Christianity decreased by more than 1 million people but is still Australia's most common religion. Other religions continue to increase. Australia is becoming more religiously diverse. Almost 10 million Australians reported having no religion.
How Hinduism is the fastest growing religion in Australia.
The 1996 census reported that almost 72 percent of Aboriginal people practised some form of Christianity, and that 16 percent listed no religion. The 2001 census contained no comparable updated data. The Aboriginal population also includes a small number of followers of other mainstream religions.
Numbers and age. The report puts the number of Catholics in Australia at 5,075,910, almost exactly 20% of the total population of 25,422,788. This is a decrease of around 2.5 percentage points in five years – in 2016, 22.6% of respondents identified as Catholic.
Australia's major religion is Christianity with the major denominations, in order of size, being Catholic, Anglican, Uniting Church, Eastern Orthodox, Presbyterian and Reformed, Baptist and Pentecostal. 30% of the Australian population reported that they were either Anglican or Catholic in the 2021 Census.
The permanent presence of Catholicism in Australia came rather with the arrival of the First Fleet of British convict ships at Sydney in 1788.
Sikhism – up from 0.1% to 0.8% Buddhism - from 2.1% to 2.4%
Chinese Buddhism and Folk Religions
China has the world's largest Buddhist population, with an estimated 185–250 million practitioners, according to Freedom House. Though Buddhism originated in India, it has a long history and tradition in China and today is the country's largest institutionalized religion.
Christianity is currently the most dominant religion in Australia, introduced by British settlers at colonisation . There has always been a degree of religious diversity in Australia.
Other religions are growing but continue to make up a small proportion of the population. Hinduism has grown by 55.3 per cent to 684,002 people, or 2.7 per cent of the population. Islam has grown to 813,392 people, which is 3.2 per cent of the Australian population.
As Professor Riaz Hassan and his team at the Hawke's International Centre for Muslim and non-Muslim Understanding expertly identify, Muslims currently constitute 2.2% of the Australian population, and it is estimated there will be almost one million more Muslims in Australia by 2050.
Muslim migration to Australia pre-dates European settlement and has been traced as far back as the 16th and 17th centuries. During this time Indonesians known as 'Macassans' shared their lives with local Indigenous people throughout northern Australia through trade, ceremony, marriage and family.
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The latest census results are out and the number of Australians who selected “no religion” has risen again to 38.9%, up from 30.1% in 2016. This makes them the second-largest “religious group” after Christians, who make up 43.9% of the population, down from 52.1% in 2016.
Australia is colloquially known as "the Land Down Under" (or just "Down Under"), which derives from the country's position in the Southern Hemisphere, at the antipodes of the United Kingdom.
Not only does most of Australia identify with Christianity, but more than half (55%) of the population believes in God, as defined as the Creator of the universe, the Supreme Being.
The word Hindu is an exonym, and while Hinduism has been called the oldest religion in the world, many practitioners refer to their religion as Sanātana Dharma (Sanskrit: सनातन धर्म, lit.
Religion in Russia is diverse, with Christianity, especially Russian Orthodoxy, being the most widely professed faith, but with significant minorities of non-religious people and adherents of other faiths.
The Japanese religious tradition is made up of several major components, including Shinto, Japan's earliest religion, Buddhism, and Confucianism. Christianity has been only a minor movement in Japan.
These statistics highlight an increasing rate of decline in Christianity and a trend that has continued since the 1960s. In 1971, Christians represented 86.2% of the Australian population. In 2021, Christians were down to 43.9% of the population.
Modern growth. Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the world. In 1990, 1.1 billion people were Muslims, while in 2010, 1.6 billion people were Muslims.
Australia is a secular country with a diverse migrant population and over 120 faiths, yet Australia has traditionally been a majority Christian country.
As with all major religions in Australia, its flock is declining: at the 2021 census, 20 per cent of Australians identified as Catholic, down from 22.6 per cent five years earlier.
In May 1990, the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference approved a number of scriptural translations for use in the liturgy in Australia, in addition to the Jerusalem Bible in the 1981 Lectionary. These include the following: the New Jerusalem Bible. the New Revised Standard Version.
Beginning in the early nineteenth century, Protestant missionaries attracted small but influential followings, and independent Chinese churches were also established. It is estimated that Christianity is the fastest growing religion in China.