I buy that argument. I am a 44 year old atheist and even in my life I've seen the difference in society from when being a Christian in the US was just something most people did, to now where we're all much more secular.
Religion's negatives get a lot more press than it's positives.
Promoting cults is all well and good until your neighbor is in the wrong cult and then suddenly it's a disaster. My experience has been that "is religious" is not at all a good predictor of whether someone is going to be a "good citizen." Instead it's "lives in a community with low socioeconomic diversity," where that last one is not "pakistani vs british" but way more specific, like "center-right environmentalist in the middle third of income."
Religion's negatives get a lot more press than it's positives.