Many of America’s contemporary crises, from the housing bubble and the financial crash to the collapse of the two-parent family, can be traced to just this tendency — encouraged by too much contemporary religion — to make the self’s ambitions the measure of all things.

If a foreign visitor –a modern-day Alexis De Tocqueville, let’s say — wanted to understand the state of religion in America today, a good place to start would have been Nationals Park in Washington D.C. three weeks ago, where the megachurch pastor Joel Osteen preached to a sold-out house. Osteen’s bipartisan reach and global influence makes him one of the most plausible contemporary heirs to Billy Graham. But unlike Graham, his message tends to be doctrine-free and relentlessly upbeat, rarely mentioning sin and regularly suggesting that God wants nothing more than to shower worldly blessings on believers.

Or the curious visitor could pick up the new census of religious affiliation in America that was released shortly after Osteen’s rally, which showed that non-traditional forms of Christian faith now comprise the th; ird largest religious category in the country, after Roman Catholicism and the Southern Baptist Convention. Overall, the growth in American Christianity today is mostly nondenominational and Mormon, while the churches that dominated American life a half century ago –Catholic and Mainline Protestant –have continued their decades-long decline.

Or our hypothetical foreigner could just listen to the way the president of the United States –himself a nondenominational Christian – discussed his famous “evolution” on gay marriage last week. Rather than just making a secular case for his position, Barack Obama defended his shift on explicitly religious grounds, invoking the figure of Jesus and the language of the New Testament to justify a perspective that obviously places him at odds with the historic Christian view of marriage.

For decades, the cultural tug-of-war between the Christian right and the secular left has encouraged people to envision the American religious future in binary terms –as either godless or orthodox, either straightforwardly secular or traditionally Christian. But these examples and trends suggest a more complicated reality, in which religious institutions have declined but religion itself has not, and Americans increasingly redefine Christianity as they see fit rather than than abandoning it entirely.

We aren’t a nation of rigorous Richard Dawkins-style atheists and equally rigorous Pope Benedict XVI-style Catholics, in other words. Instead, we’re a nation of Osteens and Obamas, Dan Browns and Deepak Chopras –neither a Christian nation nor a secular society, but a nation of heretics.

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