Where will 35,385 people pray?

The strange absence of religion in bureaucratic Australia

Photo by IZIUMLAB on Unsplash

The NSW Government has now delivered its proposal to redevelop the Woollahra and Edgecliff precincts. And it has been thinking hard about what the people of the area will need in the future.

It’s quite list. We will need parks, libraries, childcare centres, basketball courts, cultural spaces, community centres, and schools. We will need places to exercise and places to sit quietly and contemplate. There will have to be trees and cycleways, and we’ll need places to meet our neighbours.

I’m pleased to hear it.

But apparently, none of us will need somewhere to pray.

I discovered this while reading the new Edgecliff-Woollahra Social and Community Infrastructure Assessment, produced as part of the NSW Government’s plans to accommodate thousands of new homes in Sydney’s eastern suburbs – and to build a community of 35, 385 people in the zone.

What caught my attention wasn’t that the report was hostile to religion. Far from it. It was something weirder than that. Religion was almost entirely invisible. Perhaps the authors meant to cover it under the designation ‘cultural spaces’, but that catch-all term is so vague as to be meaningless.

It gets us far as asking “what is the role of quiet and contemplative spaces in higher density urban environments?” But it does not ask about worship.

The planners have remembered that we have bodies, hobbies and children. They have even remembered that we get lonely. But they seem to have forgotten that we have souls.

I think it is a telling gap. It tells us how the modern state has learned to view its citizens. Governments can see us as residents, workers, parents, consumers, exercisers, and of course as voters, but it cannot see as worshippers or seekers of meaning.

There’s a reasonable secular neutrality in some of this approach, of course. Our elected officials and the bureaucrats and consultants who inform them have learned not to favour one faith over another. That’s as it should be in a secular state.

But what we have in this report is secular reductionism. Neutrality doesn’t require pretending that religion is socially irrelevant.

Clearly it is not. Whatever the 2026 census will reveal, religion is still a deeply-rooted presence in the Australian social landscape. Churches, synagogues, mosques and other faith communities already do many of the things that the report values. They provide belonging, social connection, volunteering, care for the poor and the elderly, grief support, support for survivors of domestic violence, intergenerational community, resilience and contemplation.

They are places we marry our spouses and bury our loved ones. We weep there with grief and with joy.

I know that this Sunday people at my church, aged 9 months to 95, will gather together to pray, to worship, to meet, to share food, to catch up, and to express care for one another. Another group will have been doing that at the synagogue up the road on Saturday.

This isn’t just a theoretical question. If thousands more people are going to be living in the local area, then planners should at least ask what religious and spiritual infrastructure they will need. They will need to recognise how valued these places and communities of worship are - and that they will need to be protected and preserved.

The report uses the language of “cultural identity”, “creative expression”, “belonging”, “wellbeing” and “social cohesion”.

But it requires religion to be squashed into one of these ideas before the report’s authors can notice it. A church can be a heritage building or a concert venue or a welfare provider.

What the report can’t see is a church as a church.

It is a small lapse, perhaps. But it is a telling one, because it reveals what contemporary governments think a full human life requires. When it comes to religion, they have nothing to say.

A city is more than somewhere to work, shop, sleep, exercise, and catch a train. If we are going to build new homes for the city that we hope Sydney will become, we will need to remember that the people who live in them will not merely be consumers of services. They will be creatures in search of meaning. Some of them - who knows? - will even pray.