But it’s striking that the things that therapeutic, God Within religion doesn’t seem to have delivered to Americans are the very things that it claims to be best suited to provide–contentment, happiness, well-being, and, above all, the ability to forge successful relationships with fellow human beings. …Therapeutic religion promises contentment, but in many cases it seems to deliver a sort of isolation that’s at once comfortable and terrible–leaving us alone with the universe, alone with the God Within.
–Ross Douthat, Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics