Indeed, those intellectuals are the establishment. And what was once a daring and rebellious stance is now just another example of lockstep conformists mindlessly echoing ideas that they haven't examined. That's when contemporary fiction mentions religion at all. Most of the time, in and out of speculative fiction, religion simply doesn't exist. Characters don't believe in God or even think about believing in God.
Nobody talks about religion.
Nobody belongs to any kind of church. Religion simply doesn't exist. In my judgment, this is exactly parallel to the way sex was dealt with in most fiction prior to the 1950s. It goes on all around us, but you'd never know it from the fiction. This is, I think, a serious lapse, a dishonesty in our contemporary literature.