MAIN IDEA:

This is pretty much a review of the statistical data about religiosity that demonstrates its consistent decline practically elsewhere in the world. It also presents different explanations of this phenomenon, mainly related to the change in human needs for security and adherence to various values that define relationships between individuals and groups. Here is a graph demonstrating the overall process over the late part of XX and the early part of XXI centuries:

MY TAKE ON IT:

The continuing process of secularization of humanity is clearly connected to an increasing understanding of the world and accumulation of knowledge about the environment that allows much more effective use of resources. Basically, due to the development of science and technology human needs satisfaction, which used to be unreliable and therefore required help from some external, all-powerful, and conscious authority, now could be reliably satisfied without such help. Correspondingly the god(s) that represented such authority and had to be convinced to help either by prayers or gifts or adherence to some specific behavior, increasingly become redundant. Who needs to pray for rain if one has an irrigation system, fertilizers, and other technology? This pretty much explains the relationship between income, prosperity, and religiosity. Rich people do not need to pray for something they can just buy, be it food supplies for the next year or even a baby. One does not need to pray if food can be reliably obtained in the local supermarket, while a fertility clinic provides a much better probability of having a baby than just praying. Interestingly enough, when society falls apart, so the local supermarket is empty or too expensive, there are no jobs available, and people feel powerless, the secular attitude goes away and religiosity comes back in force, as it happened in Eastern Europe after the failure of communism. So, the future of religiosity depends on the future of prosperity. The prosperous people hardly need the god(s), while people living in misery need help from somebody, or, at least assurance that they will be somehow compensated in the future, either by getting to paradise or by living in the bright communist future.