Gallup: U.S. church membership dips below 50% for first time

From basic evolutionary biology, there is no universall "fitness", only situational fitness. In the middle ages, in a world without contraception, with extreme pressures to marriage, without pornography or any other non-intercourse sexual releases, being religious or not matters little in fertility rate. Although in frankness, it still did, that's how rome became christian in the first place, Christians married later (so had higher chances of survival), and treasured their baby girls instead of exposing them to death, small fertility advantages added up expontentially over time.

In the 21st age, the environment has shifted so much against irreligious/low commitment people in terms of reproductive fitness, due to those above factors heavily selecting against them. Literally only religious people, no matter what part of the world you are looking at, are able to maintain above replacement fertility. Irreligious people' population decline, in the long run, at least 25% every generation, will be far faster than they can "convert" religious people. Look at the amish and mormon fertility rates, read decades of research by Eric Kaufmann, and the answer is rather self evident

> This is, consistently, what I hear from friends and family as to why they have drifted away from the Catholic church, and is solidly my own reason as well.

I was raised Catholic and decided, as a teenager, that I didn't want to be Catholic as an adult.

> My theory is that people have always felt that way, but it was harder to nail down these awful people before social media.

IMO, two things:

1: The changes in the 1960s to the English (native language) mass

2: The shift towards conservative politics

Have you been to a latin mass? (The old-style mass that the Church conducted until the 1960s.) It's a very different experience than modern Catholicism, and much more similar to eastern-style worship.

But, more importantly, the latin mass has a lot less preaching. It's a meditation, and then a social gathering afterwards. It's a lot more universal in the sense that you don't really have to explicitly align with the beliefs to still be comfortable with the community. (Edit: As in, if you don't believe in the whole Jesus thing, you can just enjoy the chanting at let your mind drift away.)

But, the thing that really turned me off of the Catholic church was the drift towards conservative politics. I attended a friend's wedding where the church had a massive anti-abortion billboard over their parking lot for the whole town to see. Another time I went to a mass in honor of some deceased family members and there were posters in the church advocating that members vote against marijuana legalization.

The same can be said of science in that science can't explain the supernatural or the after-life. Science was never meant to explain those things but we have tried to make it a replacement by trying to naturalize everything. Things that go beyond this realm of understanding and reason.

> And their "priests" do not claim to be shadow of the divine, and certainly do not threaten them with afterlife.

Oh yes, if you look at the peddlers of righteous outrage we have today, and their continuous infighting, there's no difference. Dare to deviate from the line? Wrongthink! Cancelled! Even their own people fall pray to this as they get accused of not being outraged enough by their comrades.

I am from Brazil... To be honest this would be a complete disaster here.

1. My city main hospital, belongs to Catholic Church, same applies to many other cities.

2. Many of our leading universities, doing research and important work, belong to Catholic Church, notably PUC-RIO, the creators of Lua language.

3. Protestant churches here are the major organizations driving away drug dealers, some took the donations to build better light system in public parks, provide free food, counseling, and so on.

4. We have an hospital considered one of the best of world for certain treatments, to the point people from first world countries sometimes come here for this hospital, and it belongs to a Jewish organization.

And the list goes and goes on... a lot of public infrastructure here belongs to religious organizations, if the government taxed them the result would be the government suddenly needing to spend a ton of their own money replacing what these organizations are doing, and I doubt it would work well, for example the government-owned hospital in my city killed people more than once for stupid reasons (including giving penicilin to a guy that warned them he was allergic!), so the population rely on the catholic hospital instead.

EDIT: reading a sibling comment made me remember another important one: the religious organizations here are major drivers for cultural education, for example our public-owned orchestras are often filled with church-trained people, ditto for audio engineering, theather and many other "art"-related professions.