The reason why there are more Jesus freaks in USA

“The U.S. has found ways to limit the effects of education by keeping it local, and in private schools, anything can happen,” said Shults’s collaborator, Wesley Wildman, a professor of philosophy and ethics at Boston University. “Lately, there’s been encouragement from the highest levels of government to take a less than welcoming cultural attitude to pluralism. These are forms of resistance to secularization.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/07/artificial-intelligence-religion-atheism/565076/

According to Neil Johnson, a physicist who models terrorism and other extreme behaviors that arise in complex systems, “That’s an overstatement of the power of the models.” There’s no way that removing one factor from a society can reliably be counted on to slow or stop secularization, he said. That may well be true in the model, but “that’s a cartoon of the real world.” A real human society is so complex that “all the things may be interconnected in a different way than in the model.”

Although Johnson said he found the team’s research useful and important, he was unimpressed by their claim to have outperformed previous predictive methods. “Linear regression analysis is not very powerful for prediction,” he said. “I was a little surprised by the strength of their claims.” He cautioned that we should be skeptical about the word prediction in relation to this type of model. Opinion might be better.

“It’s great to have as a tool,” he said. “It’s like, you go to the doctor, they give an opinion. It’s always an opinion, we never say a doctor’s prediction. Usually, we go with the doctor’s opinion because they’ve seen many cases like this, many humans who come in with the same thing. It’s even more of an opinion with these types of models, because they haven’t necessarily seen many cases just like it—history mimics the past but doesn’t exactly repeat it.”