America’s on-off relationship with divinity isn’t easy to track

livemint.com:

If religion in America were bought and sold like a stock, now might be a good time to short it. In recent months, a number of pundits have declared that the American love affair with organized religion—and Christianity in particular—is over. Recent surveys suggest that church attendance, already faltering in the 21st century, still hasn’t recovered in the wake of the pandemic.

But before we conclude that Americans are headed for a godless future, consider the longer ebb and flow of religiosity in the US. In the distant past, organized religion often lost adherents, only to rebound a generation later. And in modern times, church attendance has proven misleading, leading some otherwise-sensible observers to assume that secular thinking will triumph.

Many Americans have a vague idea that the first European settlers came to escape religious persecution. That’s sort of true, up to a point: Puritans in New England did; so, too, did various sects who settled in tolerant Pennsylvania. But many of the first settlers spent more time on Mammon worship.

Even Puritans lost much of their initial enthusiasm by the late 1600s. By the 1690s, church membership in the region had plummeted to 15%. That said, this same period underscores the peril of using church attendance as a proxy for religiosity.

The aristocratic planters of 17th-century Virginia may well have attended the Anglican church on Sundays, but was this evidence that they embraced religion? One study of a typical Virginia county points to the answer being ‘no.’ It found that only 15% of Caucasian infants were baptized between 1649 and 1680. One clergyman visiting Maryland in the 1680s described the colony as beyond redemption—a place where religion is despised. Here, too, we