Freedom of religion in the US Constitution (and other associated thoughts....)

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

What TNF is describing is a combination of factors.  First of all, religious adherence as measured by a combination of membership and attendance is pretty much near its historical high in the US.

http://madeinamericathebook.wordpress.com/2010/03/26/a-christian-america-what-history-shows/


The surge in church membership and attendance in the early Cold War era was more a combination of the Baby Boom, since families with kids are more likely to go to church than those without them and of the recovery from the Great Depression which adversely affected membership and attendance due to people feeling they couldn't afford to be churchy, an effect which adversely affected all sorts of membership based groups:

http://ethicalpolitics.org/reviews/social-solidarity-2.htm


One notable effect in the past fifty years has been the drop in attendance by Catholics.  Attendance by Protestants has remained fairly constant over the years. while Catholics who used to attend regularly far more than Protestants are now indistinguishable from Protestants:

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Attendance may have increased, but paid membership certainly would have had reasons to decline during the depression and the first graph is trying to measure both in one statistic.  I do caution tho that the second graph does include non-religious groups as well and is based on just membership and not activity, so in the absence of some data to confirm what happened, making assumption for attendance and membership separately for 1926-1956 is rather iffy.