Urban-Rural Geographies of Aboriginal Religious and Non-religious Identification

In the past 40 years Australia has been in the process of changing from being an overwhelmingly Christian country to one that has a substantial ‘non-religious’ component. If the current trend continues, by 2050 one in two Australians will be non-religious, while only one in three will be Christian. The Australian Indigenous ¹ population has been closely following the broader Australian population's journey to ‘no religion’. As we show in this chapter, Indigenous Australians have even surpassed, albeit by a small margin, the broader Australian population in the trend towards ‘no religion’. We critically reflect, later in the chapter, on what ‘no religion’ or faithlessness means, especially for Indigenous Australians based in remote Australia, for most of whom the discourse of the ‘authentic’ is a high spiritual benchmark.