More evidence for the decline of religion in the U.S?

I haven't paid much attention to the whole Tea Party phenomenon, but I have Google alerts set up for stories about Ayn Rand. So this one came to my attention:

Tea Party Embraces Ayn Rand, by Noah Kristula-Green

Rand’s popularity tells us two things about the state of modern conservatism.

First, it suggests that Rand’s atheism and permissive social views are no longer deal-breakers among conservative thought leaders. Jennifer Burns, the author of Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, has explored Rand’s influence through the years. She told FrumForum that while religion had been a crucial issue for William F. Buckley and the conservatives of the 1970s, “someone like Glenn Beck isn’t going to argue about the existence of God or the need for religion. Beck and Limbaugh can use the parts of Rand they want to use and not engage the rest.”

I've read Burns's book. She argues that Rand helped to create a space on the right for conservatives with secular outlooks who didn't feel comfortable with the christian versions of conservatism dominant since the 1960's. Atheism also never had any necessary connection with Communism, so the collapse of the Soviet Union as an alternative political model 20 years ago has made room for a depoliticized nonbelief in religion in the U.S.

Kristula-Green continues:

Second and more troubling, the conservative rediscovery of Rand signals an increasing conservative divergence from mainstream America. Conservatives falsely assume that because more copies of Rand’s books are being sold, that everyone who reads them agrees with her. Conservatives are buying into Rand’s extreme views without understanding why many people—and not only liberals—revile her.

If, however, conservatives have warmed up to Rand in part because they share in the decline of religious belief in this country, how "divergent from mainstream America" does that make them, at least in this area?

Given that Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged reads today like survivalist porn, I still wonder how conservatives and libertarians handle the cognitive dissonance between their cornucopianism (for example, their enthusiasm for Matt Ridley's new book) and their doomsday predictions based on Austrian economics, which Atlas exemplifies. Yes, life promises to get better and better, despite what those "doomsayers" keep saying; but we need to build doomsteads in places like the Rocky Mountains to protect us from the coming hyperinflationary collapse of the American economy.