Christianity in Australia
Christianity is the largest religion in Australia, with a total of 43.9% of the Australian population identifying with a Christian denomination in the 2021 census. The first presence of Christianity in Australia began with British colonisation in what came to be known as New South Wales in 1788.
The Christian footprint in Australian society and culture remains broad, particularly in areas of social welfare and education provision and in the marking of festivals such as Easter and Christmas. Though the Australian Constitution of 1901 protects freedom of religion and separation of church and state, the Church of England held legal privileges in the early British colonial period, when Catholicism in particular was suppressed. Sectarianism was a feature of Australian politics well into the 20th century, as was collaboration by church and state in seeking the conversion of the Indigenous population to Christianity. Today, the Catholic Church is second only to government itself as a provider of government-funded social services, through organisations such as Catholic Social Services Australia and the St Vincent De Paul Society. The Anglican Church's Anglicare network is similarly engaged in areas such as emergency relief, aged care, family support service and help for the homeless. Other denominations assist through networks like UnitingCare Australia and the Salvation Army, and around a quarter of students attend church owned schools.
Historically significant Australian Christians have included the Reverend John Dunmore Lang, Saint Mary MacKillop, Catherine Helen Spence, Pastor David Unaipon, the Reverend John Flynn, Pastor Sir Doug Nicholls and General Eva Evelyn Burrows of the Salvation Army. High-profile contemporary Australian Christians include Tim Costello; Baptist minister and current CEO of World Vision Australia; Frank Brennan, Jesuit human rights lawyer; John Dickson, historian and founder of The Centre for Public Christianity; Phillip Aspinall the current archbishop of Brisbane, Philip Freier the current Anglican primate of Australia and archbishop of Melbourne; and recent prime ministers John Howard, Kevin Rudd, Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison.
Like much of the Western world, Australia has been affected by the widespread decline in religiosity that has lowered the number of professing Christians and a diversifying immigration intakes that have lowered the overall percentage that Christians comprise in the Australian population, resulting in a national census decline from 96.1% at the time of the Federation of Australia in the, to 43.9% in the.
According to the 2021 census, religious distribution is 43.9% Christian, 38.9% none or secular belief system, 3.2% Islam, 2.7% Hinduism, 2.4% Buddhism, and 1.7% other. The largest Christian denominations were Catholic at 20.0%, Anglican at 9.8%, Uniting Church at 2.7%, Eastern Orthodox at 2.1%, Presbyterian/Reformed at 1.6%, Baptist at 1.4% and Pentecostal at 1.0%. Those who answered Christian with no denomination were 2.7% of the population.
Post-war immigration has grown the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of Australia and there are large and growing Pentecostal groups, such as Sydney's Hillsong Church. According to the, Queensland and New South Wales had Christian majorities, while the lowest proportion of Christians were found in the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory.
History
Introduction of Christianity
Before European contact, indigenous people had performed the rites and rituals of the animist religion of the Dreamtime. Portuguese and Spanish Catholics and Dutch and English Protestants were sailing into Australian waters from the seventeenth century.Among the first Catholics known to have sighted Australia were the crew of a Spanish expedition of 1605–6. In 1606, the expedition's leader, Pedro Fernandez de Quiros, landed in the New Hebrides and, believing it to be the fabled southern continent, he named the land: Austrialis del Espiritu Santo. Later that year, his deputy Luís Vaz de Torres sailed through Australia's Torres Strait. The English navigator James Cook's favourable account of the fertile east coast of Australia in 1770 ultimately ensured that Australia's Christian foundations were to reflect the British denominations.
The permanent presence of Christianity in Australia began with the arrival of the First Fleet of British convict ships at Sydney in 1788. The Reverend Richard Johnson of the Church of England was licensed as chaplain to the Fleet and the settlement. In early colonial times, Church of England clergy worked closely with the governors. Johnson was charged by the governor, Arthur Phillip, with improving "public morality" in the colony, but he was also heavily involved in health and education.
