If anyone thinks the present spiritual malaise is mainly about The Episcopal Church, or mainline Christianity in America, then I daresay they're naïve about spiritual warfare - not to mention reality outside their window. The demons that have ransacked TEC (to take a single example) are the same ones which have targeted the West as a whole. Indeed, the assault upon orthodox Christianity only makes strategic sense as part of a massive assault upon civilization as we know it.

The Episcopal Church makes an important study as a group that sold itself to play in a high stakes game before it was clear what the game was. Here we see the promiscuous quality of the affluent American Left that emerged from the Viet Nam era. The time was an eschaton of sorts. Here at last was a generation uniquely qualified to fix and save everything that was broken or oppressed, and it literally jumped into bed with any cause that promised a moment's notoriety.

Here at last was the generation qualified to overhaul a 450-year-old liturgy - one universally acknowledged as embodying the spirit of a global communion. That was just the beginning. From now on the visionaries would declare open season on any aspect of the church's tradition that could be tinkered with in such a way as to leave signs of their tinkering, all in the name of "liberation".

The secular Left's simplistic formula of meddling on the surface to make a visible "difference", without examining the long-term consequences of its meddling, without examining the results in terms of its own purported goals, was the template that American politics had bought hook, line and sinker. The American churches responded with an entrepreneurial instinct that won them a sacramental role in this enterprise. Today Katharine Schori's frequent comments about the church's role in "blessing" the enterprises of social transformation illustrate this new found vocation of the "prophetic" church. Have Spirit, will travel. They shamed it, we reclaimed it. We won't put you right with God; we'll put God right with you.

Thus the churches sold themselves to the rising culture for the same pottage of self-validation for which Western culture had recently bargained itself away. Gone was the truly prophetic role the church might have played in these crucial decades of turmoil and transformation. What took its place was a prophetic caricature which had all the depth of a protest hastily organized on an elite college campus.

The result now is an odd conflation of motifs: church as whore who makes holy -- a new vicarious atonement, only more humane than the "child abuse" model Jack Spong alerted us to a decade ago. The new model is "I'm guilty, so you need to repent." The atoning work is now done by the "little people" who live with the results of the latest innovations foisted upon them by the elite class. The elites go on churning out reforms, awakening envy and resentment in one aggrieved party after another, and then pose themselves as the incarnate solution. Something like a Hollywood proletariat had come to church with a gospel that titillates all the sensibilities of an elitist culture mad with its own guilt. Here's the important part: it is a guilt that the gospel has not touched. For salvation a new gospel has been invoked, a false gospel that promises what the true gospel promises, only this gospel can't deliver. How do we know it can't deliver? Apply the Hebrews principle: the new atonement is applied and reapplied with all the fervor of an addiction, and still the conscience is not cleansed. The heart is still restless.

Here is a leaky cistern that holds no water. The driving thirst of the people is proof against it. The Episcopal Church (along with many others) was in a mad heat to forsake its well of living waters -- one which had watered an entire civilization - all for the chance of alluring a new generation of passersby.

And how well has the new god fed the people whom the churches have promised to save? It has mostly ignored them. Like the culture at large, the liberal churches have cultivated a clientele of the perpetually oppressed, those who sense intuitively that they must remain oppressed or else lose their new found status. From now on claiming wholeness would be the same as straying off the plantation.

Like the wider society, the church seeks out the latest abuse, the latest offense that can be converted into moral capital - that is, into raw political power. If the purpose of salvation were to eliminate brokenness and to restore the oppressed into the fabric of a functional community, then something more like healing would occur. Life would go on with everyone stronger and happier for being "included" within it. Instead the "oppressed" become players in a new kind of game that requires, not a community of the redeemed, but a permanent adversarial society.

Here is the sacramental niche of the entrepreneurial church: perpetually blessing but never saving the righteously indignant. This is how modern liberalism has positioned itself in relation to the spiritual reality of human guilt.

