Eh, you throw out the 1/3 of the religious who have a direct religious prohibition against drinking and the correlation probably goes away.

Maybe depends on whether "would never drink again" and "basically never drink" are included in your definition of "never".

There are a lot of non-religious reasons people don't drink, and a lot of daylight between "one drink a week" and "zero drinks an ever". I fall into the "maybe 3-4 drinks per year" category. It could be more, it could be less -- alcohol just doesn't really occupy a different space for me than, say, pickles. I like pickles well enough, if one comes with my sandwich at a diner I'll eat it. But I only think to get a pickle from the jar in my fridge like once or twice a year, and eating pickles and drinking alcohol have about the same impact on my life and happiness.

I think I agree, but I’m not sure how that fits into the conversation. The OP was marveling at people who don’t drink heavily (and attributed their casual drinking to puritanism), not those who abstained altogether. People who abstain altogether in my experience are either religious, recovering alcoholics, or people who have been close enough to alcoholism to keep a wide birth. In my experience the latter camp is significantly bigger than the others, but that could be unrepresentative for any number of reasons (e.g., I don’t happen to hang out with many devout Muslims).

I'll bet some sizable chunk of the people who don't drink at all do it for medical reasons. (e.g. Older people on prescription medications).