TFA says that the decision to place this guy was unanimous, which bodes well for the future.
To give an example of how this could manifest: it could be that religious impulse scales with material uncertainty and is also passed down in the family environment. Under a construction like this, you would expect religious impulse to begin fading among families where there is a certainty of sufficient food and shelter, with the fade occurring over the course of multiple generations. I'm not saying this specifically is the case, just proposing one mechanism that is broadly consistent with the shape of history.