Shall we pray to God that the Gulf disaster get fixed? It was clearly our fault, so what exactly would honest prayer ask for? That BP be more careful next time? That we confront our own oil gluttony? That we ask forgiveness of God’s animal kingdom?

As the disasters get more unmanageable, more heartbreaking, our spiritual credibility shrinks to the vanishing point.

The sorrowful Gulf oil “spill” (such a dainty word, less honest than ungodly death-soaked pestilential hemorrhage) makes me think of America’s many spiritual trends of recent decades, and how little they prepared us for the world we now mismanage on such a poisonous scale.

What a parade it’s been — televangelists, Jesus Christ Superstar, rapture tracts, Christian comedians, guitar Masses, Jews for Jesus, school prayer debates, purpose-driven best-sellers, labyrinth walks, Noah’s ark discoveries, WWJD, guardian angels, Moral Majority, Christian Coalition, Promise Keepers, Harmonic Convergence, Hale-Bopp cults, Jesus CEO, Jesus Seminar, New Atheism, more rapture tracts, Mary’s image on a taco, Jesus on a fridge — dazzling plot points of a remarkable era.

But what did they deliver? People are still lonely, bored, fuming, shriveling, flirting with evil, desperate to start over, standing numb before the catastrophes of society’s blind faith in technology, its unintended consequences, its lack of a backup plan.

Remember The Da Vinci Code? The novel and movie were poised to blow the roof off traditional religion and give us the real Jesus, whose secret liberating knowledge would discredit ecclesiastical falsehoods and hand us a future of wised-up spiritual integrity. But the revolution didn’t happen. There’s no Church of the New Spirituality, no New Age storefront ministries.

Columnist Ray Waddle is a former Tennessean religion editor who lived 20 years in Nashville. Now based in Connecticut, he can be reached at [email protected].