Captured Thought: Religion

It's very interesting how more and more people in the U.S. are starting to look down upon religion and are starting to disregard it as an effective means of living one's life. Many people are starting to claim that they are atheists and that there is no reliable proof to prove the existence of any type of diety, (which I find kind of absurd and ironic). We are probably one of the few countries in the world that don't have any steady base of religion. This trend is significantly ironic considering that the foundations of the U.S. was based off of religion. As I started to think about this more and more I realized that maybe democracy played a major factor in this trend. Maybe our "freedom of religion" and "freedom of speech" has given us too much liberty and we now feel as if we can disregard all of the philosophical ideas about religion and deities in favor of our new 21st century philosophy of meaninglessness. I don't know if this completely makes sense, but if you take a look at all of the other countries around like the globe, you would see that they are almost the exact opposite.
Take India for example. They are a fairly socialist society and although there's a large amount of poverty in the country, the people there are extremely happy. The reason why they are so is because they are religious. They (the majority of the people in India) practice Hinduism and even though things might be falling apart in their country and they might not have enough money for food to last them for the whole week, they are still extremely hopefull and greatfull of what they do have. I find this incredibly influencial and extremely hopefull. I believe that if the U.S. were to have some unifying force (and i'm not saying that religion is the only example of a unifying force), then I think we would finally be able to escape this materialistic society that we live in and find peace and happiness within ourselves and within the world.