OddThinking

A blog for odd things and odd thoughts.

Are the Non-Religious Under-Represented by Australian PMs?

Abstract

Julia Gillard is Australia’s new Prime Minister, and our first female Prime Minister. Other people are writing about the gender aspects of the appointment. I wanted to write about another subject: religious belief.

Gillard doesn’t seem to profess a religion. Neither does she seem to have declared herself to be an athiest or agnostic (or any variant of non-thiest.) That separation of her religious beliefs, if any, from her duties as a minister is something I am happy to respect. (Update: It seems that Julia Gillard has now made it clear to the electorate that she does not believe in God.)

Knowing of studies in the US that show most people wouldn’t vote for a President who declared themselves athiests, I wondered if Gillard was the first Australian politician to not publicly align themselves to a church. So I did the research.

I was wrong, and wrong within my voting life-time. Bob Hawke (who left office in late 1991) was an agnostic. I have a short memory, it seems.

Still, I thought, I reckon non-Christians have been under-represented in the past, say, 50 years.

Again I was wrong. I was surprised at how totally wrong I was. Australia has a long history of agnostic Prime Ministers.

I felt compelled to absolve myself for my political ignorance by publishing my negative result here.

Method

The first part was determining the representation of religions in Australia for the past 50 years. I grabbed the Census Data [Ref, Table 14.83].

I made a few approximations. The data went from 1961-2006, every 5 years. I gave each 5 year period equal weighting, and found the average. The edge conditions (1961 versus 1960, 2011 versus 2010) were ignored as they were close enough, and the figures change slowly. There was no attempt to factor in growing population size, or to interpolate trends.

The categories provided are Anglican, Catholic, Other Christian, Other Religions, No religion, Not Stated/Inadequately Described. The last category represents missing data, and could be split any way. I simply dropped it, even though it represents 10.55% of the population and, perhaps, Julia Gillard belongs in this section! I suspect, without evidence, that most of members of this group are non-religious. No doubt it includes the people who entered their religion as “Jedi” as part of a mischievous campaign during the last couple of census-takings.

The second part was determining the representation of religions of Prime Ministers for the past 50 years. I looked through entries for the recent Prime Ministers in Wikipedia and classified them into the same groups (Presbyterian → Other Christian; Agnostic → No religion). I weighted them by the number of days the person served as PM, starting 50 years ago today.

Results

Religion of Australian Population
Average Percentage since 1961
Religion of Australian PMs
Percentage of serving days, since June 1960
Christian Anglican 29.3% 35.8%
Catholic 29.4% 8.4%
Other 27.1% 26.0%
Non-Christian Other religion 2.6% 0.0%
No religion 11.5% 29.7%

Conclusions

The initial hypothesis that the non-religious are under-represented in PMs is clearly false – with 29.7% of PMs compared to 11.5% of the population (perhaps as high as 23% of the population if you attribute all of the missing data to them). Anglicans are also over-represented, but not to the same degree.

Catholics are under-represented and religious non-Christians have not been represented at all.

Given the sample of PMs is small – only 11 in the 50 year period – and the dominance of a few of the longer-serving ones (e.g. Howard and Hawke), it is not to be expected that the religion of the PMs should accurately reflect the general public. (The idea that some religions would be politically unacceptable, despite having community members, should not be discounted.)

Of course, the professed religion of the PM is only one measure of “representation”, and a poor one at that. I hope that Prime Minister Gillard will represent all Australians, and not just those that agree with her unspoken views on religion.

[Update: Merged two tables into one, while wondering why I didn’t do that in the first place.]


Comments

  1. Woo Australia!

  2. Of course, there’s a sizeable difference between an atheist and an agnostic: the agnostic won’t tell other people (or possibly even themselves!) that they don’t believe in (a) god. Very often, that same agnostic will also attend a church service at Christmas and Easter (This leads to the quip that the real name of the Anglican church is the C&E church). Frankly, this seems mealy mouthed and spineless. Can we shun agnostics?

    Also: Is it ok to label atheist evangelists as rabid anti-theists? Or is the Oddthinking Regime pro anti-mysticism?

  3. You’ve both lost me, I’m afraid.

    I am not sure if Sunny is pro agnostic PMs, pro under-represented religious non-Christians, or pro woo-woo.

    And Richard, I am not sure if you and I (and perhaps more importantly, Wikipedia) are all sharing the same definitions of “agnostic”. I tried not to get caught up to much in the definitions in the article, but I assume that an agnostic, by my understanding of the definition, would not attend a church, even at Easter, except to fulfil social, rather than religious, obligations.

    I don’t think the OddThinking Editorial Team have adopted a particular stance on any particular religion on this blog. I’ve argued for the separation of church and state a few times (marriage and postage), so I guess when the OddThinking Regime seizes control, I should toe that line for a while – at least until I can insinuate myself as the new Sun King.

  4. Vote 1 Julian for Sun King! Ra! Ra!

    (PS: Is it just me or did that anti-agnostic comment sound predictable coming from someone called Richard *kins ?)

  5. There are millions of religious evangelists out there that I would label as rabid pro-theists, and also as pro-mysticism (most religion is very mystical with no basis in provable fact).

    Also OddThinking is a term that implies something far beyond non-agreement with the ‘normal’, almost to the point of it being strange, weird, or otherwise opposed to ‘normal’. Then again, as a native US (not American – that term is for all people living in the entire North and South American continents) citizen. there are many concepts and word choices used in Australia.

    Also interesting is the author’s name is Julian followed by a typical, Christian religion based date, when the Julian date used by astronomers does not have the religious break point in years and is much more accurate at 2,451,919 rather than 2010 AD.

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