There was a bit of a fuss last week when the preliminary results from the 2006 Australian census were published. There were a few items commented on, but the one that particularly interests us is obviously the figures for religious affiliation.

	St Mary's Cathedral Sydney image from: www.aviewoncities.com

The principal trend has already been commented on; a continuing drift away from from identification with any faith or denomination, and towards either an atheist/agnostic position, or a position of simply not answering the question.

I don't want to minimise the signficance of that trend, but I don't have anything to add to what has already been said about it. I do think, however, that the census has more to tell us than just that trend, if we dig down a bit into the figures.

It's important to remember that the Census question on religious affiliation doesn't measure even something as superficial as bums on seats; it measures nothing more than willingness to tick a particular box on the census form. We already know that the figures who identify with any particular faith or denomination vastly exceed the numbers who rock up to the relevant church, chapel or meeting house on a regular basis. There's a world of difference between ticking the box and church attendance, never mind having a commitment to a life of faith. The religious groups with the strongest census figures, therefore, are not necessarily the most "successful" ones, whatever success means for a religious movement.

So what do the census figures mean?

Does willingness to tick the box have any significance at all? Yes, I think it does. In fact, I think it could signify a number of things. The problem is disentangling them.

• First, it can signify a commitment, and possibly a very strong commitment, to faith and to a life of faith. Presumably the numbers who "ticked the box" for every denomination include at least a proportion who are sincere, committed and active member of that denomination.
• Secondly, it can signify a weak or ambiguous commitment of faith — sort of "I'm not terribly interested in religion and I don't think going to church is all that important to me but if you ask me, yes, I'm a Catholic/Anglican/Presbyterian and, when the time comes, I think I'd rather be buried from there than not".
• Thirdly, it can signify identification with a community, but not necessarily on the basis of religious belief. I'm Orthodox because I'm Greek, or I'm Catholic because I'm Italian, or I'm a Muslim because I'm an Arab. I may have little or no religious faith, but the denominational identification is part of my social or cultural identity.

To complicate matters further, more than one of these factors can operate at the same time. My commitment to Islam, for example, may be quite heartfelt, but at the same time it can be reinforced and supported by cultural factors.

Religion and minority identity

It's interesting to note that those religious groups which are holding their own or growing, relative to the population as a whole include more than a proprtionate share of groups where religion and culture overlap. This is true for non-Christian religions — Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism. But it is also true for Christian denominations. Have a look at this table:

	Denomination	Growth (%)
	Christian - no further detail	68.3
	Assyrian Apostolic	31.3
	Oriental Orthodox	30.3
	Pentecostal	25.7
	Latter Day Saints	17.9
	Other Protestant	11.7
	Brethren	9.8
	Eastern Orthodox	9.5
	Baptist	7.3
	Catholic	6.8
	Seventh-Day Adventist	4.9
	Other Christian	3.1
	Lutheran	0.4
	Jehovah's Witnesses	-3.0
	Anglican	-4.7
	Presbyterian & Reformed	-11.7
	Salvation Army	-13.4
	Uniting Church	-14.9
	Churches of Christ	-26.9

I've extracted just the various Christian groups from the Census report, and shown them ranked by growth from 1996 to 2006, in declining order.

A couple of preliminary points:

First, the growth percentage for each denomination is simply internal growth. If a denomination had one member in 1996 and two members in 2006, then the growth figure will be 100%. So the figure tells you how fast a denomination is growing, but not how large it is.

Secondly, one or two of the figures are not strictly comparable with the rest of the table. At the very top, for instance, we have "Christian — no further detail", which is people who identified as Christian, but did not state any particular denomination. This reticence could be for several reasons:

• They belong to a very small denomination, which wasn't on the list offered, and which they did not choose (or did not bother) to write down.
• They are "non-denominational" Christians, who object to the whole concept of a denomination and want nothing to do with it.
• They have a residual Christian identity, but their beliefs are not clear enough for them to say what denomination best reflects their views. Or they don't go to church, and on that basis don't feel they identify with any denomination.

Given the variety of reasons why somebody might put themselves into this category, it's hard to say what conclusions we might draw from the rapid growth in the category.

Something similar is true of the "other Protestant" group, which includes those who identify as Protestant but do not specify a denomination, and those who identify with a Protestant denomination too small to warrant an entry on its own.

Having said all that, if we look at the top half of the table, it includes the Assyrians, the Eastern Orthodox, and the Oriental Orthodox. All of these denominations are associated with distinctive ethnic or national communities — communities which, in Australia, are minorities.

Now, much of the growth in these denominations is probably due to immigration, but I suspect that it is reinforced by the cultural factor that I have mentioned. Members of these groups, I think, do not display the typical Australian propensity for secularism or indifference because of social, cultural and institutional factors which support continued identification with their church.

