I wonder to what extent that is because institutions were set up to address prior conditions. It may well be that we will see this as a low ebb in church membership rather than the midpoint of a trend.
Let's see... would you say that it's fair to say that religiosity declines as one's sense of control and understanding of the world increases (whether that sense is right or wrong)? So, for example, because I understand that lightning is caused by physical phenomena related to the violent movement of air masses, rather than, say, Zeus being angry or demons cavorting, I'm less likely to make a burnt offering to Zeus or pray to the Virgin Mary and light a candle blessed on Candlemas (Feast of the Purification of the Virgin and candles blessed at Candlemas mass were widely believed to protect against lightning and most prudent householders in the late medieval and early-modern periods tried to keep a few around for protection during storms and delivery of babies).
But what if we are entering an age where people feel less control and more anxiety?
Also, my mother always contended that in the disarray of Vatican II, the Catholic Church which was the center of communal life in her childhood became nothing more than a place to go for Mass in my childhood. So she understood my disinterest in the Church as a reflection of the Church's fundamental disinterest in me (she would not have used those exact words, but that's the essence of it). What if churches figure out, in an age of fractured communities, to once again become the pole of a community?
In other words, I could see many of the trends we see explaining the decline in church attendance being used to explain the increase in church attendance if the trend were to reverse.
Similarly, the article blames late-stage capitalism for the decline in religion, while David Brooks in his take on it blames the decline in religion for late-stage capitalism. In his view, the churches provided a break on boundless greed which has become more manifest as the influence of religion wanes.
Personally, I feel that Brooks and the article cited above are missing something major, but I just don't know what it is! I guess I am skeptical of any attempt to look at two trends as broad and vague as these and say one causes the other.
The first article on the other hand... demographics are powerful and that suggests a trend that will be hard to reverse. But it doesn't really explain why, in a way that convinces me, there is such a sudden decline in religiosity across generations.
BTW, I come to this as someone who was born into a very religious family, never once believed in any of it myself, and somehow ended up with a PhD and 20 years of research focused on who resisted the Reformation and how people adapted to and adopted the Reformed religion. So it's not a topic where I expect to find an answer that I find satisfying between now and the time I die.
