"If church is the largest and most important institution of civil society, and it is the wellspring of most of the rest of civil society, then the retreat of churches in America is the erosion of civil society in America. The erosion of civil society in America means the collapse of community in America. The collapse of community in America is the collapse of family, and the death of the American Dream. In this alienating wasteland we get increased inequality, decreased mobility, and faded hope. Then we get even more broken families, even less churchgoing, and more deaths of despair."
So Timothy P Carney argues in his new book, Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse. Deaths of despair are the triple calamity of suicide, death from complications of alcoholism, and drug overdoses. The church - by which the author means all religions, including Judaism and Islam - is in severe decline in this country. Instead of being the horrifying threat that Margaret Atwood portrays it in The Handmaid's Tale and its new sequel, The Testaments, it is the institution that produces America at its best as described by Alexis de Toqueville in Democracy in America.