http://radtradthomist.chojnowski.me/2019/04/the-great-american-apostasy-by.htmlPolitical "Liberty" + Religious "Liberty" + sɛҳuąƖ "Liberty" + Marriage "Liberty" = Modern Apostate America or "Why is My Neighbor Mowing Her Lawn on Sunday?"
https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/13/us/no-religion-largest-group-first-time-usa-trnd/index.htmlDr. Chojnowski: Ever wonder why your neighbor seems to have no concern for the Sabbath day, when they are shopping or doing their lawn as you come back from Mass? Why does Sunday feel like another day in the America of 2019. Putting aside the 3% of the US population that can be classified as Jєωιѕн, Muslim, or Seventh-Day Adventist, we must suppose that most of the rest have ancestors who historically honored the Sunday Sabbath day. In the Connecticut of my youth, they even had "Blue Laws" that closed down stores on Sunday. If it were not for our own religious observance, Good Friday would be the most depressing of days since the population as a whole does not seem to distinguish this day in which Our Lord's sacrifice was offered from any other day of the year.
The statistics presented do not surprise me, especially the stark rise in the agnostic/atheist population. Teaching at Gonzaga University for 11 years, from 2004 to 2015, I found that the students had generally no religious sentiments at all. In fact, they were totally indifferent to questions of truth. The only students that seemed to believe in anything were the Communists --- they had their own club at the university. The most prevalent religious sentiment was radical anti-religion. The few traditional Catholics that I had were silent when larger issues of truth were raised. This was a "Catholic" university in which the majority of the students came from "Catholic" high schools, generally from the region and generally Jesuit.
What you find in our own traditional Catholic communities is a progression through to complete secularization with this third generation of "traditional" Catholics. Religion seems to have become for this latest generation a very thin powdering of a secular, materialistic cake that has as its main content "the American dream."
From the Statistics offered in this article, since 1990 --- I am not sure of the significance of this date --- we see a collapse of Establishment Protestantism, while the Catholic Church and Evangelical Protestantism is undergoing a slow, an agonizingly slow, decline. We seem to be headed towards the sharply anti-religious, atheistic society that we find among the British.
In the next article, we will delve into a text that traces the present apostasy affecting the Catholic world to the United States and the "American proposition." The "Americanization" of the Catholic Church seems to be the root of the present apostasy. Henry Luce, Claire Booth Luce, Fr. John Courtney Murray, Time magazine vs. Cardinal Ottaviani, Msgr. Fenton, and a few courageous others. How the Sister Lucy case is involved in this "Americanist Apostasy," still remains to be uncovered. Many are working very hard on it.