How does the poem "Why I Left the Church" by Richard Garcia reflect current attitudes towards religion?

Richard Garcia's "Why I Left the Church" is a poem in which the speaker reflects on the ways he felt incompatible with the Catholic Church as a child. This could connect with current attitudes towards religion because many people see the Church as out of touch and think that the Church's strict rules limit them in ways they do not want to be limited.
Certainly, the speaker in the poem feels limited by the Church, as seen through his interaction with Sister Mary Bernadette. The speaker wears a "space helmet / to catechism," and the nun orders him out of the room and says he can return "when [he's] ready." This dismissal leads the speaker to ponder whether he has ever become "ready" to submit to the requirements of the Church. At the time, the speaker simply left the room and indulged his imagination: "I rose into the sky and beyond. / It is a good thing / I am wearing my helmet, / I thought as I floated / and turned in the blackness / and brightness of outer space." The speaker imagines himself floating up and out of the restrictions given by the Church and by Sister Mary Bernadette as a spokesperson for and symbol of the Church.
In other sections of the poem, the speaker indicates that the Church presents a vision of life that is incompatible with his own experience. He says of purgatory, "Maybe it was the demon-stoked / rotisseries of purgatory / where we would roast / hundreds of years / for the smallest of sins." The speaker uses vivid imagery to describe the Church's picture of purgatory, and his imagery helps to capture how extreme and unrealistic this picture truly is to many who are raised in the Church. Also, he thinks that the punishment does not match the crime, as the Church's hyperbolic descriptions of purgatory indicate that even "the smallest of sins" will meet with extreme consequences.
The speaker could be any current churchgoer who, at some point in his or her life, has lost faith in conventional religion because the tactics of the Church seem out of touch with contemporary life or too restrictive to account for the myriad believers under its influence.