In the 1950′s and early 60′s, the three greatest English-speaking poets were all Christian converts (Auden, Eliot, and Robert Lowell). Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Walker Percy, and Flannery O’Connor, and Dorothy Day were all writing high-brow literature. Tolkien and Lewis were both writing some of the 20th century’s most enduring works of fantasy. Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, Courtney Murray, and Arnold Toynbee all made the cover of Time. Bishop Fulton Sheen won an Emmy for his prime time network apologia (in his acceptance, he thanked his four writers: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John). Jacques Maritain helped draft the UN Declaration on Human Rights, while William F. Buckley founded National Review in his bid to “stand astride history and yell ‘stop!’”

This was, in short, a golden age of Christian cultural influence and output. Christianity was culturally compelling enough to convert an Auden, intellectually sound enough to produce a Niebuhr, and diverse enough to support both a leftist like Maritain and the founder of the modern conservative movement in Buckley. All of this culminated in the American church—even those knuckle-and-foot dragging evangelicals—by and large backing the greatest social cause of the time: the Civil Rights Movement. After all, the American church was also still prophetic enough to produce a Martin Luther King Jr.

And yet, despite all this strength and victory on the civil rights issue, this proved to be the last time that pastors boldly protest-marched where presidents feared to tread. What had appeared to be the dawning of a golden age turned out to be the last glimmers of dusk; “a kind of Indian summer for orthodox belief,” as Ross Douthat puts it in his new book Bad Religion: How We Became A Nation of Heretics. What went wrong is the subject of the first half of this new book; where we are now is the subject of the second half.

Douthat shows that what went wrong boils down to the church’s response to two related things: the sexual revolution and the increased polarization of politics. Contraceptives and abortion permanently undermined the church’s traditional teaching on sexuality: no longer was sex necessarily linked with children. Without this, it was no longer possible to argue that keeping sex only within the realm of heterosexual marriage was not just morally correct, but also rational and humane. After all, the risk of children being raised outside the stability of marriage was gone, and risk of disease greatly reduced. Suddenly, the church’s ‘sex-marriage-children’ trifecta was atomized into its constituent parts. The Protestant Mainline reacted to this in what Douthat terms an “accomodationist” manner, seeking liberal readings of Scripture and tradition to sanction the new norms, while evangelicals maintained their fundamentalist edge, and Catholics varied from parish to parish (though Rome itself was more traditional).

Likewise, in politics the Mainline sought to accommodate itself to all later liberal causes while evangelicals emerged from their post-Scopes Monkey Trial exile to increasingly side with the Republican Party. Catholics, after generations of supporting democrats, also found themselves increasingly shoved into the Republican tent as Catholic social teaching failed to match the Democratic Party’s views on the social issues.

Just like that, the American church found itself divided. On the one side, the Mainline sought a liberal accomodationist approach to culture, and yet found their membership slipping. On the other, Evangelicals saw their numbers increase apace with their support of Republican causes. And Catholics often found themselves in the middle, torn between their Church’s teachings on social issue and the vestiges of Catholic social democracy.

At this point, both sides must admit defeat. The Mainline and liberal Catholic parishes have declined rapidly in attendance and influence, to the point where their very existence is threatened. And while evangelical churches have flourished, they have failed to produce the kind of artistic excellence or sweeping sociopolitical change of 50 years ago: George W. Bush’s presidency started two wars and the Great Recession, but it did not bring about an age of evangelical preeminence or victory on any trademark evangelical social issue. Moreover, both sides have presided over a vast transformation of American religious views into something distinctly hostile to both.

This new religious outlook is best described by Douthat as the heresy of “the god within.” This is the Oprah-approved view in which a “spiritual-but-not-religious seeker picks and choose from, reads symbolically, and reinterprets for a more enlightened age” the texts and traditions of any and all faiths with the mystical goal of finding oneself and/or a connection with the cosmos and/or God, and thus find contentment/happiness. This is the faith of Eat, Pray, Love and of every Disney movie of the past two decades. Its view of religion is, as Douthat notes, essentially therapeutic in nature: the goal is always to find one’s own happiness. It is religion as one more way to balance the ego and the superego, to use Freudian terms.

This is one of the four modern heresies Douthat discusses in the second half of the book—and the key one of the four. Of the other three, the “name it and claim it” prosperity gospel preachers are just a minority within a minority, a small sect of the evangelical movement; the “real Jesus” textual critics a discredited academic wing of the dying Mainline; and the ‘America is a Christian nation’ obsessives just a continuation of the political polarization trends that began in the 1970′s. The God Within is the soul of American religiosity now.

It is a religion that makes sense in a pluralistic and scientific society, since it makes room for others’ beliefs and keeps its miracles safely psychological. And it’s not an all-bad soul for American religion to have, as Douthat acknowledges: “the advantages of this therapeutic culture should not be easily dismissed. Tolerance, freedom, personal choice… can loom very large indeed, especially when set agains the web of shame that the older Christian culture sometimes bound around believers and nonbelievers alike.”

But, Douthat goes on to note, “it’s striking that the things that… the God Within religion doesn’t seem to have delivered… are the very things that it claims to be best suited to provide— contentment, happiness, well-being, and, above all, the ability to forge successful relationships with fellow human beings.” He goes on to note that Americans are less happy in their marriages than they were thirty years ago, they participate in less social activities of all kinds, and they have fewer close friends (a self-reported average of three close friends in 1985 has dropped to just two in 2004).

The argument Douthat makes is that while we are free to find the God Within on our own terms using whatever tools we wish, by so doing we have made religious community optional and consequently far less common—and religious/moral discipline almost impossible, since any base desire can instead be interpreted as the promptings of the God Within. This is similar to the dilemma Americans face post-sexual revolution: we are free to pick and choose amongst sex, marriage, and children in a way that was never possible before, but by making such freedom possible we have made the close bonds of family optional and as a result far less universal.

What the American church needs is a response to these two dilemmas: an argument as to why its structure and community is better than the freedom of the God Within, and a coherent response to the sexual revolution. From a traditionalist viewpoint, the success of the decentralized and entrepreneurial evangelical method of church-planting would seem to point toward a way to make church as an organization work in the 21st century. In an intriguing passage, Douthat compares the top-down approach of the Mainline and the Catholic hierarchy to Soviet-style command economies, and evangelical church plants to the free market. As for the sexual revolution, the Catholic Humanae Vitae is probably the closest the church has come to grappling successfully with this issue: arguing that sex, marriage, and children are a package that should not be unpacked, even if we now can, because keeping them all together will have the best results for society writ large.

But whether these are enough remains to be seen. With regard to Humanae Vitae, yes, divorce boomed for a time and out-of-wedlock booms still in some communities—seemingly vindicating HV’s predictions. But amongst the upper-middle class, contraception has obviated the need for marriage before sex by taking kids (and disease) essentially out of the equation without doing harm to marriage once a couple decides to settle down: upper-middle class divorce rates are lower than the US as a whole in the 1950′s. It is at least as plausible to argue that this success will spread to lower-income communities as it is to argue that Humane Vitae’s teachings are the only way to improve family outcomes amongst the poor. And it is within these very communities of the urban, upper-middle class that the evangelical movement has had the hardest time sustaining church-planting success. The suburbs yes, but the city itself has proven to be a tougher place for evangelicalism to succeed—likely because its harder to argue against the modern sexual arrangement amongst those navigating its challenges successfully than it is amongst already-settled suburban families.

Unless and until the church can mount a successful argument against the seeming success of the upper middle-class urban model, the God Within will likely continue its hold on the American soul.