> one side of the culture wars is fueled by a desire to impose Christian moral authority upon the USA.

Impose? A broadly Christian ethos (I say broadly because America is heretic central) was already in place and has been blandly fading out of existence in the West. Certainly, there are those who are actively defending their rights, but the hierarchy of the Church sold out long ago (50s/60s are generally treated as an important period in that respect). Currently, an amalgamated Marxist/secularist/scientistic/New Age-y pseudo-ethos is aggressively imposing its vision using the instruments of the state and private (corporate) coercion, propagating through the media and the education system. The revolutionaries of the 60s are in positions of power and have been working from within the system.

> Such authority has been undermined by a pair of understandable happenstances: It happens that empiricism and the scientific method are simply better at making predictions about the world than priestly divination,

Huh? First of all, contrary to the bizarre fetishism some have for "prediction", the ends of Christianity are not technological or predictive. Priests don't make predictions or engage in divination (certainly not in the Catholic Church). The very fact you'd said that casts serious doubt on your understanding of the basics of Christianity.

> and it also happens that the abuses and frauds committed behind church doors keep coming to light.

The latest wave of abuses and frauds are coming to light, absolutely, and this is a good thing because the current hierarchy is mired in weakness, cowardice, and corruption. But if you think in centuries instead of years and remove some of your prejudice, you'll notice that, first, the Church has gone through various crises involving elevated levels of corruption and mediocrity in the clergy and it has recovered from each (name another 2,000 year old institution, let alone one that could survive the wickedness and failures of its own clergy and leadership time and time again), and second, the frauds and abuses in question are hardly unique to the Church. Sex abuse of minors, for example, is a problem across all institutions where there are minors, and indeed, abuse rates are higher in other institutions such as public schools.

> I wonder to what degree some participants in the culture war are trying to simply communicate the idea that we do not need a deity to deliver unto us tablets of moral rules, and running up against folks who cannot imagine existence without Jehovah.

Again, you do not understand. While Protestants tend to have more issues defending their moral positions (divine command theory comes to mind), the Catholic tradition is firmly rooted in natural law theory. Natural law theory is generally understood as having its origins in Plato, which of course means its predates Christianity. What that means is that we can, to a large degree and in principle, reason morally using our own unaided faculties of reason (and indeed know the existence of God without recourse to revelation). Revelation does furnish additional knowledge with moral consequences, but not all moral knowledge is revealed. The "tablets" you refer to are presumable the Ten Commandments, but they are essentially expressions of the natural law. There is no reason why a pagan Greek could not have come up with that list.