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I'm having a hard time understanding this argument. You read old books which constantly talk about God, divine providence, etc... and your conclusion is that people weren't religious?
If anything, modern people tend to vastly underestimate just how religious people were in the past. As you point out, in the 1600s of Europe, there wasn't a competing ethos. Christianity served not just as a religion in the modern sense, but as law, cosmology, and history as well. Religion permeated all aspects of society. That is completely gone now.
Great Awakening aside, Christianity has been in a near monotonic decline since the Renaissance. People today are less religious than those of 1980, who were less religious than 1950, who were less religious than 1920, etc...
It’s always been funny to me when people don’t see it in reverse now. And personally I hold the opinion that most of the religious fervor or lack thereof comes down to culture. People in general don’t read the texts, unless they’re going into ministry of some sort. They don’t really think about theology or anything else. If you’re raised in a culture that is absolutely convinced that the Eucharist is literal actually the Body and Blood, you will believe it.
A big part, to me, of the difference has been public education with its officially unofficial agnosticism. When the culture tells you that god/s don’t matter, and when public officials are reluctant to sound too religious, it’s basically creating a culture of atheism. People will almost always follow the party line of those aspirational figures in public life on most issues. And our political and social elites are at best deist in a vary vague sense, or educational institutions are atheist or agnostic (they aren’t officially going to mock you for being religious, but they’re certainly not going to acknowledge religion in a positive way), and most social heroes are atheists. Without a positive example of the elite being religious, the end result is the decline of the religion.
I didn't. I was raised in a culture that was monolithically christian (at least nominally) and I always took it as a metaphor until I was explained that it was actually meant to be taken literally (transubstantiation) and it seemed... idiotic? That was the first crack for me.
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