Cultural failure - I thought Alex Karp's recent book was pretty good and worth reading. It makes the case that our culture has failed to articulate the things that make the west great (and worth defending) and as a result it's creating a lot of political and cultural problems. https://www.amazon.com/Technological-Republic-Power-Belief-F...
Religion (particularly Judeo-Christian) has a lot of issues with empirical historical / scientific claims, but one thing it was good at is it's culturally adaptive. A lot of the cultural tooling and support it provided both with community and with some of the core cultural ideas around family and children - life purpose and direction are probably good things for most people. Secularism does this pretty poorly for the average person and what people substitute for what's missing is often much worse.
It all seems like the same Utopian thinking any way you cut it. It makes for good fiction books because we can't see the actual counterfactual.
The simpler explanation to me would be it wouldn't matter if you had a religious or secular society. Just different trade offs on the long march of progress.
People 80 years from now will live better lives than we do today. That is just the way it goes. Of course if you asked anyone during WW2 this 80 years ago about 2025 they would give a highly pessimistic answer about 2025.
Religion (particularly Judeo-Christian) has a lot of issues with empirical historical / scientific claims, but one thing it was good at is it's culturally adaptive. A lot of the cultural tooling and support it provided both with community and with some of the core cultural ideas around family and children - life purpose and direction are probably good things for most people. Secularism does this pretty poorly for the average person and what people substitute for what's missing is often much worse.