This factor may weaken as these communities integrate more and more into the Australian mainstream, but it can still persist for a generation or two. The big wave of Greek immigration to Australia was at least a generation ago, but Eastern Orthodox Christians still seem from the census returns to be a more cohesive group than Christians generally.

Mainstream denominations

	The Salvos:suffering a surprising decline

Conversely, the denominations in the lower half of the table, which are declining fastest in census terms, include most of the more "mainstream" denominations which have no distinctive cultural or ethnic identity to reinforce them, particularly the Anglicans and the Uniting Church, but also some smaller groups — the Jehovah's Witnesses, the Churches of Christ, the Salvation Army.

I cautiously suggest that, although the numbers for these groups may be declining, those who still identify with them are increasingly likely to do so because of a religious commitment, rather than for social or cultural reasons. In other words, there may be fewer and fewer people describing themselves as Anglicans, but for more and more of them Anglicanism is really something important to their spiritual lives. But at this stage that's just a guess on my part.

(That's not to say, of course, that Orthodox Christians don't have a true religious commitment. My point is simply that, as cultural and social supports for an Anglican identity disappear, those who continue to identify as Anglicans must increasingly do so for reasons other than social or cultural.)

It will be interesting, when the National Church Life Survey figures are published, to see if attendance or active participation in these denominations declines in parallel with the census figures. If not, to borrow a sporting analogy, we might conclude that it is the pavilion members of the mainstream denominations who are dropping out in the census returns, rather than the playing members.

Denominations which buck the trend

It has to be said that there are some groups bucking the trend. Although not appearing in the table above, which includes only Christians, the numbers professing Australian Aboriginal traditional religions are in free-fall, despite the obvious cultural identification involved. It is difficult to work out what is happening with that figure.

The other way of bucking the trend, of course, is for a denomination which is not associated with a distinct cultural or ethnic group to display strong census figures. There are a few examples of this, of which the Pentecostalists are the most prominent.

And this is particularly interesting, because what characterises the Pentecostalists is not their theology. Their theology is generally conservative, and other churches with a conservative theological stance are in steep decline. Nor, sad to say, are they distinguished by being untainted by sex abuse scandals or other controversies. What characterises Pentecostalism is its distinctive worship style and its very active community life.

Pentecostalism, in other words, may not build on cultural or ethnic communities, but it creates communities of its own. I believe that is at least part of the reason why (at least as far as we can judge from the census returns) it has been successful in building and retaining membership.

Ian Elmer has recently argued on the discussion board that an ability to create and maintain funcitioning communities is crucial for a denomination wishing to build up active participation. I think he is right, and I think that it also helps to maintain the lesser commitment of identification with the denomination for census purposes.

Where does this mean for Catholics?

Out of nineteen Christian groups listed in the census figures, so far as building and retaining membership between 1996 and 2006 goes Catholicism is exactly in the middle — tenth out of nineteen.

I think this may tell us something about Catholicism and its ability to build, or build on, communities. If I'm right in thinking that the ability to retain members is connected to strength of community, the figures suggest that Catholics may have stronger communities than the other mainstream denominations. Of the very large denominations, certainly — say, those with more than half a million members — we are very much the highest on the table.

This may partly be social and cultural — we all know what the Irish and the Italians are like! But it may also be theological. As compared with mainstream Protestantism, Catholicism stresses the importance of the communal dimension, and the common Christian endeavour. At the risk of oversimplifying, it is simply not possible to be a Catholic on your own. You can only do it in community. This contrasts with the classic Protestant focus on the unmediated relationship between the individual and God. And that could lead us to pay slightly more attention to community-building.

Whatever the reason, the census figures suggest to me that we are not the worst at community. We're not good enough, undoubtedly, but at least we have a limited measure of success upon which to build.

This also suggests that if we want to do better at retaining existing Catholics and attracting new Catholics, our focus should be on community-building. Catholic parishes should foster communion not just in the narrow sense of encouraging people to come to Mass, but in the wider — and equally eucharistic — sense of encouraging people to share in every aspect of the community, and of welcoming all those who want to share.

It would be wrong to see community-building as an alternative to encouraging participation in the sacraments. Quite the reverse; in the typical parish, the two are complementary. Building a successful and functioning community provides a basis for lively communal sacramental life, and coming to Mass provides an opportunity to meet, to share and to build community.

IMAGE SOURCES: The background image of in the headline was sourced from www.wesleymission.org.au/publications/annrpt/2000/images/faces.jpg.

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Peregrinus can be contacted at: Peregrinus <peregrinus@catholica.com.au>

©2007 Peregrinus