To talk like that would be obscene. So does it say, “Thank you Secular World for saving us all from tyranny, and from the fear of concentration camps. You are no longer Mammon or the Great Harlot; you are our Saviour in the physical world, and have enabled us to return to preaching the Gospel. To you we owe our lives and freedom”? The truth is the Church has no idea what to say; and finds it convenient not to think about it. This is what most people do when faced with a problem utterly beyond them. They go on doing what they have always done with ever increasing zeal, because they cannot think of anything else to do.
The simple truth is that traditional Christianity has no answer; which is why the Church cannot find one. What is needed is a new, and entirely different attitude of mind, and a new interpretation of the Christian message. This is confirmed by the collapse of traditional Christianity across large swathes of the population since the War; people recognised that the C.of E. was irrelevant to what they regarded as the important decisions in life. There are left those who have experience of the numinous, and the charismatic churches, who are in danger of making the same mistake as Antigone made in the old Greek play. Yet there is nothing particularly heretical in suggesting that Christianity needs a re-interpretation. It has been re-interpreted before; four times actually, and is none the worse for it. St. Paul created a world religion out of what was, and would have remained, an obscure Jewish sect, between about AD 40-50. Augustine embraced Plato, and his successors Neo-Platonism, and gave Christianity a classical intellectual structure, and saved it from remaining the hated religion of an under-class. Thomas Aquinas, 1226-74, incorporated the newly discovered philosophy of Aristotle into the doctrine of the Catholic Church, and probably saved it from a rival pagan intellectual establishment which would have destroyed it. In doing so, of course he stifled science. Luther, Calvin and others, restored the Jewish idea of the human soul having direct access to God; but Luther sought to avoid rampant individualism, not by a return to Jewish ceremony which would have killed Protestantism stone dead, but by declaring that the “Word of God” was revealed in the clear words of Scripture. He promptly quarrelled with Zwingli about the correct interpretation of the simple words of the Eucharistic message, “This is my body”. But it was not a storm in a teacup; it was a search for the inner discipline necessary to bind the Protestant Church together. Now it needs to be reconciled with a just, secular state.
Mammon still exists of course. It contaminates the secular world with its political correctness and its screams of racism, as well as in the abuse of power; but it contaminates the churches too, by substituting for experience of the divine in religion and nature, the hocus-pocus of magical ritual. This provides a primitive superstition in the efficacy of indulgences which hardly differs from the worship of forest and river gods in antiquity.