister and also weeks later in their public statements that called for the government to intervene and put a stop to the proposed changes.
However, in May 2024, in response to the media reporting, the ABS clarified it was not proposing to exclude the ‘Yes’ box. The actual changes included having the question read “Does the person have a religion?”, with accompanying tick boxes for ‘No’ and ‘Yes’, and an open space for those with religious affiliation to write-in their response.
In their letter to the ABS, the bishops also claimed that the removal of the picklist of top denominations would result in many members of minority faiths being “clueless” in writing their denomination in the open space.
As revealed by the Rationalist Society of Australia in December last year, the ABS comprehensively rejected the bishops’ concerns and argued that the desire for maintaining comparability with past Censuses needed to be “balanced against changes to improve accuracy, relevance and inclusivity.”
The ACBC letter was prepared by the Catholic Church’s National Centre for Pastoral Research (NCPR). According to its website, the NCPR is “committed to the highest standards in research, practice and engagement”.
Read our three-part ‘The Census Files’ series.
The RSA is supporting the ‘Census – Not Religious?’ campaign, which is encouraging Australians to mark ‘No religion’ if they are not religious at the 2026 Census.
See all of the RSA’s reporting about the Census question here.
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Si Gladman is Executive Director of the Rationalist Society of Australia. He also hosts ‘The Secular Agenda’ podcast.
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