Leaving Religion in Australia

Australia has gone secular fast. "No religion" overtook Christianity as the largest census category in 2021 and the trend has only accelerated. The active deconstructions in Australia are mostly concentrated in specific sub-communities rather than the country as a whole. The Hillsong-and-friends Pentecostal megachurch network out of Sydney is one of the world’s most influential and has produced a substantial number of ex-Pentecostals as the church has gone through public scandals over the past decade. The Australian Catholic Church has been through its own abuse crisis, with the Royal Commission documenting decades of cover-up across multiple dioceses.

There is also a real and substantial Australian LDS community, especially in Brisbane, Melbourne, and the suburbs of Sydney, with the same exit dynamics as the US LDS exit. Australian Jehovah’s Witness exits are large per capita. And the immigrant ex-Muslim population in Sydney and Melbourne has been growing, drawing especially from the Lebanese, Iranian, and Afghan-Australian communities.

The advantage of deconstructing in Australia is the broader secular culture; the disadvantage, similar to the UK and Canada, is that secular friends sometimes underestimate the specific cost of high-control religious exits, and finding other ex-members of your specific tradition is the work that compounds.