Dr. Cornel West on "The Crisis of Contemporary American Religion"

"American religious life - despite its weekly rituals and everyday practices - is shot through with existential emptiness. This emptiness - or lack of spiritual depth - results from the excessive preoccupation with isolated personal interests and atomistic individual concerns in American religious life. These interests and concerns unduly accommodate the status quo by mirroring the privatism and careerism rampant in American society. Like so much of American culture, exorbitant personalistic and individualistic preoccupations in America religion yield momentary stimulation rather than spiritual sustenance, sentimental self-flagellation rather than sacrificial self-denial. Needless to say, these accomodationalist forms of religion fit well with the thriving consumerism, narcissism and hedonism in the country. Religion becomes one more stimulant in a culture addicted to stimulation - a stimulation that fuels consumption and breeds existential emptiness. In this way, postmodern American culture attempts to eliminate spiritual depth, disseminate stimulatory surfaces, flatten out transcendence into titillation and replace the sense of the mystery of existence with that of the self's feelings of intensity (usually of the orgiastic sort). Accomodationalist forms of religion usually aid and abet this postmodern condition, thereby surreptitiously prohibiting the very existential state they claim to produce - namely, spiritual depth."

-from the introductory remarks to Prophetic Fragments by Dr. Cornel West and also quoted on pg. 357-8 of The Cornel West Reader