And in America today, it Is clear that side by side with its growing modernity there is a gathering tide of spirituality of every kind that is seeping into society. For example, modernity tends to contract all of reality into the self, and it replaces a moral way of thinking about life with one that is therapeutic. Life's great preoccupation therefore becomes, not the biblical God or even the Good that is outside the self, but the pains, ambiguities, and sense of loss that are internal to it. Getting in touch with the self, in our culture, becomes the same thing as getting in touch with truth. All of this may then spill out into a quest for spirituality, interiorized though it is, but it is a quest that is so privatized that it will not intrude itself on others, nor will it think much about moral responsibility before others because its purview is not moral at all.
Modernity is hostile to the moral world in which the biblical discussion about sin takes place.
It is hostile to the idea that God is other than our sense of ourselves in our innermost feelings, that He is objective to us, that He addresses us by the Word, that He summons us to accountability before Himself. Modernity therefore has the effect of transforming guilt into shame, and shame, our inner embarrassment about ourselves, can then be resolved simply through counseling. Thus has our moral life become secularized. This is the argument I have developed in Losing Our Virtue . This rearrangement of meaning around the self, around its moods, needs, intuitions, aches, and ambiguities, has entered the church.