Study examines decline in American religiosity
May 28, 2020
» Continue to this story on American Enterprise Institute
CWN Editor's Note: “The present decline is striking in its speed and uniformity across different measures of religiosity,” writes Lyman Stone of the American Enterprise Institute. “But a longer historical perspective suggests some caution in making overbold statements about what such a decline might portend. At the dawn of the American republic in the 1780s, probably just a third of Americans were members in any religious body, and just a fifth could be found at church on a given Sunday. This was a historic low ebb in American religiosity.”
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Posted by: Randal Mandock -
May. 29, 2020 7:40 AM ET USA
I am not sure why this is not obvious to everyone. From the report summary: "[E]xpansions in government service provision and especially increasingly secularized government control of education significantly drive secularization and can account for virtually the entire increase in secularization around the developed world. The decline in religiosity in America is not the product of a natural change in preferences, but an engineered outcome of clearly identifiable policy choices in the past."
