I haven't seen any nation voting to go back to the divine right of kings, or even to reinstate an official religion. It seems that once people are free of religious coercion, they don't voluntarily go back.
I suspect the current infatuation with official sanctioning of religion, by a vocal segment of the Republican Party, is the primary reason why educated people tend to be horrified by the party.
It's a bit like what happened to the democrats with the peace movement. They found themselves attached to a winning party, assumed they were responsible for the wins, and proceeded to trash the party.
"It seems that once people are free of religious coercion, they don't voluntarily go back."
Yes, that certainly is true. It's true of me, and true of my family going back to the British Isles and Europe, the ones that weren't here before colonization at least. The Scots-Irish were placed in Ireland in an attempt at breaking Catholic control ... more a political move than a religious one. Anglo-Irish parliamentarians attempted the same thing. French Huguenots, Quaker, Dutch Reformed, Moravian, I count them all among the people without whom I would not exist. They were hounded across Europe and eventually ended up here, in what was to become a wonderful country, with a constitution expressly designed to never permit governmental meddling in religious matters again. But, "congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof" has been turned on it's ear, to the point that this "establishment clause" is actually being used to suppress religious expression. And, people who advocate no belief, in any god, are at the forefront of that suppression. That's where we've gone astray. You fail to see your own complicity, obviously, else you wouldn't be pontificating upon being free of religious coercion.