05/08/2026
How to Identify as a Christian on the Census When the ABS Gives You No Box to Tick
by Kurt Mahlburg
Census night is Tuesday 11 August. What Australians write on their census form that night will help decide, for the next five years, how Christian our country is officially said to be.
Whether youâre a Christian or only loosely affiliated with Christianity, getting the answer right is important â especially as confusion and concerns of bias and donkey voting swirl around the religion question again this year.
More on those controversies in a minute. First, hereâs the Daily Declarationâs official guide on how to answer the religion question so it accurately reflects your Christian affiliation.
The religion question â Question 24 â provides Australians with ten options to choose between, as well as the opportunity to write your own answer. Among the listed options are the six largest Christian denominations in Australia: Catholic, Anglican, Uniting Church, Greek Orthodox, Presbyterian and Baptist. If you see your denomination there, tick it.
Even if your identity as a Christian is more important to you than your denominational tie, still choose your denomination. The reason is simple: your answer here helps determine how much funding your denomination may receive for schools, hospitals and chaplains â and even where new churches are allowed to be built.
If you belong to a denomination that isnât listed â such as Lutheran, Pentecostal, Salvation Army, Seventh-day Adventist, or to a more specific Catholic or Orthodox tradition â select âOtherâ and write it down.
If you attend a church that has a generic or branded name and youâre not sure which denomination it belongs to, donât write the churchâs name. Instead, take 30 seconds with a search engine and type âWhat denomination isâŚâ along with the name and location of your church. Then select âOtherâ on your census form and write that answer. If the answer still isnât clear to you, just write âChristianâ.
If you donât attend church or are unsure about denominations but still consider yourself a Christian by upbringing or general worldview, select âOtherâ and write âChristianâ.
And to any Christian tempted to tick âno religionâ because your faith feels more like a relationship than a religion, donât tick âno religionâ â unless you want to be counted the same as an atheist! The best way to express your identity would be to select âOtherâ and write âChristianâ.
In short:
- Your denomination is listed (Catholic, Anglican, Uniting Church, Greek Orthodox, Presbyterian, Baptist) â tick it.
- Your denomination isnât listed (Lutheran, Pentecostal, Salvation Army, etc.) â select âOtherâ and write your denomination.
- You donât know the denomination of your church â look it up, select âOtherâ and write it down. If you still donât know, write âChristian.â
- You donât go to church but still consider yourself Christian in some sense â select âOtherâ and write âChristian.â
- You have a relationship with God but donât see yourself as âreligiousâ â select âOtherâ and write âChristian.â
So, what of those controversies? For the average Aussie Christian, Question 24 contains at least three highly unusual features.
First, it lists âno religionâ at the very top â a change that was made in 2016, retained in 2021 and will reappear this year. For a question about religion, this is a curious priority â especially given that far more Australians identified with a religion (53.8%) than no religion (38.9%) in the last census.
Second, it doesnât allow Christians to identify simply as Christians. While the six largest Christian denominations are listed, none of them are clearly marked as belonging to Christianity. The result: Australians who consider themselves Christian by background or general outlook, but have no formal tie to a denomination, have no easy way to say so.
Third, the privilege it denies to Christians it extends to adherents of Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism â despite Christianity dwarfing all three combined.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), the religion question is designed this way due to practical constraints. The ten-item list provided, it says, simply reflects âthe most common responsesâ â and that to expand the list would make the question âtoo long and burdensomeâ (though the census form provides up to 16 tick boxes for other questions).
As for the 2016 decision to reposition âno religionâ to the top of the list, the ABS said this was done in response to public submissions that warned of âperceived bias in the question format and consequent potential underestimates of the number of people who stated they had no religionâ.
However, thereâs good reason to believe the change made by the ABS in 2016 has produced a bias of its own that now runs in the opposite direction.
McCrindle Research, in its 2025 report An Undercurrent of Faith, found that 65% of Australians either consider themselves a Christian or are warm towards Christianity.
Separately, in 2024, National Church Life Survey (NCLS) Research found that 58% of Australians say they believe in God or a higher power.
Neither of these measures is identical to the census religion question, but both hint that Christian affiliation in Australia is larger than the 43.9% recorded in the 2021 census.
Notably, the 2016 push that saw âno religionâ placed first on the census form came from groups that insist Australians should only name a religion if they actively practise it.
However, the ABS itself says the opposite in its own 2026 Census Dictionary, where it describes religious affiliation as âthe religion a person nominates an association withâ even if that affiliation âmay be different from their practice of, or participation in, religious activityâ. Indeed, according to the ABS, the religion question âis not designed to measure the level of adherence to beliefs or participation in practices common toâ the religion a person nominates.
Importantly, the ABS has elsewhere acknowledged that the order in which options are listed on census forms has a real effect on how people answer. Among those effects is âdonkey votingâ â the well-documented phenomenon of people choosing the first available option in a list rather than the one thatâs true.
Taken together, this means the ABS made a change in 2016 that serves the secular lobbyâs goals at the direct expense of its own â and as a result, it is likely undercounting Christian affiliation in Australia.
The ABS can make its case for its current design of the census religion question. But in its current form, the question does not reflect how theologists or anthropologists classify the worldâs religions, or how adherents themselves understand their place within them. It applies a flattening secular logic to a question that was never secular to begin with.
Read more how the ABS can fix its religion section, how to provide feedback to the ABS, and to read this article on The Daily Declaration here: https://dailydeclaration.org.au/2026/08/05/christian-census-abs/
