Alternative Spiritualities in Australia By Carole Cusack

The five-yearly census data since 1996 has revealed that the fastest-growing religions in Australia are Buddhism, Islam and Paganism. The 2006 census data broadly identified Australia as 30.6% not religious (combining categories such as Atheism, Humanism and No Religion and Religion Not Stated/Not Adequately Defined), 63.8% Christian, and 5.6% religions other than Christianity. Australia is a generally secular nation with no established church, in which approximately 14% of the population attends religious services regularly (defined as at least once per fortnight). When ‘religions other than Christianity’ are removed from this equation, the percentage of Christians regularly attending is 9% of the population (21.8 million in 2009). This paper examines Australia’s secular and multicultural nature and seeks to place Paganism in the religious mix. This draws attention back to Australia’s convict foundation, as one cause of the comparative secularity of Australia (as opposed to America) is the fact that the United States were settled by religious refugees where Australia was settled by convicts hostile to religion and authority. That one third of those convicts were Irish is a possible factor in the attraction of Celtic types of Paganism and alternative spirituality in Australia in the twenty-first century. This paper has three sections: first, the place of Catholicism and the Irish in eighteenth and nineteenth century Australia is examined; second, the growth of alternative spiritualities in the West and Australia in particular is considered; and third, the data from the 1001 and 2006 Australian Censuses on alternative spiritualities, and Paganism in particular, is discussed. ... https://www.academia.edu/1692333/Alternative_Spiritualities_in_Australia?email_work_card=title