How is it that Australia has become a country without a Christian majority and yet we voluntarily outstrip ourselves year on year with the scale of our Christmas festival. Friends, I think we’re in it for the good time.

The 2022 census revealed religious affiliation in Australia is in sharp decline. In 1901, the year of federation, 96.1% of Australians identified as Christian, but today only 43.9% do. Nearly 40% told the census they had no religious affiliation at all. In South Australia, there are now more people with “no religion” than Christians, and in Tasmania, non-believers are the majority.

It’s not just that we structure our school terms and end-of-year holidays in the workplace around the public holiday of 25 December; we structure our finances around it, too. In 2022, Australians funnelled an eye-watering $74.5bn to pre-Christmas spending. In the middle of a cost-of-living crisis, as recently as November experts were suggesting this Christmas we’ll beat it – and this is retail spending too, not just the end-of-year parties and work wrap-up drinks.

The festival that Christians adopted as the celebration of the birth of baby Jesus may indeed include present-sharing to represent the gifts of the wise men to the newborn messiah. But other traditions........

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