I think there's something to both sides here. I often think this is the fundamental issue that America faces: does it want to be the country it was for the last 400 years, or the country it told itself it was?

AFAICT most of American politics is explainable through that prism.

I feel like part of the issue is there's not an either/or or a before/after. There's not the past and then progress, it's a long continual climb. There's also not the country the US told itself it was and then the country it was; the US for the entirety of its history was both a progressive, positive force for good in the world and ahead of other countries in some aspects, while being backwards and evil in others.

For example, in 1945 while the US was helping Europe to liberate itself from the Nazis, segregation and Jim Crow laws were still in effect back home. So we have a very difficult task of trying to sort through the past and figure out what "American" qualities are good and worth keeping, and which are negative and worth throwing away.

Progress isn't inherently good, we've got this dichotomy in the US where some people are like fuck it let's just throw everything at the wall and we'll assume that's for the better vs things are pretty good so we shouldn't do anything at all. Both are tribal and not really realistic.

Europe is mostly free of control by religious organisations. Even Ireland is shaking off the shackles.

Compare Europe (mostly atheist) with the US (mostly religious) to discover the consequences of dismissing religion in society.

This is overstating it. In Europe you still have state sponsored churches which were shunned from the earliest days of the US (at least partially). The church attendance rate in some parts of Europe is still very high. Poland is 60%, Ireland is 50%, Italy is 30%. Those rates are very comparable to the most religious states in the US (Poland tops all but Utah).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_attendance

You also don't realize how a lot of church attendance in the US is mostly cultural/social. Not to mention, Europe isn't without flaw, so it's hard to "compare" anything objectively.

Echoing the person you are responding to: the OP's original point is more about the abandonment of some guiding framework for morality, not necessarily about religious institutions.

Sorry, I meant to say Western Europe, where Ireland is an outlier. And church attendance is VERY generational - the vast majority of attendees are over 50.

Western European morals and philosophy are no longer influenced or controlled by religious considerations. I wish I could say the same for Australia.

While Western Europe is far from perfect, it's also not a morality-free wasteland of depravation and selfishness. This is what happens if you abandon religious moral guidance: nothing.

First off, just a bit of a nitpick, but as I understand it the Evangelical/pentecostal side of Christianity is doing pretty well, or at least it's not suffering from its members literally dying off (far from it, in fact). That was also my experience from about five to ten years ago.

Second, I'd argue it's way to early to conclude that abandoning religious moral guidance is a success. At most it's an (unprecedented?) experiment that so far seems to work.