Australia doesn’t have a Christian vote in the same way that the US does. We have some small pockets of fundamentalists, but they are mostly isolated within communities, rather than representing the world view of their communities.

Christians are distinct in their voting patterns along denominational lines. Catholics tend to be Labor voting, although with strong conservative segments, as do Uniting Church. Anglicans tend to the default position of the rest of the community and evangelicals and fundamentalists tend to favour the Coalition.

However their Christianity does give them some common concerns which make ties of religion at least as strong as those of family and class.

One of the features of the last few years has been the rise of militant atheists like Richard Dawkins. This appears in our research to have led to a greater feeling of group identity amongst atheists and agnostics. While they may have been solitary beliefs in Australia for much of the last century, they are now coming to be more broadly held by socially cohesive groups.

The Leximancer map below, generated from our July survey, demonstrates this. (Click on map for larger image).

One can quite clearly see that Christians are heavily associated with “debt”, one of the issues that is indicative of a Liberal voting intention, but also with “people”. “People” is a word in the leximancer maps which denotes concern for the effects of policies on people. It is an indicator of compassion.

At the opposite end are the atheists and agnostics whose major concern is with climate “change” and “environment”. This does not mean that Christians are not interested in environmental issues, nor that atheists and agnostics lack compassion, just that there is a much higher likelihood that each group will be associated with these contrasting clusters of  issues. That does not also mean that there is considerable overlap.

With reference to the way Christians swung to the government last election you might be interested in this work by my colleague John Black.  With respect to the last election he says:

“…we saw significant swings to the Christian Kevin Rudd led Labor Party across seats where religions such as Pentecostals and Lutherans were strongly represented and this relationship between the outer urban Pentecostals and the more rural Lutherans proved enduring enough to last right through to the end of the modelling process. Here's the data on these two faiths and on the major mainstream religions, by new Commonwealth electorates, so you can see for yourselves what impact the loss of Rudd makes on election night.”

This table shows you how our respondents are voting, sorted by denomination. (Click on map for larger image).

It looks like Kevin Rudd’s Christianity, or at least his approach to politics found a lot of favour with Christians, without alienating atheists and agnostics. Abbott is attracting Christian voters, but at the same time he loses atheists and agnostics. Interestingly Abbott does not draw his best support from Catholics, but from Pentecostals.

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