I'm unsure if its related to estrangement, but I don't think its farfetched to assume its a big factor. Its interesting to me that for many who consider themsel

I'm unsure if its related to estrangement, but I don't think its farfetched to assume its a big factor. Its interesting to me that for many who consider themselves non-religious often have taken up something else (overwhemingly, politics it seems) to fill the hole, often with the same zeal and dogmatic outlook that they look down on in traditional faith-based belief systems. But I also think its more than simply the abandonment of religion. It is the abandonment of religion combined with the rise of the internet/social media. It isn't only religion that has suffered participation declines in the previous decades. Local communities of all kinds have crumbled. The internet has provided people with a means of escape from anyone that could possibly disagree with you and allows you to find perfectly insular cultural bubbles. This is immediately more gratifying than real world relationships, but it also conditions people to have zero tolerance for anyone in "meat space" that isn't in complete alignment with them, in which case they simply distance themselves from the relationship. But at the same time, many of these online community relationships tend to be more shallow and superficial than real life ones, which is why so many people report strong feelings of loneliness in their lives. We've essentially dismantled most of our traditional local sources of community and replaced them with superficial but unsatisfying online ones.