From a Western European perspective, I can't see how the US moving towards more expected levels of religiosity is going to be 'a bad thing'. The amount of cultural/social/performative religiosity when I've been in the US is very strange to me and even religious UK friends of mine who've been, find it quite clawing.
Well, religion has been foundational to community life for centuries in the United States, particularly for marginalized communities like immigrants and obviously Black Americans. The flipside of individual freedom in religion (or lack thereof) is alienation from long-established communities and a breakdown in social cohesion. And I absolutely support individual freedom in or without religion--it's obviously enshrined in the First Amendment to the US Constitution)--but I can also acknowledge the trade-offs and downsides, especially in a such a hyper-capitalistic and unequal country as the United States.
And I agree with the sentiment expressed by others that the Republican-right-wing evangelical marriage and the Prosperity Gospel types growing at the expense of mainline Protestantism and Catholicism (as problematic as I find many aspects of both mainline Protestantism and Catholicism) is, in a word, "Bad."
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