Loose canon: The British Museum’s Living with Gods exhibition describes some of the myriad ways in which faith expresses itself
www.theguardian.com
As we have seen in the former USSR, the use of direct force to stamp out religion failed no matter how severe the persecution.
Likewise the early church was routinely oppressed and thrown to the lions, etc.
So as we see, direct opposition fails miserably.
But today, as the church progressively moves to the Left, we see the church embrace much of the Left wing ideology of our day. We have a Pope who rails about the evils of building walls, but seemingly ignores the mass genocide of abortion, at least, abortion is labeled mass genocide officially by the church to this day. And we see many on the Left say that Jesus would want immigrants into countries to feed them, seemingly taking up the Christian religion briefly to achieve political support, but then rejecting it once someone may say that gay marriage is an abomination before God.
So as the church move towards Marx, the man who said religion is the opiate for the masses, it seemingly is dying off in the Western world. I think the Left has finally understood how to destroy religion, just subvert the religious leaders towards the pervasive political ideology of the world so that you can't really tell the difference. Then the church loses all appeal, being indistinguishable from the rest of the world like the Catholics who are a majority on the Supreme Court but refuse to overturn Roe vs. Wade.
Once the salt has lost all its flavor, it goes bye, bye.