The religiosity of the United States has impressed observers since the early 19th century, and American levels of religious involvement remain strikingly high compared to those in virtually all highly developed countries. The US is often taken to be a decisive counterexample to the idea that modernization tends to undermine religious belief and activity (what’s known as the ‘secularization thesis’).
It’s become clear, though, that American religiosity has been declining for decades. What’s more, this change has been produced by the generational patterns underlying religious decline elsewhere in the West: each successive birth cohort is less religious than the preceding one. Taken together, these two facts mean that trends in religiosity are remarkably similar across the western world....