Comment by RiverCrochet

Not seeing the connection.

In "non-secular times" people as a whole were far less mobile, so they grew up and built connections around the same people, and any connections to the wider world were very low-bandwidth if they existed at all. So they trusted the people they were near because they were around them constantly, and also tended to resist change.

I think you are conflating religious values with how things were when people mostly lived among the same people for most of their lives and didn't have modern communication methods that brought the whole world (or an appearance thereof which is what modern social media is) to their face.