Sydney's Christians aren't sold: Church leaders and experts push back on One Nation's pitch for the pew vote

One Nation has spent months positioning itself as the natural political home for Christian voters alienated by Labor's social agenda. Sydney's church communities, by and large, aren't buying it.

The pitch landed squarely in view this week when Chris Minns addressed the NSW Labor state conference and acknowledged his government faces a steep climb to hold power at the 2027 state election, with One Nation polling strongly in outer-suburban and regional electorates. Several of those seats — Penrith, Camden, and Riverstone among them — contain significant church-attending populations. That arithmetic has focused minds at party headquarters and in the pews alike.

Political scientists at the University of Sydney's Department of Government and International Relations point to a structural problem with One Nation's religious outreach. Australian church attendance has been falling for two decades — the 2021 census recorded just 44 per cent of Australians identifying as Christian, down from 61 per cent in 2001 — but the congregations that remain are not monolithic. Mainline Protestant denominations, Catholic parishes in Western Sydney, and Pentecostal megachurches hold sharply different views on the policy areas One Nation has tried to weaponise, including immigration, Indigenous recognition, and climate change.

Western Sydney churches see the pitch differently

The demographic reality is hardest to ignore in Western Sydney, where the fastest-growing congregations are predominantly migrant communities. Blacktown's Hillsong-adjacent independent churches draw heavily from Filipino, South Korean, and Pacific Islander families. The Coptic Orthodox Diocese of Sydney, centred on its cathedral in Arncliffe, represents one of the city's largest concentrated Christian communities, with roots in Egyptian immigration stretching back to the 1960s. Telling those congregants that stricter immigration policy aligns with their values is, as several observers put it this week, a difficult sell.

The Australian Christian Lobby, which operates a Sydney office and holds real sway among theologically conservative voters, has declined to endorse any party ahead of the 2027 election. The organisation's repeated public position is that it grades candidates individually against a scorecard covering issues from religious freedom protections to euthanasia legislation. That approach cuts across the neat partisan lines One Nation is trying to draw.

Academic researchers tracking religion and voting behaviour note that the Liberal Party historically captured around 55 per cent of self-identified Christian voters at state and federal levels, a coalition One Nation is now trying to fragment. The 2025 federal election results in the seat of Mitchell — covering Baulkham Hills and Castle Hill, one of Sydney's densest concentrations of church-going families — showed One Nation preferences flowing inconsistently, with splits along generational and ethnic lines that party strategists had not fully anticipated.

Theology, not just politics, driving the resistance

Clergy and lay leaders across denominations have been notably cautious about One Nation's overtures. Sydney Anglican circles, which carry institutional weight through Moore Theological College in Newtown, have historically engaged with conservative politics but have also maintained a tradition of critiquing ethno-nationalism on scriptural grounds. The Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney, under Archbishop Anthony Fisher, has been consistent in its criticism of policies it regards as incompatible with Catholic Social Teaching, particularly regarding asylum seekers — a policy area where One Nation sits far to the right.

Pentecostal communities, sometimes assumed by strategists to be naturally aligned with populist conservatism, are also more complex than the caricature suggests. Many of the larger churches operating out of Seven Hills and Rooty Hill have active social justice programs and refugee support networks, work that sits awkwardly alongside One Nation's platform.

Heading into the 2027 campaign cycle, the practical question for Labor and the Liberal Party alike is whether One Nation can consolidate even a meaningful fraction of the Christian vote in marginal Western Sydney seats. Analysts at Macquarie University's Centre for Research in Social Inclusion have flagged that religious identity is a far weaker predictor of voting intention in multicultural electorates than income, housing stress, and transport access — the very issues Labor has staked its second term on. With Metro West construction ongoing and rental vacancy rates in Parramatta sitting below one per cent, those material pressures may prove more decisive in the pew than any appeal to cultural Christianity.