Today's liberals live a pretty good life, and they feel bad about it. They have more of everything than any generation before them, and they sense this is unfair. But rather than repent and become Gandhians, they remove Christmas trees from the village green, or put bike lanes on four or five roads in their town. They might tighten up rules on what people can eat, drink, or smoke, and when. Are these the abuses that have been crying out for redress for the welfare of the community? Probably not. More likely they are the result of conscience-stricken busybodies scanning the horizon for opportunities to impose their heightened awareness on others.

Don't forget the name of the disease: I'm guilty; now you need to repent.

By my own standards I'm a sinner. I enjoy privileges which I cannot justify. I'm part of a society that has blood on its hands going back into the formative years of its history. I can't change any of this. I suppose I could give up my privileges or pledge myself to live a life of service to other people, but then I would have to give up my good life. Rather than do that, I will vote to give away somebody else's money, and I will think of myself as generous. Rather than acknowledge an enemy halfway around the world who for generations has clamored for my blood, I will see to it that someone puts the screws to Wal-Mart.

Facing up to a real enemy would cost me something. Shutting down Wal-Mart only puts demands on somebody else.

I feel guilty. The way I deal with it is through symbolic gestures, probably through the political process, that essentially make work for somebody else. And at the end of the day I still feel guilty.

How do the churches enter into this game? Find somebody who's been excluded, and include them. Even better, ordain them, thus making them living symbols in an emerging theological system. And after they've been ordained, stir them into the mix. The chemistry of church, and of Christendom, will now be different. After a while even the old stained glass will have a new "eternal" message.

The church demonstrates the same impulse as the secular society, but it goes a step further. In spite of its own befuddlement or even outright apostasy, the church carries with it the theological key to what is happening. Modern liberals, in their quest for utopia, are caught in a cycle of trying to save themselves. The terrible irony is, first of all, that they are powerless to do this (as only historic Christianity reveals). And second, their attempts at building utopia are conflicted and fatally undermined. Worse - they have opened themselves up to be the pawns of sinister powers in a truly adversarial universe, where the combatants are not flesh and blood.

A society that is not right with God is powerless to save anyone - spiritually or materially. Here the classic Christian theology shows itself to have strategic significance: the ones who presume to save are caught in their own need of salvation. In attempting to "save" others materially they are really using them. As a result they themselves are neither saved spiritually nor are their benefactors helped materially - at least not for long. What results is that bizarre codependency we know as the Nanny State.

On the other hand, those who are right with God - and who trust God's Word to assure them of it - are not caught in the cycle of perpetual validation through conspicuous acts of symbolism. They are not acting against a troubled conscience. They do not smugly dismiss their historic complicity with oppression. Like the recovering addict, they identify what they can change and change it. They leave it to God to do what only God can do. This is called "I'm guilty, so I'll repent."

They do not become a uniform group of likeminded clones. Nor are they finished with sin and the dysfunctions that issue from it. They are finished only with trying to save themselves and needing to use others for their salvation.

They can also forgive others without giving up power. After all, moral or psychological power that is hoarded to set oneself apart is superfluous to one who has been accepted by God. If God is for us, what further validation do we need?

If this spirituality sounds like something conservatives have mastered while liberals are awash in guilt and power games, guess again. Most conservatives I talk to are paralyzed by the thought of what others think of them. This in turn reduces their thought and action to the same treadmill of self-validation, further reducing their "conservatism" to a religious preference or "opinion" after all. In too many cases they too gravitate toward symbolic gestures to shore up the status quo rather than decisive action based on biblical principle.

That's one of the reasons why not everyone is rushing to the lifeboats. The ship may be going down, but that's not the only hazard. There are also sharks in the water.

--The Rev. Canon J. Gary L'Hommedieu is Canon for Pastoral Care at the Cathedral Church of Saint Luke, Orlando, Florida. He is a regular VOL columnist.