Churches losing membership four times faster than they are gaining it

[Esquilax]

Another thing is that the world we live in is increasingly hostile to the kind of mysticism that religion needs to peddle to survive; we're figuring out more things every day, providing solutions to universal problems that actually work, and the more we discover, the less apt it is to believe in magical solutions, which is all religion really has. The church can only ever provide non-answers, justifications to its varying positions that rely solely on magic, nothing real, and it's simply a fact that this mystical stuff no longer looms quite as large, because there's less ignorance for it to loom in. Once upon a time theists could point to diseases and call them demons, and they had a real world consequence to attach their mysticism to, but they can't do that with the advent of germ theory. Ditto with lightning, and volcanoes, and varying mental health problems; the church has effectively lost all its toeholds in the real world with which to justify their nonsense.