I take your point, and I agree with what you're saying here. It's also well said.

But I suspect there's something paradoxical about this religious individualism. Just as Wittgenstein said there are no private languages, so too there may be no private religions. This Protestant individualism or emphasis on a so-called personal, one-to-one relationship with God overlaps with secular individualism. So if we're looking for a reason for the hypocrisy of American churches, we have to include Luther's role in emphasizing the individual's sovereignty, which takes us to liberalism, capitalism, democracy, and so on. Of course, Christian hypocrisy began long before that, as you said, but individualism is a seed of Christianity's self-destruction.

I agree that there's a problem with atheistic morality. I've written a number of articles on how secular morality can be reconstructed in aesthetic terms to be compatible with modern knowledge and with a viable, pantheistic religious perspective.

As far as can be discerned from the gospels, Jesus preached against moderate religious institutions because he thought the world was ending soon. Without that desperation, folks are less likely to sell all their possessions and live on the streets helping the needy. But I think the horrific upshot of philosophical naturalism can replace that failed prophesy as an existential motivator.

Actually, what I think happened, given the Gospel of Thomas and the more mystical idea that the kingdom of God is already in our midst, is that early Christians used the threat of the world's imminent demise as an exoteric (dumbed-down) reason for moral self-sacrifice, whereas what they really had in mind were the necessities of physical death and of facing God in the afterlife, the latter being relatively immediate for everyone since we only live for eight or so decades. Still, the exoteric prophesy failed, which casts doubt on the Christian formulations.