Religious conviction and adherence to organized ministries is more prevalent in regions where the quality of life suffers, such as throughout the Americas. Here in the US, precarity (housing precarity, food precarity, job precarity, etc.) feeds into the kind of magical thinking that fuels adherence to faith and authoritarian ideology (that a charismatic figure will use their power to fix our personal woes).

So religion is not a personal symptom like a fever or cough, it's a community problem, like elevated hate crime or recurring rampage killings.