A better understanding of nonbelief

TGC Australia recently published an analysis by Dr Sarah Quicke of whether we are experiencing a 'quiet revival' of interest in and/or conversion to Christianity here in Australia. It does it a good job of describing the difficulties involved in both gathering and interpreting data about religious beliefs and behaviours, e.g. the difference between the 44% who (still) call themselves Christian and the 8% of people aged 18-35 who actually "believed and lived out the gospel." 

Quicke refers to the very insightful McCrindle report An Undercurrent Of Faith, released in March 2025, which uses an analytical method called cohort analysis to try and work out how a particular group of people tend to behave over time. The purpose of this post is to draw attention to one element of that report which agrees with Quicke's analysis but also adds some detail to it. 

Here is what the cohort analysis showed about different age groups' identification with Christianity: 

As you can see

• While younger people represent a smaller portion of the population, they are disaffiliating from Christianity much faster than their age category is shrinking. This is reinforced on page 22 with an observation that "[b]etween 2016 and 2021, one in three Christians aged 15 to 24 (36%)... moved from Christianity to no religion. This rate is almost twice as high as the rate of the overall population (19%)."  
• Older people represent a bigger portion of the population, and their (re)affiliation with Christianity is growing significantly faster than that.

So is Christianity becoming an old people's religion? And does the decline of Christian identification among young people signal that it will continue to be increasingly irrelevant for the future? 

It depends what it means to 'be' 'Christian.' 

Consider what the report discovered about generational patterns of church attendance: 

First of all - the bar is pretty low. These people attend church at least monthly, and that attendance may be online. But what's interesting for our purposes is that among people who called themselves Christian, younger people were considerably more likely to be regular at church than older ones. 

Now combine that with the report's relatively innocuous observation that "older generations are more likely to" hold on to and express "the values and traditions of their upbringing" (page 9). 

I have a bad feeling that means that a lot of the older people who are (re)identifying as Christian are not actually putting their trust in Christ to be forgiven and 'born again,' but are using Christianity as a protest against what they see as contemporary decadence, immorality, hypersexuality etc. In other words: 

• Older generations may nominally be becoming Christian, but are in the process may actually only expressing moral self-righteousness - which may actually hinder them from being able to humble themselves enough to be forgiven of their sins and accept Christ's righteousness alone;  
• Whereas the decline of social value of religious identification is permitting younger people to be being more honest about what they actually believe. If they don't believe the gospel, they say so. If they do, they act on it. 
• And as both the report and Quicke observed, "only a small proportion... of people" are negative towards Christianity. Many - especially young people - are open to to spiritual conversations, discussing the gospel, visiting church, and even to changing their religious views. 

As I said in a previous blog post, changing social circumstances won't necessarily make people more open to the gospel. I expect it to trade one set of misconceptions and barriers for another. Our challenge and opportunity is to: 

1. Pay enough attention to people to discern what they believe and why they believe it, 
2. Work out how those beliefs interact with the gospel, and through that, 
3. How to show them that the real, Biblical Jesus is more awesome than anything they could previously have imagined.