The National Social Science Survey of 1993 asked in what religious denomination did the respondents grow up? Then it asked what was their religious denomination now. A comparison of the responses to these two questions gives some indication of movement. The figure below shows what percentage of those growing up in each of the major denominations described themselves in 1993 as having 'no religion'. In all the denominations, the proportion is over 20%, but reaches nearly 40% among those brought up as Uniting Church.
Zina O'Leary lectures at theUniversity of Western Sydney, Richmond, NSW. She has recently completed her doctoral thesis on those who have left their inherited faith. For her thesis, she found 80 people who had been raised as Christians but who now described themselves as atheists. She chose two groups of people: those who moved away from faith prior to 1967 and those who did so post 1982. She wanted to see if the stories had changed.
As part of the process, she identified three major patterns in the stories. One group of people left the faith primarily as a reaction to a specific event. Something happened in their lives, such as the death of a member of the family, which led to the rejection of faith - often with a lot of anger and bitterness. Another group left the faith after a longer period of reflection. It was not a reaction or rebellion, but often an intense intellectual exercise. For a range of reasons, they felt that faith no longer made any sense for them. They could not reconcile their faith with the way they saw themselves or the world. In leaving faith, there was often considerable sadness and confusion. The third group left faith as part of a general search for meaning. They were not satisfied to take faith on the authority of others, and their own journey took them away from it. This appears to be an increasing pattern. People are putting together their own sense of what the world and life is all about, rather than accepting a 'package' as presented by a particular religious group or tradition.
In 1999, the CRA hopes to publish a paper written by Zina in which she outlines these groups of people and discusses her findings. The paper provides important insights into the changing nature of religious faith in Australian society.

Philip Hughes