Secularists have come disproportionately from among the ranks of one-time Christians, like “cradle” Catholics who became “lapsed” Catholics, and whose Christian faith commitments were never other than shallow. As Jim Davis and Michael Graham report in their book, The Great De-churching: Who’s Leaving, Why Are They Going, and What Will Bring Them Back? (2023), evidence also exists that more than a quarter of the growing cohort of “de-churched” white evangelical Christians hold at least one view that typically has been associated with anti-Semitic beliefs and sentiments: namely, that “the United States should be declared a Christian nation.”

What about religious commitments among American Jews themselves? In May 2021, the Pew Research Center reported that, in 2020, only about a quarter of American Jews believed in the God described in the Bible, only a fifth deemed religion “very important” in their lives, and only an eighth attended religious services at least weekly. ...

So, did anti-Semitism become more or less prevalent, virulent, and violent as religious commitments among Christians became shallower and Jewish identities, both religious and cultural, underwent assimilation or attenuation via intermarriage?