I was trying to rein myself in, because this is a good topic for discussion and there's probably five other ongoing threads that would make a better home for it, but just to quickly address your post, I'm using church attendance in the same overall bucket as any social group as described in Puttnam's "Bowling Alone". It's not that they are religious, it's that it's a community not purely based on socioeconomic traits and encourages mixing of different personalities, political preferences, and there's good scholarship that the community takes the edge off extremist beliefs.
FWIW, the Enlightenment had to reckon with your concern about faith versus secular values, and that tension heavily influenced the founding fathers. I think Jefferson would say that religion doesn't open the mind to falsehood, but that many professed believers who's minds are already open to conspiracies and fantasy are more forgiving of the mystical as an explanation for things they can't comprehend.
Taking it back to social media, the voter who believes that Jesus saved Trump from assassination no longer has a neighbor or fellow congregant who gently dissuades him; instead he's found a group on Facebook or X that is reinforcing his beliefs.
What should be really scary is that these people are fundamentally lonely, and are going to be the very first community emotionally dependent on an AI that is too novel and unregulated to have much sense of what comes next.