G. Frink's

Doesn't our economic catastrophe inevitably have spiritual failures at its core?

Yet religion has become so politicized by the power-preoccupied manipulations of the culture warriors that we have have difficulty turning collectively to it for the spiritual wisdom our predicament requires.

Timothy Shriver tried to fight his way past this in his Newsweek column Religion from the Heart by consulting Robert Bellah, 81, Elliott Professor of Sociology Emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley.

Bellah, who is best known for coining the term American civil religion, "has spent his career trying to understand the values that make society work," Shriver wrote.

Bellah told Shriver "that we've lost our balance:"

I think the market mess is very much the result of our culture of extreme individualism which is unprecedented in our history as a nation and is unique in the world. Both parties have bought into it. At the Democratic convention, we were told that anyone can do anything they want by themselves if only they work. At the Republican convention, we were told that we don't need the state for anything.

The people at Goldman Sachs may be highly moral individuals, but we've created a culture that never asks them to think about the needs of the community. A market that is unregulated and lacking social responsibility is an invitation to the worst of our instincts. People forget that Adam Smith wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments, not just The Wealth of Nations.
Too bad for America that we haven't listened to Bellah for the last few decades as he's warned that we're abandoning our faith in community, in compassion, and in social responsibility. We've forgotten that strong community is the one non-negotiable of a strong nation. Reduce the economic system to a war of one against all and the heart of the nation will be lost soon after.

What we have created, and what to our ruin we enshrined in law and regulation, is a kind malevolent individualism which pays little heed to the needs of the community.

About this, Shriver argues:

We're in the mess we're in for many reasons, but one of them is simple: When politics and economics are divorced from spiritual values, greed destroys community. Such is the monster we face today.

The way home from here is not yet clear to me, but it is clearly not more of the same.