I really think persecution is too strong a word unless it's deliberately being done to exclude people of particular faiths (and there's no reason to think that's the case, here). Insensitivity and lack of inclusiveness, perhaps, but not active persecution.
My sense - and granted the Australian landscape is different - is that this trend is more about lifestyle changes impacting the whole family. People work longer hours (and in more households, both parents work), having activities after school becomes harder, the weekend gets encroached upon because it's more likely to be possible for people to participate. It does make things more difficult for families, where both parents are often run ragged, but I'm not really sure it has much to do directly with changing attitudes to religious involvement
Ok, I get what you are saying, I can accept insensitivity and lack of inclusiveness, however, in the US, if such lack of inclusiveness amounts to discrimination on the grounds of religion it is illegal under the First Amendment (as indeed many of the Covid restrictions on worship were found to be illegal by the US supreme court, even if one might argue they were objectively justified).
The bill of rights is an extremely strong aspect of US law. Americans may seem to be entitled and self serving in a sense when you look at how we interact with the law and our expectations, and our litigiousness, but the reason for that is the absolute nature of the bill of rights, the fact that the losing party does not pay all the costs of a civil lawsuit, but rather these are paid by each side, unless the lawsuit is found to have been itself really legally dubious, in which case the judge can award attorneys fees to the defendent, and also in the US sovereignty is in principle distributed among the citizenry, with each citizen jointly holding, with the other citizens, the sovereignity of the nation*, thus being sovereign and subject, for the rule of law applies equally to all persons, and in effect, the Federal Government exercises according to the Constitution powers which would be equivalent to those that a regent would exercise on behalf of a monarch, but of course the US government is a democratically elected Republic, as opposed to a parliamentary democracy in the Commonwealth System, which we are close to conceptually but with more separation of powers (although Australia with its bicameral State Parliaments or Legislatures or whatever you call them, except in Queensland where the upper house was abolished, and with its strong senate, is unusually close to the United States system).
*Note this is
emphatically not an endorsement of the insane and obnoxious “Sovereign citizen movement” in which people claim via conspiracy theories that they are themselves sovereigns and thus not subject to traffic stops by the police, et cetera, an absurd conspiracy theory which I have heard exists in Australia as well. For that matter, it is not an endorsement of the US system in which sovereignty rests with the citizens, who are subject to the laws and the Constitution, merely a characterization of how it differs, in terms of the bill of rights and this concept of “We the people”, from many other governments; for example, members of the Council of Europe can derogate from certain provisions in the European Charter of Human Rights during states of emergency, whereas constitutional provisions for such derogation in the US are extremely limited. For instance, the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII, which many Americans now regard as a moment of enormous shame, was likely illegal, but at the time you still had segregation, Jim Crow laws and other things later found to be illegal or else prohibited through legislation.