According to Manning Clark, the early colonial officials of the colony had disdain for the "consolations of religion", but shared a view that "the Protestant religion and British institutions were the finest achievements of the wit of man for the promotion of liberty and a high material civilization." Thus they looked to Protestant ministers as the "natural moral policemen of society", of obvious social use in a convict colony for preaching against "drunkenness, whoring and gambling". Chaplain Johnson was an evangelical priest of the Church of England, the first of a series of clergymen, according to Clark, through whom "evangelical Christianity dominated the religious life of Protestant Christianity in Australia throughout the whole of the nineteenth century".
Chaplain Johnson led what is regarded as his first service under a tree in Sydney Cove on the first Sunday after arrival, 3 February 1788. On 7 February 1788, Arthur Phillip was sworn in over the Bible as the first governor of the colony, and delivered a speech to the convicts counselling the Christian virtues of marriage and an end to promiscuity. Johnson celebrated the colony's first Lord's Supper in an officer's tent on Sunday 17 February 1788.
Johnson's successor, the Reverend Samuel Marsden, had magisterial duties and so was equated with the authorities by the convicts. He became known as the "flogging parson" for the severity of his punishments.
Early history of the Catholic Church in Australia
Some of the Irish convicts had been transported to Australia for political crimes or social rebellion in Ireland. This was due to the colonisation of the Irish people by the English, and resultant dispossession and cruel conditions forced on them by the English. Irish Catholics had been forced to pay tithes to the protestant churches, even though they were Catholics. Authorities were prejudiced against Catholics and Catholic convicts were compelled to attend Church of England services, with no provision or respect for Catholicism.One-tenth of all the convicts who came to Australia on the First Fleet were Catholic and at least half of them were born in Ireland. A small proportion of British marines were also Catholic. Other groups were also represented, for example, among the Tolpuddle martyrs were a number of Methodists.
It was the crew of the French explorer La Pérouse who conducted the first Catholic ceremony on Australian soil in 1788 – the burial of Father Louis Receveur, a Franciscan friar, who died while the ships were at anchor at Botany Bay, while on a mission to explore the Pacific. The first Catholic priest colonists arrived in Australia as convicts in 1800 – James Harold, James Dixon and Peter O'Neill, who had been convicted for "complicity" in the Irish 1798 Rebellion. Dixon was conditionally emancipated and permitted to celebrate Mass. On 15 May 1803, in vestments made from curtains and with a chalice made of tin he conducted the first Catholic Mass in New South Wales. The Irish led Castle Hill Rebellion of 1804 alarmed the British authorities and Dixon's permission to celebrate Mass was revoked. Fr Jeremiah Flynn, an Irish Cistercian, was appointed as Prefect Apostolic of New Holland and set out from Britain for the colony uninvited. Watched by authorities, Flynn secretly performed priestly duties before being arrested and deported to London. Reaction to the affair in Britain led to two further priests being allowed to travel to the colony in 1820 – John Joseph Therry and Philip Conolly. The foundation stone for the first St Mary's Cathedral, Sydney was laid on 29 October 1821 by Governor Lachlan Macquarie.
The absence of a Catholic mission in Australia before 1818 reflected the legal disabilities of Catholics in Britain. The government therefore endorsed the English Benedictines to lead the early church in the colony. William Bernard Ullathorne was instrumental in influencing Pope Gregory XVI to establish a Catholic hierarchy in Australia. Ullathorne was in Australia from 1833 to 1836 as vicar-general to Bishop William Morris, whose jurisdiction extended over the Australian missions.
