This leaves religious believers with two options. On the one hand, they could start to build institutions with a view to overturning the existing prohibition on taxpayer funding of explicitly religious schools. The strict laicité-like reading of the establishment clause that underwrites this prohibition is completely ahistorical as far as an originalist reading of the Constitution is concerned, and there’s no textual reason why it should prevail in the long term if resistance is persistent and organized enough. Of course, in a diverse and expansive country that is home to many religions, tailored religious instruction will never make a comeback in the public schools — for practical reasons, to say nothing of the legal challenges that would arise. But there are many countries in the world wherein both secular government schools and religious schools receive state funding, and there’s no reason why this arrangement couldn’t obtain in the U.S.

The other option would be for parents to pull their kids out of public school and either homeschool them or pay for them to attend private religious schools instead. This is the easy way out for affluent parents, to be sure, but it would require creative and generous charity work on their part in order to make such an option available for eager working-class families.

These are the only two realistic routes to a religious renaissance in the United States. Secular schooling is the cause of religious decline in the West, and only actions that address this cause will change its effects.