But overall I think that's about right. Sometimes more optimism seems warranted, but for every datum we see about the shrinking religiosity of the young, there are at least two that show that previously promising results about the youth of yesteryear have faded into the norm. People get more religious as they age. Some of it is peer/societal pressure. Some of it is surrender to anti-atheist bigotry. Some of it is the socially implanted axiom that they need to give their kids a religion. Some of it is fear of death. Hell a tiny bit of it is people finding a particular religion/sect that suits them more than they expected.
All that adds up though to an incredibly slow gain for secularism no matter how the current crop of kids score for now. The way I look at it is religiosity in Europe faded just as slowly after the scientific revolution of Copernicus, Galileo et al passed into the industrial revolution and the (intellectuals only) Enlightenment. Even in late Victorian times, public atheism was a huge scandal (and a crime) and religiosity was only marginally less entrenched than pre-Luther. The only thing that accelerated rationalism was the utter horror of losing tens of millions in a single brutal war. The more you know about WWI the less easy it is to accept a loving god. Experiencing the fucking thing would have deconverted most saints I would imagine.
Other than that huge spike, reinforced 20 years later with another, the decline in religion in Europe was and is incredibly slow-moving. The US suffered at a much reduced rate and much more distant, in many ways, impact through those wars, so secularization has continued to move maddeningly slowly here. I'm basing my estimation on that rate, where simplistic daddy-in-the-sky beliefs are still held by the vast majority (don't let the DU Keller Klatch pretend otherwise - at least 2/3 in the US still believe in a literal Satan, Adam and Eve, Angels, etc) and where each generation only chips away a couple of % throughout their lifecycle.
The guess is only a guess of course, but I would be surprised if the tolerance limits are more than 100 yrs from that guess, in either direction.
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