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This is a great essay which will likely not please any American Protestants but it's the truth. I will quote from it some:
"Several important aspects of American Christianity can be traced to seventeenth-century England. As the Catholic religion was violently suppressed by the monarchy, an increasingly Protestantized culture eliminated nearly all loci of the supernatural save God Himself, as beliefs in the apparitions of saints, angels, and demons, as well as the effects of sacraments and other rituals, were harshly derided as papist superstition and priestcraft. In a significant departure from continental Protestantism, English theology, following Berkeley, came to focus on the act of belief rather than God in history. Arguments for the existence of God followed the stoic philosophers instead of Aquinas, using the argument from design, which relied on subjective perception instead of objective metaphysics. English religion became grounded in subjectivity, rather than objective historical or philosophical claims. This was a dangerous approach, as it made no appeal to the continuity between generations responsible for the perpetuation of a common sense of duty, truth and goodness.
At the end of the seventeenth century, a more intensely subjectivist form of Christianity known as “pietism” arose in Germany, when Lutheran preacher Philipp Jakob Spener (1635-1705) proclaimed a radically antidogmatic and antiecclesiastical Christianity, which was condemned by Lutheran churches. Spener's emphasis on the “attitude” and religious “sentiment” of Christians as more important than any formula for belief or ecclesiastical organization was foreign to any major form of Christianity that had hitherto existed. Here was born the familiar American evangelical idea that Christianity is essentially and primarily a “relationship,” not a "religion," and that this relationship is more important than dogmatic orthodoxy or ecclesiastical obedience or ritual orthopraxis. Intellectually barren pietism did not succeed in Germany, but one of its offshoots, quakerism, found fertile soil in the United States. Pietism also found favor among some of the eighteenth-century English, in the form of Wesley's Methodism, which focused on emotional responses as proofs of spirituality, so that the educated classes regarded Methodists as fanatics. Methodist fervor was famously satirized in Wuthering Heights in the character of the Rev. Jabes Branderham, though we can see that Methodists still had a strong belief in objective norms of behavior, their professed anti-dogmatism notwithstanding.
The widely influential German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), raised in a Pietist household, turned religion completely inward toward the realm of human subjectivity, appealing to man's supposedly innate capacity to sense the Infinite. His thought has had a profound effect on religion in the English-speaking world, which has largely retreated into fideism and abandoned the project of expounding the objective reality of religious truths. Most have adopted Kant's belief that religious feeling and ethics are more important than cosmological explanations and ritual. Kant was so convinced that the human mind was the only locus of the divine on earth, that he would not enter a Catholic church, because he was convinced that the Sacrament was the one place where God was not. Ironically, many American Catholics, while assenting to the Real Presence, nevertheless espouse a Kantian form of religion that, carried to its logical conclusion, would restrict divine action to the human soul."