One Nation Targets Church Pews, But Melbourne's Faith Leaders Have Questions

One Nation has mounted a deliberate push into Melbourne's church communities ahead of next year's federal electoral cycle, distributing literature and attending services in outer-suburban and regional parishes — but religious leaders, political analysts and interfaith advocates say the party's pitch may be harder to sell than its strategists expect.

The campaign matters because Victoria's Christian population is neither small nor monolithic. The 2021 Census recorded roughly 3.4 million Victorians identifying as Christian — about 53 per cent of the state's population at the time, a figure that has since dipped slightly but still represents an enormous bloc. One Nation's calculation appears to be that a segment of that constituency, alienated by the major parties on issues including gender policy, school curricula and religious freedom legislation, is available for the taking.

What Melbourne's Faith and Policy Voices Are Saying

The Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture, which tracks political engagement with religious communities nationally, has flagged a tension that runs through One Nation's pitch: the party's climate scepticism, its historically harsh rhetoric on refugee and asylum seeker policy, and its opposition to foreign aid programs all sit uncomfortably alongside the social justice teachings prominent in many Melbourne congregations. Inner-city parishes along Sydney Road in Brunswick and the Catholic community centred around St Patrick's Cathedral on Gisborne Street in East Melbourne have long been associated with social welfare work, including refugee support through the Jesuit Refugee Service Australia.

Political scientists at the University of Melbourne's School of Social and Political Sciences have pointed out that One Nation's previous attempts to court Christian voters — most prominently around the 2019 federal election — produced limited results in Victoria specifically. The party polled below two per cent in most Melbourne metropolitan seats at the 2022 federal election. Analysts note the party appears to be sharpening its messaging on religious freedoms, parental rights in education, and opposition to the Victorian government's controversial Conversion Practices Prohibition Act 2021, which banned so-called conversion therapy. That legislation remains a live grievance in some conservative church networks.

The Uniting Church in Australia's Victorian and Tasmanian Synod, headquartered on Little Collins Street in the CBD, has not commented directly on One Nation's campaign, but the Synod's publicly stated positions on refugees, climate action and First Nations reconciliation place it at odds with much of what the party stands for. The Catholic Social Services Victoria network, similarly, has spending commitments and advocacy positions that conflict with One Nation's welfare policy platform.

The Conscience Problem

The core difficulty for One Nation is that Christian voters in Melbourne — as data from the Australian Election Study consistently shows — do not vote as a bloc and do not weight their religious identity above economic and healthcare concerns when they enter a polling booth. A 2023 Lowy Institute survey found only 11 per cent of Australians said religious beliefs were a major factor in their voting decisions, a figure markedly lower than comparable surveys in the United States.

Interfaith advocacy group Common Grace, which operates nationally including through Melbourne-based partner organisations, has previously described One Nation's policy on asylum seekers as incompatible with Christian scripture's instruction on welcoming the stranger. The organisation has not yet issued a formal response to the current campaign push, but its past statements leave little ambiguity about where it stands.

For pastors and priests navigating their congregations through an increasingly polarised political environment, the advice from denominational bodies has largely been the same: encourage civic participation, stop short of endorsing parties, and let members weigh policy against conscience. That approach is unlikely to deliver One Nation the clean breakthrough it is advertising internally.

Watch the next few months. One Nation is expected to hold community forums in growth corridors including Melton and Pakenham — outer-Melbourne seats where population pressures, cost-of-living stress and shifting demographics have already scrambled traditional voting patterns. Whether the party can convert church outreach into primary votes in those electorates will tell analysts a great deal about the limits of faith-based political targeting in contemporary Victoria.