The Census is an important church-state issue, and the next five-yearly Census is happening in Australia on August 11 this year.

The reaction to it by the Australian hierarchy says a lot about the church and illustrates its strengths and weaknesses. At issue is the status of the almost 90% of Catholics who are not strictly observant.

These so-called Cultural Catholics still underpin the church through their attachment to Catholic schools and other agencies and, ultimately, through their self-identification as Catholics in population counts. This means ticking the ‘Catholic’ box in the Census.

Church leaders are alert to this phenomenon.

They are irritated by the failure of such Cultural Catholics to observe church rules about regular Mass attendance and by their related willingness to challenge official church leadership and teaching. Bishops know that numbers matter for government funding and support because the organised church lives on government money.

Why the church lobbies

This is where church lobbying comes in. It should be noted, in fairness, that many sectors of society, including the growing secular lobby, also engage in lobbying around the Census for similar self-interested reasons.

The church’s interventions have been two-pronged. The first prong was official lobbying to protect the framing of the Census in a way thought most likely to produce a result favourable to religion.

The context is the remarkable growth in non-religion in Australia. In the last Census in 2021 the percentage of non-believers in any religion grew to 39% from 30% in 2016, accelerating a long-term trend.

That puts non-religion just behind Christianity (44%). The gap is narrowing at an astonishing rate.

Fighting the question change

Given this context the Australian Bureau of Statistics was proposing for 2026 to change the question “What is the person’s religion?”

The proposed change would have asked firstly, “Does the person have a religion?”.

The Australian Catholic Bishops’ conference successfully lobbied against this change on the grounds that it was biased against religious belief. The question remains unchanged at the insistence of the Labor government.

A direct appeal to believers

The second prong was direct appeals to those citizens who will be filling out the Census. Archbishop Anthony Fisher of Sydney coordinated a multi-faith campaign, launched at St Mary’s Cathedral.

He stressed the well-known importance of the Census in the construction of policy and the distribution of government funds. His appeal to the Cultural Catholics and other Christians and religious believers who were not observant was bitter-sweet (Catholic Weekly, Sydney, June 18 2026).

“You don’t have to be a regular worshipper to have a religious identity. Many people still feel connected to their faith even if they practise it occasionally.”

He might have added, or almost never.

“But religion helped shape your life, your family, culture and beliefs and deserves to be acknowledged when you complete the census.”

Privately connected, publicly weak

The church remains privately connected because bishops and other church leaders still maintain access to government on a leader-to-leader basis. But publicly, the church is disconnected.

Shrinking church numbers means that church leaders have only ineffective means of public communication.

• John Warhurst is an Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the Australian National University in Canberra and a director of the Council of Australasian Catholics.