Rorty on an analogy with the decline of religious faith

The Last Judgement Mosiac on St Vitus' Cathedral, Prague.

Here's old man Rorty on the decline of religion and the theology of heavenly rewards:

That decline, and specifically the decline of people's ability to take the idea of postmortem rewards seriously, has not weakened liberal societies and indeed has strengthened them. Lots of people in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries predicted the opposite. They thought that hope of heaven was required to supply moral fiber and social glue - that there was little point, for example, in having an atheist swear to tell the truth in a court of law. As it turned out, however, willingness to endure suffering for the sake of future reward was transfered from individual rewards to social ones, from one's hopes for paradise to one's hopes for one's grandchildren...

Fascinating, this, given the rhetoric of environmentalism AND also technological triumphalism which reference grandchildren, though both contradict one another profoundly.

However, his comment about ethics is interesting: one which Christian apologists fail to realise frequently. Somehow, humans continue to behave in more or less ethical consistency in liberal society without reference to religion. (By which I mean: sure, people remain sinful and greedy, but chaos does not reign as we might expect it to). How is this to be accounted for? Has Rorty perhaps overestimated religion's decline? Are people still referencing some kind of divine judgement seat even though they do not articulate it in this way? Are people merely doing what helps them (and theirs) to get along best - ie, is it actually in their self-interest to act 'ethically' and so they do it?