Foundations of diversification and equality
The Church of England lost its legal privileges in the Colony of New South Wales by the Church Act of 1836. Drafted by the Catholic attorney-general John Plunkett, the act established legal equality for Episcopalians, Catholics and Presbyterians and was later extended to Methodists. Nevertheless, social attitudes were slow to change. Catholic laywoman Caroline Chisholm faced discouragements and anti-papal feeling when she sought to establish a migrant women's shelter and worked for women's welfare in the colonies in the 1840s, though her humanitarian efforts later won her fame in England and great influence in achieving support for families in the colony.John Bede Polding, a Benedictine monk, was Sydney's first Catholic bishop from 1835 to 1877. Polding requested a community of nuns be sent to the colony and five Irish Sisters of Charity arrived in 1838. The sisters set about pastoral care in a women's prison and began visiting hospitals and schools and establishing employment for convict women. The sisters went on to establish hospitals in four of the eastern states, beginning with St Vincent's Hospital, Sydney in 1857 as a free hospital for all people, but especially for the poor. At Polding's request, the Christian Brothers arrived in Sydney in 1843 to assist in schools. In 1857, Polding founded an Australian order of nuns in the Benedictine tradition – the Sisters of the Good Samaritan – to work in education and social work. While Polding was in office, construction began on the ambitious Gothic Revival designs for St Patrick's Cathedral, Melbourne and the final St Mary's Cathedral in Sydney.
Since the 19th century, immigrants have brought their own expressions of Christianity with them. Particular examples are the Lutherans from Prussia who tended to settle in the Barossa Valley, South Australia and in Queensland, Methodists in South Australia, with notable pockets coming from Cornwall to work the copper mines in Moonta. Other groups included the Presbyterian, Congregationalist and Baptist churches. Establishing themselves first at Sevenhill, in the newly established colony of South Australia in 1848, the Jesuits were the first religious order of priests to enter and establish houses in South Australia, Victoria, Queensland and the Northern Territory. While the Austrian Jesuits traversed the Outback on horseback to found missions and schools, Irish Jesuits arrived in the east in 1860 and had by 1880 established the major schools which survive to the present.
In 1885, Patrick Francis Moran became Australia's first cardinal. Moran believed that Catholics' political and civil rights were threatened in Australia and, in 1896, saw deliberate discrimination in a situation where "no office of first, or even second, rate importance is held by a Catholic".
File:Mary MacKillop.jpg|thumb|St Mary Mackillop is Australia's first canonised saint of the Catholic Church
File:GeneralEvaBurrows.jpg|thumb|Eva Burrows was the 13th General of the Salvation Army.
The Churches became involved in mission work among the Aboriginal people of Australia in the 19th century as Europeans came to control much of the continent and the majority of the population was eventually converted. Colonial clergy such as Sydney's first Catholic archbishop, John Bede Polding, strongly advocated for Aboriginal rights and dignity
With the withdrawal of state aid for church schools around 1880, the Catholic Church, unlike other Australian churches, put great energy and resources into creating a comprehensive alternative system of education. It was largely staffed by nuns, brothers and priests of religious orders, such as the Christian Brothers ; the Sisters of Mercy ; Marist Brothers, who came from France in 1872 and the Sisters of St Joseph, founded in Australia by Saint Mary MacKillop and Fr Julian Tenison Woods in 1867. MacKillop travelled throughout Australasia and established schools, convents and charitable institutions but came into conflict with those bishops who preferred diocesan control of the order rather than central control from Adelaide by the Josephite order. MacKillop administered the Josephites as a national order at a time when Australia was divided among individually governed colonies. She is today the most revered of Australian Catholics, canonised by Benedict XVI in 2010.
Also from Britain came the Salvation Army, which had been established in the slums of East London in 1865 to minister to the impoverished outcasts of the city. The first Salvation Army meeting in Australia was held in 1880. Edward Saunders and John Gore led the meeting from the back of a greengrocer's cart in Adelaide Botanic Park with an offer of food for those who had not eaten. The Salvos also involved themselves in finding work for the unemployed and in re-uniting families. In Melbourne from 1897 to 1910, The Army's Limelight Department was established as Australia's first film production company. From such diverse activities, The Salvos have grown to be one of Australia's most respected charitable organisations, with a 2009 survey by Sweeney Research and the advertising group Grey Global finding the Salvation Army and the nation's Ambulance Service to be Australia's most trusted entities. Australia's George Carpenter was General of the Salvation Army from 1939 to 1946 and Eva Burrows during the 1980s and 1990s.