For example, a 2007 article in The Boston Globe, “The Nonbelievers,” noted that, “Today, Americans appear to be following a larger trend of people around the world abandoning organized religion, particularly those in wealthier, more educated countries.”

The Boston Globe article referenced an encouraging Pew Research Center for the People & the Press study that found, “20 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 25 say they have no religious affiliation or consider themselves atheists or agnostics — nearly double those who said that in a similar survey 20 years ago.”

The study’s authors observed, “This change appears to be generational in nature, with each new generation displaying lower levels of religious commitment than the preceding one.”

Similarly, a story in USA Today, “Young adults aren’t sticking with church,” reported that Protestant churches are losing young adults in “sobering” numbers.

Another study, by a Christian research organization, demonstrated that 16- to 29-year-olds are “more skeptical of and resistant to Christianity than were people of the same age just a decade ago,” and “exhibit a greater degree of criticism toward Christianity than did previous generations when they were at the same stage of life.”

The survey also found that more than half of young churchgoers perceived Christianity to be “hypocritical,” and “too involved in politics,” and one-third (correctly) identified Christianity as “out of touch with reality.”

These are very encouraging statistics. If these trends continue, faith in the U.S. may begin to resemble that of “post-Christian” Europe, where religion is a more private matter and many churches go perpetually unoccupied, demoted to the status of cultural museums.

Europeans are far more likely to consider belief in God a personal embarrassment best kept private. As former British Prime Minister Tony Blair recently lamented, “You talk about (religious faith) in our system and, frankly, people do think you’re a nutter.”

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not expecting, or even hoping, for a complete end to religious belief and assorted fantasies of faith. As I’ve written previously, I couldn’t care less if people worship the Virgin Mary or a virgin daiquiri, so long as they don’t push it on our secular society. However, the growing evidence of a decline in participation with the rigidly dogmatic and authoritarian tendencies of organized religion fills me with optimism.

I’ve grown tired of watching unsupported faith-based beliefs mutate from a relatively harmless, privately held belief into an ignorance-fueled destructive force in public policy. The ongoing fight to inject creationism into public science classes, the ideological push for abstinence-only sex education (despite evidence of its ineffectiveness), and the refusal to legally recognize “sinful” homosexual relationships represent extremely obvious examples of how the consequences of Christian dogmatism are imposed on society.

Atheist writing — my own included — sometimes contemptuously derides the irrationality of religious faith. It’s regrettable that it became necessary to publicly criticize the “sacred beliefs” of others, but fanatical Christian culture warriors forced a harsh response.

As Thomas Jefferson noted when considering the preposterousness of the Holy Trinity, “Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions.”

Christian mythology is offensive to the rational mind, embraced by believers with a certainty that’s either entirely unrelated or far disproportionate to evidence, making it well deserving of ridicule when foisted on a secular society.

I’m increasingly optimistic that current trends indicate a continuing generational decline of religiosity in America. Any reduction, of course, will be most welcome.

John Bice is a State News columnist. Reach him at bice@msu.edu.