The American assault on the human spirit and upon the salvational work of God began at home as a degeneration of the American character. The European capitalist ethic had always threatened a perversion of the spirit, because it exalted individualism and because it measured religious justification by ownership or wealth or power. And so the American character from its infancy bore the potential of moral disaster: the individualism could become egotism, the productive energy could become technicism and a commodity ethic, the optimism and pride of achievement could become racism and imperialism. Thoreau saw the danger in the 1840s, De Tocqueville even earlier. The American contribution to the decay was a separation of the capitalist ethic from a religious base, a vulgarization of cultural criteria, and an immensely extended dominion over nature. The American people, having perfected a new morality of power, egotism, technicism, and the commodity ethic, became with each generation less culpable and less capable of moral choice, like inebriates or addicts who cannot be judged as the men they once were.

American individualism reduces the judicability and therefore the salvability of men because it isolates them not only from their human neighbours but from the divine community of law, love, and responsibility. The moral shrinking can be seen in some of the manifestations of individualism. One is sentimentalism within a dominant savagery. Human ferocity, unlike the natural kind in animals, is often tinged by an apparent and trivial tenderness.