The rapid advancement of technology has had lasting impacts on the way we communicate, how we work, how we socialise and how we relate to ourselves and others. So it’s no surprise that it has also had an effect on our rituals.

But while the media loves to be alarmist about these changes, what the statistics show is that ritual isn’t going anywhere; it’s just responding to our changing priorities and culture.

In Australia and other westernised cultures, some inherited, institution-led and collective rituals are weakening, with more personalised, flexible, secular, digital and wellbeing-oriented rituals taking their place.

While religion remains central to ritual life across much of Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and elsewhere, Australia has slowly been undergoing the process of religious disaffiliation. Globally, 75.8% of people still identified with a religion in 2020. Islam grew particularly rapidly between 2010 and 2020, while the religiously unaffiliated also increased from 23.3% to 24.2% of the global population.

In Australia, 86.2% of Australians identified as Christians in 1971 but by 2021 that number dropped significantly to only 43.9%. Over the same period, the number of Australians reporting no religion increased from 6.7% to 38.9%. Among Millennials in 2021, 46.5% reported no religion.

Pew Research Centre estimated that between 2010 and 2020 Australia experienced a 17-percentage-point increase in its religiously unaffiliated population, one of the largest shifts recorded internationally.

However, other statistics point to it being less about religious rituals being lost, but more about institutional ritual being on the decline, with personalised spiritual practices taking its place. One such study found that in the US, 23% of adults say they meditate for spiritual reasons at least weekly, while 30% visit natural places for spiritual reasons at least monthly.

Standardised ceremonies are also making way for personalised ones, with weddings a prime example in Australia. While marriage isn’t going anywhere (there were 118,804 registered marriages in 2025), the ritual is undergoing change. In 2001, 53.1% of Australian marriages were conducted by civil celebrants and 46.9% by ministers of religion. By 2021, civil celebrants conducted 80.7%, while ministers of religion conducted only 19.3%.

Rather than abandoning the wedding ritual, Australians have increasingly taken ownership of it: their vows, music, location, readings, clothes, participants and symbolism. This points to one of the defining transformations of modern ritual: from prescribed meaning to personally authored meaning.

Another way our rituals are transforming is a decline in face-to-face gatherings. In a study by the OECD, it was found that in 21 European OECD countries, the proportion of people meeting friends daily fell from 21% in 2006 to 12% in 2022, with daily gatherings with family members outside the household falling from 17% to 11%.

In Australia, 68% of Australians had weekly face-to-face contact with family or friends outside their household in 2009, with that number falling to 53% in 2025.

This potentially means the loss of some of those mundane-but-important rituals: Sunday lunch at Mum’s, popping around to a friend’s house, regular drinks after work or the weekly neighbourhood catch-up.

It also helps explain why the ritual matters. In 2024, around 15% of Australians experienced social isolation and 15% experienced loneliness. This statistic could also be due to a decrease in formal civic and community rituals, with a drop in regular participation in clubs, associations and volunteering recorded across the country.

In Australia, formal volunteering through an organisation fell from 30% of people in 2019 to 23% in 2025. Social-group involvement declined from 51.1% to 45.3%, while involvement in community-support groups fell from 25.3% to 20.7%.

These statistics, however, do not indicate that Australians have stopped helping each other. In 2025, 30% of citizens undertook informal volunteering in the preceding four weeks. Akin to religious rituals, rather than joining an organisation (like a Rotary Club) and attending on a weekly basis, people might engage when a specific event or need arises (like a natural disaster).

Again, the shift seems to be formal/informal.

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