American society breeds a laser-like self-focus, consumer materialism, and practical atheism—not by refuting faith in God, but by rendering it irrelevant to people’s “now.” As Christopher Lasch noted in The Culture of Narcissism, it also tends to create weak personalities dependent on group behavior and approval, and therefore more vulnerable to advertising and product consumption. The social sciences effectively replace the clergy as a source of guidance and meaning. Social media and mass entertainment abolish solitude and personal reflection.
As a result, in an age of radical self-absorption, authentic individuality—real self-knowledge and mastery—withers, because the autonomous communities that root an individual in distinctive moral codes, beliefs, and histories (i.e., churches, families, etc.) are unable to compete with the noise and flash of consumer society.
A “new” evangelization must therefore start by admitting that much of the once-Christian world, and even a great many self-described Christians, are in fact pagan—or rather, worse than pagan.