Religious diversity in Australia

National statistics

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Leader: Gary Bouma (Monash University)

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Australia conducts a census of the population every five years which includes a religious identity question: ‘What is your religion?’. This provides a very rich resource for mapping religious diversity at national, state and local areas. We are discovering that religious diversity (in terms of numbers of different religious groups and numbers of different identities) varies substantially across each of these levels of observation. These diversities intersect with income, migration status, country of origin and ethnicity, producing a rich diversity of lived diversities which are successfully negotiated daily. This case study is being conducted with Alan Gamlen, Dharmalingam Arunachalam and Ernest Healy, all of Monash University.