“The present decline is striking in its speed and uniformity across different measures of religiosity,” writes Lyman Stone of the American Enterprise Institute. “But a longer historical perspective suggests some caution in making overbold statements about what such a decline might portend. At the dawn of the American republic in the 1780s, probably just a third of Americans were members in any religious body, and just a fifth could be found at church on a given Sunday. This was a historic low ebb in American religiosity.”